Almost all “on prem” business IT is managed by external contractors. I was one of them. We served about a third of the commercial premises in a small Midwestern city, driving out to visit the server closet, change backup tapes, click through Windows Updates, and perhaps make the rounds of desktop users with any questions or concerns. We sold a monthly package of so many labor hours, and we’d visit each customer site about once a month. We’d get the keys from an office administrator who perhaps knew how to provision user accounts. The biggest, richest customers might have had 1-2 help desk on staff, probably not domain admins and certainly not empowered to do any decision making or design. That was for us.

It was quaint, adorable, personal, and hilariously inefficient.