Spend enough time in the tech industry, and you'll eventually find yourself in IT hell -- one not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his "Divine Comedy."

But here, in the data centers, conference rooms, and cubicles, the IT version of this inferno is no allegory. It is a very real test of every IT pro's sanity and soul.

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How many of us have been abandoned by our vendors to IT limbo, only to find ourselves falling victim to app dev anger when in-house developers are asked to pick up the slack? How often has stakeholder gluttony or lust for the latest and greatest left us burned on a key initiative? How many times must we be kneecapped by corporate greed, accused of heresy for arguing for (or against) things like open source? Certainly too many of us have been victimized by the denizens of fraud, vendor violence, and tech-pro treachery.

Thankfully, as in Dante's poetic universe, there are ways to escape the nine circles of IT hell. But IT pro beware: You may have to face your own devils to do it.

Shall we descend?

1st circle of IT hell: Limbo

Description: A pitiful morass where nothing ever gets done and change is impossible

People you meet there:Users stranded by vendors, departments shackled by software lock-in, organizations held hostage by wayward developers

There are many ways to fall into IT Limbo: When problems arise and the vendors start pointing fingers at each other; when you're locked into crappy software with no relief in sight; when your programmers leave you stranded with nothing to do but start over from scratch.

You know you're in Limbo when "the software guys are saying the problem is in hardware and the hardware guys are saying the problem is in software," says Dermot Williams, managing director of Threatscape, an IT security firm based in Dublin, Ireland. "Spend eternity in this circle and you will find that, yes, it is possible for nobody to be at fault and everyone to be at fault at the same time."

A similar thing happens when apps vendors blame the OS, and OS vendors blame the apps guys, says Bill Roth, executive vice president at data management firm LogLogic. "Oracle says it's Red Hat's fault, while Red Hat blames Oracle," he says. "It's just bad IT support on both sides."

Michael Kaiser-Nyman, CEO of Impact Dialing, maker of autodialing software, says he used to work for a nonprofit that was locked into a donor management platform from hell.