+1 thanks Doug -- great smile for a Monday morning.
"Things are like the are today, then they have ever been before."
I've never quite fully understood this style of behavior by IT folks. It's a control issue for sure, but when I seen my IT folks as looking at me and my colleagues as people that can help them, it generally has worked well. It's funny, DEC's IT group knew never mess with research or engineering because KO or GB would come down them. I think they loved the Compaq merger because quickly, the IT group 'was in charge' and we got told to 'bugger off' - did not matter if some one in engineering or research had invented the idea or technique and they had it configure incorrectly. They knew it was supposed to work ;-)
It has gotten outright silly a few times in my life. Tektronix was great, and DEC worked well; but I've found IT departments run by 'big iron' (IBM back in the day, MSFT these days) don't want to listen. They have 'the solution' - your square peg will be made to conform. We only have round holes, that's all we need so that's all you should also....
Intel is mostly that way, although I will say the Macs@Intel sub-group in IT is one of the best I have ever worked. I think part of the reason why they listen to people like me when the rest of IT will let them, is they are way fewer people than they need to support the few thousand Macs@Intel. So, if I call they know something really is fubar, as I would have fixed it myself it was minor or told them how to fix it for me if I could (needed some silly IT permission).