I work in a similar role where we previously did have a lot of contact with call centre folks, and the whole "overload us with requests" thing is very real. You

I work in a similar role where we previously did have a lot of contact with call centre folks, and the whole "overload us with requests" thing is very real. You become the go-to IT guy in no time at all, because if you make stuff for computers, surely when one breaks you can fix it, right? Or you could build something else in place of it? And suddenly, you have nearly no time to actually finish projects anymore. We had to distance ourselves by a floor and implement a ticketing system to avoid exactly this. Sounds like you had the opposite extreme though, which sucks just as bad but for the floor staff instead of the devops guys. Seems to be a fine balance.