It will never cease to amaze me how people can be so narrow in focus.  It never even crosses their minds most of the time that someone who supports them may not be working right beside them all day long and may not be involved in their day to day activities enough to pick up on all their slang and terms.

So when I get a group of users like that I always have to laugh a little as I set them straight.  Yes, I’m the DBA for this company.  Yes I do backups for the servers in my control.  And yes I’m the one you need to call whenever you need anything at all SQL related.

However…

NO — I don’t have all your servernames memorized.

NO — I don’t know how big your DB is off the top of my head.

NO — I can’t tell you what rights everyone in your group has.

NO — Sending me a ticket that says “export my favorite tables” will not get you what you want.

NO — I don’t remember that conversation you had with the vendor about what we need to do to upgrade your DB.

NO — I didn’t realize that your app was renamed 2yrs before I got here and half of your group still refers to it as the old one.

So when you guys out there (and you know who you are) send requests to your DBA team,  know that they’re here to help you but you have to know that many times they’ve got several hundred servers to monitor and they can’t always keep your info on the top of their heads.  So at the very least whenever you send them a request, include the ServerName, DBName, etc with it.  They need to know what you’re talking about.