Int'l Paper also was buying lots of companies for awhile, some of them other paper companies.

During a merger, there are legal restrictions on what can and can't be viewed, in stages of nn-days before the official merger date (and other legal milestone dates as well).

Sometimes we kept old support personnel from the original company, other times not.

For one acquisition, one day I simply had 12 more prod SQL instances to support, which I had not been logged into before. Those kind of situations force you to develop more flexibility in how you handle certain things.

I guess I should wish I had the luxury of the ultra-controlled environments some people have, but it's a mixed blessing/curse. I know several people at FedEx and they are in NO-ERROR PERIOD production envs. But it takes them 3 days to change a title on a screen because of all the code and app checks everything must go thru.