By day, I'm an IT Manager for a great, metropolitan engineering company, fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and capital expenditure request approval.

Being an IT (or MIS, or IS, or DP, or whatever your company calls it) manager can be fun. I usually get quick, first access to all the toys (such as, ahem, FrontPage). I get to ignore requests to reduce my network space utilization. I get to surf the Internet legitimately (as a test of new web browser technology, of course). 

On the other hand, since I am now responsible for developing and promulgating IT standards in the corporation, I can't be too cavalier about the rules (like, ahem, about software piracy).

After slaving as a VM/SP systems programmer, taking a couple years off to teach elementary school in LAUSD, coming back to do PC Tech Support and XBase progamming, then becoming a roll-your-own Oracle DBA, I was given the opportunity to move to Denver as an IS Manager over local tech support.  Eventually my purview expanded to cover the entire Rocky Mountain Region (read: I got to travel to Salt Lake City and Albuquerque).  

Now I'm busy overseeing folks doing R&D and writing standards.  Life, overall, is pretty good.