Following last week's column "The truth about IT," Anon dropped me a line suggesting an addendum to Item 5, "Security is a pipe dream": "5a. The manager busting your [hump] for 'military-level security' is going to complain loudly the first time the system says he needs to change his password and he discovers he cannot change it right back to his son's name."

Anon also threw in a new item: "7. 9% of CEOs won't get what IT does for the company. While the engineering staff will be getting bonuses for shipping buggy code one month late, IT will get no recognition for keeping a Byzantine network running with little or no budget and with practically no interruptions. But IT will get hammered because Exchange went down and needed two hours of coaxing before it was back (never mind that the guy busting your hump about that was the one who insisted on Exchange in the first place)."

As if that wasn't enough, he also added a warning: "Caveat. You should have known this before you got into IT. If you have been in IT for more than five years, you do know this, and if it really bothers you, you've picked the wrong profession."

Which leads me to a couple of issues about IT that I omitted last week. The first is the demand that management makes for you to be a "team player" and give "110%." This usually involves working 60-hour weeks, being willing to change your schedule at the drop of a plane ticket and forgetting that normal people actually have large chunks of time when they don't take cell phone calls and don't reply to e-mail within 30 minutes.

The idea of living for your job is fine when you have some equity in the company, but for the average employee to have his job security dependent on what amounts to slavery is just a kind of corporate protection racket.

How many of you in management positions have just fallen in with the company ethic by allowing, and most likely encouraging, your staff to go the "extra mile" when you knew that they were completely overloaded? Sure, sometimes a little extra effort is needed, but not day in and day out. Once extra effort becomes the norm then the truth is you need more staff or less work.

But let's distinguish between companies that have this attitude toward staff and IT departments that adopt the ethic by themselves as a sort of geek machismo. Often all it takes to get rid of this ridiculous way of life is for the CIO or tech support manager to learn to say no.