You know the kind I mean…sat down at my computer this morning and not only is the new server the IT folks are supposed to deliver still not working properly, but the SOL*R server was down, AND EdTechPost had inexplicably blown up. And my first hour of trying to fix things seemed to only make matters worse.
I left IT because I got frustrated spending so much time on things which, while they were necessary to make the systems work, felt like they added so little actual value to people’s lives, my own included. Seems like I cannot get away from it though.
If you work someplace where the servers don’t inexplicably go down all the time and where you don’t have to wait 6 weeks for someone to edit a configuration file for you, go give someone in your IT staff a hug. If you have this AND they actually allow you do what you want to do, go buy them a case of beer. And if they let you do all this AND continually delight you by actually improving the service, and smile at the same time, then please, please, call me and offer me a job 
I’ll tweak widgets and find the missing semi-colon when I know the result is something that adds value. But so much fiddling to just get simple infrastructural issues solved – lord, give me strength! – SWL
One thing I’ll say about the IT folks here at UCalgary is that they’re generally awesome. They really do try to help out, do a lot of great work, and their service reliability is pretty darned good (not counting the near-constant Blackboard outages, but I don’t use Blackboard so that really doesn’t affect me…)
Well go give ‘em a big man hug already!
One thing I’ll say about the IT folks at UMW is that we get along exceptionally wel. In fact, I think they want to hug us because everything we do in Instructional Technology is hosted off-campus -we never have to bother them. We only get together to trade baseball cards and talk about the weather. It is a really tight bond! While the folks at Bluehost are generally absent and we couldn’t hug them if we wanted to -there have been a couple of times I have wanted to. We have little in the way of downtime, and we’re only paying them 6.95 a month (although the figure is higher for we have many accounts). That said, sometimes the limits become real. For example, we are planning a WPMU install with dynamic subdomains via WildCard DNS (yadda, yadda, yadda) -and it is a no go at Bluehost. So the freedom is awesome, and we have been unbelievably lucky thus far. But we may be feeling the ceiling on certain things that require a little bit more server love.
Oh yeah, and we may be hiring soon, and I have a friend in immigration;)
Jim, seriously, if you guys weren’t located on the other side of the continent and it would mean us leaving glorious Victoria, I would jump at that in a second! I consider myself one of the legion of UMW admirers (though I confess, I have yet to submit my Reverend Jim purchase order. Soon, soon.)