Your request, by necessity, is going to cover a
very large slice of life.
The day of a lone wolf developer/dba/jack of all trades is going to be VERY different from a network person vs a dedicated dba vs a database designer in a large corporate environment.
You make it sound like IT is generic, that there's some kind of standard environment. There really isn't, and I think this should have been stressed more.
Not at all. If you write, and I write, and someone else write's, we'll get three different views. The point is that people entering the workforce have no idea what any of us do. That's why I ask many people to write, not one or two.