Not very much support

Universities are around primarily for two reasons (and I won't get into the argument as to which should be the primary function): teaching students and doing research to add to the base of knowledge that exists. This is something that cannot happen with just students and faculty in this day and age, and there's generally a larger number of people hired at a university or college that are the support staff.

This is composed of assistants (and here some do and some don't mind being called "secretaries"), librarians, janitors, etc. One of the groups that nowadays are vital is tech support. This is what I want to focus on. The problem is that of course if a professor doesn't do his/her job, then the school fails in a small way, and if students just stop coming, then the school is also going to fail. But what is worse is that the support staff is vital to things working, and quite honestly it has severely failed here.

My research entails a large amount of time spent using computers, both local "small" computers as well as supercomputers that I connect to remotely. So while I'm not an expert with computers, I have come to realize that I know more than pretty much anyone at IT here. It has been six months since I have arrived and my faculty webpage (which I wish to use for research) is not set up yet, and well, everytime something goes wrong, it takes a month to fix it. (I know partially why, and I'll get to that in a sec.) Getting software installed on my machine (that the school has a site-wide license to use) takes 1-2 months, and trying to get access to my office desktop from off-site is basically akin to asking them to up and move the university to southern California.

The base of the problem is that there is one number for IT, and they will forward your request to the appropriate person. But as I have learned (with the last request above), the appropriate person isn't the knowledgeable one. That person will often have to contact someone else, and everything takes far to long to happen. I know that for large companies (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc), a large number of IT issues can be resolved by someone who knows basically nothing and is given a little packet of troubleshooting guides, but with a smaller place, I would prefer to talk directly to the tech person him/herself. See, when that happens usually you are cut off in the middle of your sentence when describing the problem since he/she is actually intelligent.

As it stands I have to talk to people who I don't even think know that computers can be used for something other than email and the internet.