Skyhawk,
Oh, the joys of "big IT." I started out as a drone in the Intel Enterprise IT department. Talk about "filling out forms in triplicate" before anything gets done. But with 200,000 machines plus worldwide you need some strict controls. Luckily I was quickly able to move to supporting a single R&D group that was allowed to buy everything outside of normal procurement. This was because the group needed support for multiple platforms not to mention some odd skills. For example: I ran a broadband cable internet service and an ATSC (HDTV) broadcasting station from my lab. No kidding. This was late '98 and our group was riding the bleeding edge of content delivery. So the dept. manager one day said "Mark and Ajit, we need to be able to test this stuff once we get some solid builds going. I want to test delivery via cable modem and the ATSC broadcast stream. Set it up." About $300,000 and many a sleepless night later we had it all running. We had a broadcast radius of about 35 feet, but that was good enough. The cable thing was cool too, I purchased a Cisco CMTS and about 20 different cable modems and put them in the developers cubicles. Quite the cool bit of tech back in the day.
