Network administrators are nearly the most useless and annoying people in any IT organization.  They have nothing to do and they seem to be notorious tinkerers.  Playing with networks is like playing with their toys.  Their favorite toy is SECURITY.  They just looove to tinker with security settings.  I think it gives them some sort of bizarre fetish satisfaction to be able to screw with peoples lives; all in the name of SECURITY.

The problem is that most of them (at least most that I’ve run into) don’t know what the hell they’re doing.  They always end up locking things down so tightly they become unusable.  When confronted with the problems they’ve caused… again, in the name of SECURITY, they always come back with the same statement.

“It shouldn’t be doing that.”
Well no shit you moron.  It WASN’T doing that before you screwed with it.  So then they try to undo what they did, but since they don’t really understand what they messed with, they can’t undo it.  If they weren’t so bored, they might not screw around with the user base to begin with.
But they are bored.
So they tinker.
But then, something new comes along.  Something, again, they don’t really understand.  Perhaps it’s new hardware.  Perhaps it’s a new program.  Perhaps its a new operating system.  Whatever it is, it’s something new and shiny.  Since they don’t understand it, it must be a SECURITY risk.  But since they’re the self important network administrators, they get themselves the new toy so they can EVALUATE it.  Ooo…. evaluation.  That’s a big important sounding word.
While they’re EVALUATING the new shiny toy, there’s still a little work to be done.  New computers need to be deployed, or software problems need to be cleaned up.  The network administrators can’t be bothered with building new machines for every single user!  Ha!  They’re too busy implementing SECURITY and EVALUATING things!  How could they possibly box everyone in to maintain SECURITY while still allowing themselves enough time to EVALUATE their new shiny toys?
Virtualization!  Whoa!  Have you heard of this?  Virtualized computers are the hottest non-sense to hit the lazy, ADD soaked brains of the network administrators.  With virtualization, the network administrators can build one machine and then clone it out on a single computer!  Everyone then connects to this virtualized computer.  For the network administrator it’s perfect!  They have to do even less than they’ve been doing before!  Now, when they screw something up, they can just roll back the virtualized computer and nobody will know they’ve screwed stuff up!
Until the thing they screwed up can’t be rolled back.
Or until it’s discovered that the base image was never right to start with.
Or until they find out that everyone needs different stuff and they end up managing 25 different images and decide that it’s easier to let everyone do their own thing.
How many more times will I run into this nonsense?
Network Administrators should be hired for about a week to crawl under desks and do other generally unpleasant stuff (like the auto-mechanics they basically are) and then go away.  They should be allowed to come back for two days at a time, once per month.  And they should be closely monitored.
Almost like being on probation.
Don’t even get me started on the MONITORING software they install.
Or the software they install to control things like automatically rebooting your computer or locking it.  They must think people are walking around waiting to use your computer to secretly send emails.  Sadly, the only emails that have ever been sent from my computer have been sent BY THE GODDAMN NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR!  So then they installed some software to automatically lock it after 10 minutes of inactivity.  Okay… all in the name of SECURITY.  But then they still sneak around and send emails in that 10 minutes.
1)  If it’s really that big a problem, why not set the auto-lock timeout to like 30 seconds
2)  They must really be bored if they’re walking around looking for machines to physically screw with in the 10 minutes between the time I get up to take a dump and come back.
I guess they need some more new toys.