Yes, I was a little harsh about the IT guys at IRS. I've seen a lot of politics played, and hated that. People aren't allowed to do their jobs because of political games. For instance, earlier in my career we had a failure of a major system and the application folks were panicking. I told my boss I could fix it in 30 minutes and he stopped me and let it sit broken for 2 days. I was pissed at us looking incompetent. He gave me the go-ahead to fix it after he got approval to buy a couple hundred-thousands of dollars in new storage equipment. I've seen a lot of bs played in IT and it sucked.
Never let an emergency go to waste, eh? Classic. I work in an IT department as well and have seen similar tactics. Politics abounds everywhere.