[kwlug disc.] "people don't respect what they don't pay for"

[Kyle Spaans]

Forgive my youthful naivety, but why do businesses seem to resist
having technical support entirely in their own shop?

When the business man asks "Who can I call for support/complain to?" -
why does that have to be a company? Why can't it be the LAN/System
Administrator? If they are already an employee, why can't they be held
responsible? Pockets not deep enough?

Or is it possible that support contracts can be cheaper than having a
knowledgable in-house tech-guy? Is it too much to expect from one [or
a small number of] person to be able to solve ALL of a businesses'
technical needs? Or are those people simply too hard to find - thusly
making them too expensive?

As an example, when my dad worked for the MNR in Cochrane [google it,
it's way up North, above the 49th Parallel even.] - their office file
& print server was an IBM server running Windows xxx. It was failling
because it was overheating, so my dad's couldn't do his work to
prepare a statement to get funding from so-and-so [or some such
"work"]. But they couldn't fix it for over a week, because they had to
wait for the IBM guy to fly in and tinker with it. But WHY? Why can't
they just have one guy in-house who can take care of it?