Many of us know them only as a voice on the other end of a frantic phone call.
Like 911 operators, they field our most desperate pleas for help. In soothing tones, they play techno-shrink, allaying our fear of corrupted files, malfunctioning mouses or blue screens displaying ominous error messages: "Fatal exception occurred at 017 : BFF9DFFF."
Yet, for all their trials, office techies are almost universally underpaid and underappreciated. And with their great powers come great, and somewhat frightening, responsibilities.
The average office network administrator can parse every e-mail ever sent and received by company employees, including the one in which you called the chief executive officer a moron.
He can monitor your every keyboard stroke and track your every visit to Perezhilton.com, every peek at fantasy sports stats and every Facebook update.
"We can find out anything about anyone we want," said a manager at a Toronto-based information-technology company that provides outsourced tech support to Canadian firms.
In short, if you're not careful, those meek and mild techies can make life miserable.
This fall, NBC will boost the North American profile of the lowly techie with The IT Crowd, the spin-off of a British sitcom that follows an awkward group of techies and their interactions with technologically inept office workers.
But in many offices, techies are still treated with a mix of scorn and gratitude.
"The end-user gets frustrated very easily," says Alex Williams, a former network administrator who now runs Greeneyetea, a consulting firm that specializes in environmentally friendly IT solutions. "Their solution is to yell or get angry or throw their arms up. That's often why end-users and IT people don't get along."
Getting on the IT department's bad side is not a good idea for many reasons. With most networks, technicians can log on remotely to any workstation using Microsoft's Systems Management Server. Once they log on, your entire desktop is at their fingertips.
"You can do some insane things with SMS," the Toronto IT manager says. "I can wipe out entire computers with SMS if I [want] to."
And if you're careless enough to keep personal information stored on your work computer, the techie's electronic skeleton key can crack that open too.
"It's a little bit ridiculous what people store in Word files," says Nathan Jang, a manager at DotNoc, a Vancouver-based IT services firm. "A lot of people leave Visa numbers, social insurance numbers. We've seen Excel spreadsheets with a person's life story; social insurance numbers; birthdates, banking numbers."
Your e-mail isn't safe either. Any firm with a local exchange server probably logs each e-mail sent and received.
"At a previous job I had," the Toronto IT manager recalls, "we had an IT guy there who was monitoring and saving every e-mail to every executive in the company. He and his supervisor were monitoring the bosses, mostly for self-preservation, I think." Both the e-mail snoop and his supervisor were eventually fired. But only because they got caught.
To be fair, IT departments usually don't take the initiative to watch over staff. The directive usually comes from a superior concerned with worker productivity. "If a boss decides that he wants to receive every e-mail that you receive, they can," Mr. Williams says.
The Toronto IT manager once had the unenviable task of scrutinizing website visits for every employee in an office and then approaching - in person - the top 10 pornography visitors to ask them to stop.
Douglas Chick, IT director for an Orlando company, had to monitor so much staff e-mail and Internet use that he began to see patterns.
"Women will visit local schools, movie listings, online gambling and even community events," he says. "Men, on the other hand, go straight for the porn, adult dating sites, online gambling and sports."
He also found that many workers didn't settle for online sexual gratification. "I think it is fair to say that at least two people per every 50 are having an affair inside or outside of the company," he says.
How can he be so sure?
"The IT department loves to see pictures of you and your lover in a Zorro, Batman, Spider-Man, bondage or monkey costume."
The legality of e-monitoring methods at work can be murky. While Canada has privacy laws that apply to e-mail and the Internet, labour laws are a provincial jurisdiction. Only union workers and those toiling in Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta have some electronic privacy protection.
"Most employment agreements give employers the right to monitor employee activity," says Michael Geist, Canada Research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa.
That electronic supervision has to be within reason. In 2004, Dan Armeneau, an IT worker at Parkland Library in Lacombe, Alta., discovered that someone had installed software on his work computer that logged every keystroke and mouse-click he made.
When he cracked open files for the keystroke monitoring software, he found that it had even recorded his online banking access numbers.
"It logged absolutely everything," says Mr. Armeneau, who found out that his network administrator had installed the software. "If I had typed 'the boss is an idiot' and then deleted it, the software would [have kept] it."
The provincial privacy commissioner ruled that the library had violated Alberta's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Emerging office technology is presenting new challenges to privacy laws. With VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) telephone networks now used in many workplaces, logging, recording and listening in on private conversations is a snap.
Fortunately, the law isn't the sole barrier to unsavoury behaviour. In post-secondary classes, aspiring IT workers now learn a code of ethics that bars such unwarranted spying.
Even so, most firms don't have many ways of stopping the rare unscrupulous one.
"We're gatekeepers," the Toronto IT manager said. "You really have to have someone you trust in our position."
