I just had the worlds most frustrating, USELESS conversation with the IT department.  Here's the situation:  Customer called, tried to order tickets (duh, I AM the box office.  That fact will become important later.)  Went to run her credit card, and got an error that I'd never seen before, but was very clear: failure to establish connection to credit card server.  No prob.  I try a few more times just in case it was a quick hiccup in the system.  Nope.

Apologize to the patron, ask them to call back in about half an hour and call IT, with the order still up on my screen.  Read the error to IT guy #1.  He has no clue, asks me to try it a few more times ("The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" Albert Einstein) and it still doesn't connect.  Here's where things get annoying: "Well, my boss is down the hall right now, and the ticketing software programmer is in the next room; I don't want to bother them.  It's just the credit card server.  Can it wait?"
NO!  It cannot wait.  I am the box office.  Most of what I do is run credit cards for ticket purchases.  Without access to the credit card server, I am USELESS!  And then, the ticketing software spontaneously crashed.
*sigh*  "Okay, I'll go get them, we'll call you back."

Fifteen minutes later I get a call back, and they want me to try and run it again (obviously these guys have never heard of Einstein).  No can do, when the software crashed, it deleted the order because it was unfinished, and hence not savable.  More stupid questions abound: Do you run credit cards often?  (What part of the concept of box office are you guys not understanding?!)  Why don't you remember the patrons ID number?  (Because I talk to dozens to hundreds of patrons a day, I'm lucky if I remember two names, much less numbers!)  Is the patron's number in the phone log?  (Yes, along with a dozen or so other unlabeled numbers, I don't know which one was her, and even if I did, the point of that would be what?)  Can't you retrieve the order, somehow?  (If you're the ticketing software programmer, shouldn't you know that it doesn't save orders until payment has been made and tickets have been printed?  The order is just flat gone!)
"Well, how can we test this?" 
You're the IT guys, you tell me!
"Sorry, we can't do anything for you.  Call us back if it happens again."

*headdesk*  I'm not IT, but it's pretty obvious that my computer and the credit card server are having trouble talking to each other.  This is obvious, because that's what the error said!  Maybe get off the flippin' order obsession and oh, check the network?  Did anyone do that?  No.  They made some noises about poking around inside the history of the server, but what good is that going to do if my computer can't reach it in the first place!?  "I don't see any transactions coming for you in here."  That's because it never made it there half-wit!

It's going to be a long day, and all my chocolate is at home.