Sane? Hah. You're funny.
Sane is a funny concept. Sane is what the rest of the world says you are if you can talk to people and fight off that dark dark urge to rip their spines out and sacrifice them to the Novell box that hasn't been rebooted since 1993.
You ask, my dear Sabrewolf, how we remain sane while dealing with the users? The users that submit a help-desk ticket titled "Director" merely because they're a director. The users that say that they "can't access that one website with the e in it" and you suggest "ebay" and after nearly three hours of trying to figure out what they mean you decide to Google it and they call you a genius for getting to the site.
Are those the user's you're talking about? Or perhaps it's the user that decides installing that free copy of AOL they got, that they have 9000 hours free of, is a great idea. You're wondering how they have install privileges. They complained to their managers for three months about how locked down the systems are because they couldn't install that new copy of minesweeper the prince from Saudi Arabia promised would bring them millions in a secret account. The same user that management eventually just buys their own computer for some god-forsaken reason who calls you every week to reset his three letter password.
Or perhaps you're wondering about the user that deletes an entire directory on the network, then when questioned about it gives you the wide eyed, tearful stare and says "I don't know how to delete things! The computer must have done it!"
There are billions of users and few of us that stand against the dark tides, the onslaught of dull stares. The vanguard of IT professionals that suffer at the torrent of the user community.
You ask how we stay sane? The IT community, every one of us, will give you a different answer. But it's always the same... You must forgo your preconceived notions of sanity when you enter this field. Friends. Family. Health. These are the first sacrifices a true IT professional makes. The first of many. You might ask yourself why one would take up the ranks and battle the tides of stupidity. Why... Why dive into the darkness to fight a losing battle...
I suppose that could answer your question if anything could.
It's the rush. The thrill of it. When you've got the power to crush the user's very souls? It's a rush. Chipping away at somebody elses sanity by tweaking little things like the DPI scaling by a few points, making them slowly think that their sight is going? Perhaps adding a mouse jitter program that will randomly tweak the mouse 50 pixels to a side when they click. Or maybe rigging up a game of pinball to open when their supervisor's webcam detects them leaving the room...
It keeps them paranoid. The razor line you walk of driving them crazy but keeping their complete and total trust in you is the most invigorating feeling in the world. You. Are. GOD.
You can recover that document that crashed unexpectedly, making the user nearly worship you for the day. The rush of keeping thousands of users up and running in a corrupt mail-store on an exchange cluster? It's almost better than sex. Almost.
That multimillion dollar contract that just won't e-mail through because of a stale link state? The problem that nobody else can solve yet you somehow manage it? A rush.
So if it's such a rush why the megalomania?
It doesn't start like that. IT people never start like that. You start your job wanting to help people. Wanting to interact with the systems and spend your day doing what you love. Maybe you're a programmer. Coding is fun. You get to enshrine your logic into a module or program. But the user isn't happy. They didn't want THAT kind of prompt, they wanted that OTHER kind of prompt.
Or maybe you're a systems administrator. Getting the entire business running smoothly is a great feeling! The problems are all solvable with a quick Google, everyone knows how to use a computer it can't be that hard to point and click... but then a user manages to constantly blue-screen his computer with 0xc000021a. Then his entire department. You're not sure how, but he did it. And you fix it. Then they do it again. You figure out why it does it and you tell them to stop doing it. AND THEY DO IT AGAIN.
Perhaps it's because after you save the day you never even get recognized for it. Even a "thank you" or a "good job". It never comes. You get a nifty little Outstanding performance award. The second one, two years running. You get a commendation letter from the CIO. But then you get an 82 cent raise on a $25 wage in California. A wage equivalent to that of a level one help-desk monkey. Somebody that still has some spirit that needs to be sucked away.
Years of being under-appreciated take their toll on anyone's psyche. It's not a sane environment. It's insane. The systems are your only solace, based purely in logic. They do exactly what you tell them to. Until they don't. How do you stay sane? You don't need to. You're the only sane one left.
TL;DR: Video Games.
