Many Admins on both data and voice networks are remote.
Spoke to a Voice network guy who was in japan, the customer had rung him up and the poor guy woke up to answer a call to find out the london office of his company voice network was kaput and causing allsorts of bother in other parts of the network. he went from sweet dreams to speaking to various people in london with in a couple of mintues.
Many of the Network admins are remote spoen to ones in either the companies home country or one in another locaton.
Many of the city firms IT people seem to be in ipswich or brum etc.
Had a problem where i had someone translating between me and a network bod in espana and when it came to a url and password she traslated it in to English when it should have been in Spanish
The problems take up lots of out time but the companies save money to spend on hardware
I will be far from sitting around all day and a small part of my remit is to oversee the internet and intranet sites in the Uk and some parts of europe by chance.
I always make sure i have far to much work so like you say they tap somebody elses shoulder. Never understand why people want to lighten their workload and make themselves less necessry.
In a few years i guess i head out to asia as thats the way the world is revolving maybe a nice office in makati will do me![]()