re: Is a large part of working in IT just playing the blame game?

1st level tech support at the companies I've dealt with, all work from a playbook. If your problem is in the playbook, they have a sequence they run to fix it.

If your problem is not in the playbook, or if the solution in the playbook doesn't fix the problem, they typically start escalating the issue. That's where you get some variation in how companies deal with customers, and if you're dealing with a crappy organization they'll drop the ball.