> Staff requests equate to people standing outside my door asking me to
> fix it. Perhaps "time to fix" rather than "time to respond" would be a
> better measure. It would still require somebody to actually *measure*
> this stuff.

Most places I've been at use a database to log all this automatically. 
Even if you still want to allow people to turn up at your door, it only 
takes a few seconds to log it into the database. You can then use it as 
a kind of "to-do" list as well if you want.

> Ditto for uptime. Systems were a bit unstable when I joined, but within
> a few years everything was stable enough

Even if the senior management there weren't interested, don't you think 
it would have been nice to be able to produce actual numbers rather than 
"it used to be a bit unstable but it's better now"? If even to only put 
on your CV for future jobs.

> "Implement new system to increase performance" would require that
> somebody actually give me the *money* to perform badly-needed upgrades.
> Never gonna happen. :-P

There's other things, like software solutions to make things easier/more 
efficient to do.

> Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap the
> backup tapes once a week.

But you could have done more?

> Not really. There is no long-term plan. We just show up each day and
> mungle on with writing the code. Deadlines don't really exist.

So if you only pretend to work for the next 3 months and don't actually 
write any code, nobody will care? I find that really hard to believe. 
Where does the company get its money from to pay your salary?

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