At my company, you could have a ticket open for days for something as minor as an e-mail problem. A few years ago, I found it was much easier just to fix my own issues and those of my co-workers. Now everybody in the office comes to me while the IT guys sit around doing who know's what.
Usually, we're arguing about who's gonna take the ticket, "all my email is gone again." Then going deskside to toggle the "view all"/"view unread" button, for the 10th time. Seriously Sam, doing what you're doing (helping fellow cubemates), is how I decided to go full time and get paid for playing with computers. BTW, what's up with the Sox?
At my company, you could have a ticket open for days for something as minor as an e-mail problem. A few years ago, I found it was much easier just to fix my own issues and those of my co-workers. Now everybody in the office comes to me while the IT guys sit around doing who know's what.
When I took a new job in 1990, it was the first place I had worked that really used PCs. We were all networked together of course, but used real PCs. God forbid you had a hardware or software problem. It could be days until they got around to you and you could actually work again. We had one guy who was a PC expert, but really was an accounting/financial guy like the rest of us. He was our tech support. We never had to call the IT staff with him around. But about 2 years later he transfered to a different area, and we all freaked out. This is when I first really started to learn PCs. I got my own at home, and then I was the "real" department IT guy. Since then, in 3 different companies, I have always been a bit of the tech guy on the side, but less and less over the years as companies did realized that you actaully had to have somebody around that did know what they were doing in case things went wrong.
Several years ago I worked in an investment area of a bank. I thought the most important person in our entire area was the young IT guy. He wrote the code for our models, did all the back office stuff, PC tech hardware/software, networking, everything. And for a couple of years, it was just him, and he was worked to death. They did finally get a guy to help him tho. But the same attitude was at my last job, no respect for our department IT guy, but he basically was the one who made our area work.
Opening a ticket takes days.. Compared to the user that doesn't know how to copy a file from C: to S:\whatever
When S: is down, some Indian with a script isn't going to help. It takes someone to get that server info and to let them know it might take awhile to get that problem fixed by a local IT pro.