IT people...

bodhi

quarky said:
There are fundamental things that should be done in terms of maintaining the environment, that are just not done.
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Very little is actually maintained.
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And it isn't a resource issue.

Gotcha.

Probably won't help you any, but this is similar to what I've been telling my manager for years now:  We don't (always) take (proper) care of the basics, unless something actually goes wrong.

In our case it still is kind of a resource issue.  We do have the numbers, I think, but the majority of our team members are quite young and still lack knowledge and experience, and by extension confidence.  They are great guys - clever and hard working.  The company just doesn't invest anything meaningful in terms of training and ongoing development.

I spend a lot of time supporting the junior members of our team, while I'm actually supposed to take care of those basics instead, plus investigate and plan and implement newer technologies, while having to deal with emergencies because of those neglected basics.  So even upping the number in the team becomes false economy sometimes, because where I work they've been reluctant to employ people with existing skills and experience as far as our team is concerned.

There's usually this disconnect between IT and the rest of the company, too.  When the aircon dies and the servers start smouldering, I really don't give two shits about transferring the MD's wife's iTunes library to her new laptop.  But he does.

Oh, and until very recently we were also somehow responsible for changing the light bulbs in the ladies toilets.  I'm not joking.

Once I had to fix the kitchen sink when the hot water tap exploded.  Yep - definitely the IT department's problem, that one.  If no-one stepped in, everyone else would probably have just continued standing there all frozen to the spot while the biblical deluge washed the piles of crap away right from under their desks.  Which in hindsight would have been a vast improvement in terms of cutting down on complaints about mouse cables being so short...

Speaking of which, to top it all off, IT support was once called in to remove the carcass of the recently deceased office mouse from a Sales team member's rather fancy spare pair of high heels.  To be fair, she was a rather attractive Canadian lady, so the entire team attended and we had no shortage of volunteers with apparently years of experience in that particular field on that occasion, so maybe that doesn't count.

All true.