Exact opposite with me. When I first started, it was 7:30 - 4pm, and the Network admin, actually SHUT DOWN the server room at night. That's how parochial and bassackwards they were.
After he left, for a less stressful job, it took me 3 long years to convince them, computers, electronics, and other equipment, runs better at 24x7x365, and wouldn't it be nice..(and yes you can), check your e-mail at home, and read it at your leisure, instead of trying to cram it all in during a 5 minute break.
Now, I can't keep up with the demand for VPN, remote access, etc. Since we've only got a 3 man shop, with 5000+ pc's, not to mention the servers, printers, mini's, routers, applicances, switches and other stuff, getting the bosses to agree to leaving pc's on 24x7 is easy, when I showed them that Patchlink could update all 5000 pc's in one night, and it would take both of my guys, and me, about 60 days @ 8hrs per day, just to update our groupwise client, much less all the other patches, updates, virus definitions, profiles, etc, etc, etc.
ROFL, shut down the server room. ROFL ROFL. That's funny. What a stupid ass.
Fortunatly these days, you can have web email, VPN tunnels and all the other trappings and much of it can be done remotely. Would certainly have made my life much easier. Back in 96, few were running TCP/IP interally and even if you were, the tools didn't exist to make all the cool stuff possible. I mean, VNC alone has made my administration of our China factory possible. Not sure how I would have handled that before.
I've got a developer in Germany who VPNs into our network here in the states and can cross over another VPN to a machine sitting in Fuyong China. THAT is amazing :)
Now if I could just make my VCR stop blinking....