VI. Thou Shalt Schedule Downtime before Working upon Thy Network

As a courtesy, try to give your users plenty of advance notice before you take down the network to work on it. Obviously, you can't predict when random problems strike. But if you know you're going to patch the server on Thursday morning, you earn points if you tell everyone about the inconvenience two days before rather than two minutes before. (You'll earn even more points if you patch the server Saturday morning. Tell your boss you'll take next Thursday morning off to make it up.)