IT Control is out of control, what can we uses do?

Gene writes...

First off thanks for the awesome shows that makes my 2 hour commute to and from work significantly more tolerable.

I am a software/hardware developer and our sysadmin team makes our lives miserable.

We have to do everything through sysadmin and they want absolute control.  The running joke is you need to put in a support ticket to turn your computer on.

We have actually started putting them as a risk in our project plans and develop mitigation plans.  Our system designs have to work around the limitations of the "approved" Dell they will only let us use and now we have to move everything to only Windows 64-bit...

RHEL will not be allowed because they don't want to "deal with the hassle".  Is this normal?  What are the frustrated and depressed users to do?

Thanks again for an awesome show.