I'm still battling to get ADSL (1) here in Victoria!!! What could Australia possibly teach about an outdated service which they have not yet been able to deploy responsibly!!!

I also felt the same need to leave an IT career which was somewhat unfulfilling and unrewarding. Unappreciative customers were the least of my worries; however your mention of them gives them a place in the top 10 reasons. ITIL driven businesses were one of my biggest reasons to get sick of a career in system administration. Businesses use the ITIL framework in ways which are not justified, and apply certain theories blindly without first considering how to implement them in a low-impact manner. Yes, I'm being very generic here, but only for the sake of holding myself back from an endless rant. Anyways... To answer your question, my method of leaving the hands-on IT world while still remaining of technical value to my employer was to move into Technical Writing. As a profession, I read it was voted in the top 10 least stressful jobs in the United States, and I can confirm that here in Australia the stress levels associated with Tech Writing are relatively low. I find it also satisfies the creative needs of a geek while still paying the bills and leaving enough income for geekdom. Technical Writing is definitely worth a consideration if you have good linguistic skills, and if you enjoy interacting with different teams to harvest and transform data into universal information.