Also that answer freaks me out a little. It reminds me the time I joined a project that had been circling the drain for 2 years before I arrived and after working on it for six months we had the talk about how each and every ticket had to be justified in terms of how it affected the end user.

I put a ticket in to speed up the build process from 40 minutes to 15 minutes and insultingly I was asked "how does this benefit the user?" and I said "The user would have had the product six months ago if the build was shorter".

People with that kind of attitude are going to be incredulous that the system has it's own needs, that the server needs to be plugged into the wall to have electricity, etc.