OWNED!

If you like Stephen King, and don't mind reading long serials while getting the feeling that nothing will ever be resolved to your satisfaction, I'd say go for it.
In my case I gave up after a book or two because I personally don't like the feeling that nothing will ever be resolved to your satisfaction.

Agreed, and I think it depends on your environment and what type of staff you have and how qualified they are.
For example, if a required service has moved to some other TCP port and production is down because of it, you can wait hours
for a solution, or a well-qualified and trusted developer can edit the port setting in the deployed code and get everything
back up in minutes.

Don't wait until immediately before before code freeze.
Your code will have to interact with the rest of the system and by waiting
until the last minute you are potentially introducing integration issues into
the mix at the worst possible time.

In Hollywood movies, the bad guy always draws first, and the bad guy always gets shot. QED

Did no one else else immediately think of Gilligan's Island? Granted that robot _walked_ across the bottom of the _Pacific_ Ocean. Maybe I'm just showing my age.

What about people who aren't actually dead, but have jumped the shark?

A couple of years ago when my daughter showed up for middle school orientation, all of her 6th grade class had been given slips of paper with the WRONG locker combination.
Mayhem ensues. One can easily imagine that schools aren't experts in tasks like this, although you can certainly argue that they should be. Probably some poor teacher with half a clue about technology was assigned the task of distributing locker combinations, and no one bothered to check before the slips were handed out. Ultimately there's no accountability for stuff like this so the situation is not likely to change any time soon.

The evil corporation is American (go figure)

...and I'm not being sarcastic, if my 11 year old son is any indication of what is happening around the country.

He saved all his birthday, christmas and allowance money for months to buy an iPod touch and spends way
too much time playing games on it. Most of the games are free or only cost a couple of bucks, meaning he
can get near-instant gratification without having to save $50 to buy a console game. He uses it almost
exclusively as a game platform, even to the point of using a clunky old mp3 player for music, in order to save the
iPod touch battery for game play.

Is it just me or does the name "Drupal" seem kind of limp and flaccid?

Putting CAPS LOCK key next to 'A' on the keyboard? It was the first thing I thought of.

They had 300 baud in 1964? Raise your hand if you were still using 110 baud in the 1970's.

You can get work experience while you study, and probably get your tuition paid to boot. It's called a Research Assistant position. Don't assume that Computer Science departments are the only place to look for one. Other departments like Astronomy, Chemistry and the biological sciences all have computing needs.

I just had a conversation this weekend about a policy tried with some success in Chicago. When an entire school has an egregious record of underperforming, fire everyone in the building and start over. Make them re-apply for their jobs. (I tried searching for an article to support this story just now, but I couldn't find one.)