Every five minutes, my machine goes "ping". It's out of "profile space", and it pops up an alert box to tell me so. There's nothing else I can delete to free up profile space; the culprits are Acrobat and NS7, both of which I need for my job. The Helpdesk can't give me more than 8MB profile space, and they said they were going to try to exclude NS7 from my roaming profile but when they said they'd done it there was no change.

So, every five minutes, my machine goes "ping", in that annoying Windowsy way. I went to turn the volume down (since I can't fix the problem, fix the symptom). No 'Settings'. No Control Panel. We are locked out of TURNING DOWN THE FUCKING VOLUME on our computers in case by doing so we Break The Internet.

Apparently the rationale is that if we have access to Settings, we could accidentally remove a program or something Bad like that. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that perhaps their role as a "Helpdesk" could be better fulfilled by, say, helping the people who need the help, the people who accidentally do dumb stuff (by, perhaps, fixing the problem for them, and maybe even teaching them how not to do it again) rather than by wilfully obstructing the people who don't need their 'help, the people who are actually capable of USING A BLOODY COMPUTER.

Rachel's comment says it all, really.