How the Hell do you get off the Helldesk?

I am FUCKING tired of doing Helldesk. I've been working it for EIGHT years now. There is no way out, except via management, and I know I'm not a manager.

Any great idea you have gets sniped and given to somebody else. Got a great idea on how to make updates work better? Great, that falls under system administration, now your coworker has that task. After all, you've got to keep the desktops working. Anything that takes away from that, no matter how it might make your day interesting, and give you valuable skills that would let you move on to a higher paying career in, say, ANYTHING, well fuck you. You don't see us giving the janitors skills training, we gotta keep them down - and you're a glorified janitor.

FUCK the Helldesk.

I did a sideways move out of IT and into a project team.

After eight years in IT you (should) have excellent problem-solving, time-management and people-handling skills. You're also flexible and able to pick up new tools and technologies.

This shee is marketable.

I've just spent all week on site installing a site data scheme change (email me if you're really interested in what that means, folks) and I've dealt with the following:

The police (it's their control room, and I'm about to make bits of it temporarily not work)

The system which is being upgraded (running on a combination of VMS, Linux and Windows)

The outstation equipment (generally attached to the instation via RS485)

The resident engineers (it's their maintenance contract)

Our commissioning engineer (regards programmers [correctly] as "softies" who wouldn't know real work if it fell on them)

Our customer representative (doesn't necessarily know or care about the gory details, needs strategic overview of what we're doing)

The range of skills required to successfully co-ordinate and execute all the above without pissing any of them off or causing them to do the wrong thing is, basically, what I learned in the IT department.

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