If you have physical access to the hardware, the world's your oyster. Until you get caught anyway.

Probably best to give a nice gift to one of the top IT folks - or be buddy-buddy with them - for the Admin password with the assurance that you'll take care of it if you mess the system up. Or better, that you won't in the first place.

This got me a good deal of leeway once upon a time, but then, maybe things are a lot harder to circumvent these days.

One of my other employers had all company functions on an RDP server and staff could do whatever they needed, heck, wanted - within reason - with their desk PCs with everything else securely away in a window on their desktops. The solution doesn't scale well though, especially when the company server can't use the processing power of the desk PCs, so that might not be right for your company. Indeed, the company in question eventually had people doing their work on the bare metal, so to speak.

By that point I was VNCing to my home PC instead in a weird reversal of the previous setup.