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Sys-Admin Appreciation Day Tomorrow
nrmrvrk (ner-mer-verk) writes "Tomorrow, the last Friday of July, is Sysadmin Appreciation Day! A
special day, once a year, to acknowledge the worthiness and appreciation of the person occupying the role, especially as it is often this person who really keeps the wheels of your company turning." Thanks to Martin, BSD-Pat, Liz, CowboyNeal: the guys who get the thankless job of keeping our hardware running smoothly.
I actually enjoy having my users get viruses. My systems are untouched and winDOS support gets to take care of fixing the problem! HA!
Feels the need to get to know and talk to everybody since he's so familar with all your files, email, etc.
Trust me, we don't want to get to know you. We'd rather you didn't exist at all. We don't care what's in your files, what kind of mail you get, or what porn sites turn you on. We mostly just wish you wouldn't call up telling us about either a) Problems we were fixing when you interrupted us, or b) Problems that are actually ID 10T related. And believe me, we don't feel the need to talk to you. Leave us alone.
Have I made my point yet? Sysadmin is just a high tech janitor. He creates... nothing.
Agreed. We don't create much (though sometimes we get to set up a new shop, which is great fun), but rather we maintain existing investments.
And certainly not deserrving[sic] of much higher pay.
Agreed. Sysadmins should be paid maybe 20-30% more than regular janitors (simply because of the experience/education required). What that really means is that janitors are underpaid.
And here's one more:
8) Not having a good one makes it hard to get any work done (because nothing works).
8a) Not having a good one makes it hard to get nay work done (because of the stink and clutter).
-- Your Friendly Janitor
I'm sorry I'm so far behind in handling user requests. I like you though, so I've taken care of this particular request for you right away.
I'm happy to delete your home directory for you. You did back it up, right?
Uhmmm...root == responsibility. Shouldn't they be the ones doing the complete reinstall? I'd hand them the media and the instruction book and tell them to have at it. Such is the price of root. You can't have it both ways.
I'm a geek. I sysadmin a network, and rare is the day that goes by that I don't write some code. Other people have made profit off my code, and so have I. My code is running in production situations, and a lot of it gets used 20,000 times a day.
And yet, I don't see the point of a sysadmin appreciation day. There is nothing unsung about being a geek, anymore. Ever since Open Source became a coined trademark, geeks have been the trendy thing to be. Ever see any of those banner ads on slashdot? They are marketing to an image that I accredit ESR for hyping. Certainly, geeks were around before that image, and they will be around after everyone gets as tired as I am with it.
But sysadmins are NOT unsung. Anyone willing to disclose the amount of money they make as a sysadmin?
We can be more than what "our" culture defines us to be.
Programmers who become sysadmins tend to write code to do things.
They write a bit of code to do this.
They write a bit of code to do that.
They write a bit of code to make this do that.
Bit by bit the entropy sets in. They never seem to see the whole picture. 1 year down the line and you have to hire 3 sysadmins just to handle the reboot dependencies.
Good reading for all (potential) sysadmins:
http://www.infrastructures.org/
Deleted
Several years ago, one of our clients called up to say that their system wouldn't come back up after a reboot. It turned out that the user was running out of disk space, so they removed that /unix file that was taking up so much space...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Minus the rest of your post, I'll agree with the topic; any single hot secretaries might consider FUCKing the sysadmin on Sys-Admin Appreciation Day. Trust me, it'll brighten him up a little... and you never know... maybe you'll make one person whose homedirs he won't accidentally delete! :^)
the real at&t mix
A phone that doesn't ring every 30 seconds (especially when it is a fax machine that calls four times because someone forgot to dial 9).
Dude, you pick up the phone?
If it's not in email (documented, logged and backed-up for future evidence) I don't know about it. That includes problems with email.
OK, OK, some people (my boss and staff) have my mobile, but I have CID and they know my abuse policy...
Your Working Boy,
Tommorrow is also the first day of the Oregon Brewers Festival. 72 Microbrews by the riverside. Starts at noon - I just took the whole day off for my sysadmin appreciation.
There's more to it than this.
You know what? It really saddens me that so many people have this view of the sysadmin as Mr. 'Big Brother' bad asshole who looks over their shoulder and tells them what to do.
The fact remains... the sysadmin, and the IT staff in general, are *responsible for ensuring that computers are available to do what htey need to do for the company*.
I've had times when I've said.. hey.. most of my users are very computer literate. I'll just let them do whatever they want with their workstations.. you know what? The amount of work I have to do goes UP! WAY UP! Why? Because...
If Mr. Programmer installs some software, and de-installs it, re-installs it, hence, destabilizing windows (we all know this happens), and his computer BSODs every day, and he can't get his programming done, it is still *MY JOB* to fix it, not his. It is no longer relevant who's fault it is, it's still MY JOB to fix it.
As for 'taking back' users computers... It's not *YOUR COMPUTER*. It's the COMPANY'S computer. You should not *care* what it runs so long as you can do your job.
I must say, in my shop, if someone came to me and said 'can I put linux on my computer, because it lets me do my job better' then, if I believed them, I'd say 'here, have a second computer to use linux on'.
Users have JOBS to do. Project managers, programmers, designers... they don't have fucking TIME to deal with network issues.
Excuse me? to guarantee myself a job? Dude, I don't know what you think is out there, but if you were to only use software that an idiot could administer, nothing would get done.
How are your abilities compromised?
Anyone got a mirror of the site?
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I mean tranfer it when you pick it up and discover its a fax... you don't have a tranfer feature on your phone. You don't have to send it to the right fax, just tranfer it to any fax and let them figure out what went wrong.. hehe
yea, I leveled 3 times in d2 during our last "outage."
:-)
Worked all night, I did.
--
+&x
Isn't this inherently an anti-BOFH's thing? Don't true BOFH's loath and hate from the quiet solitude of their server rooms? They don't allow anyone in there anyway, so how could we honor them? :)
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Don't know if any of you noticed, but only the advertising banner shows up... the rest of the page? Network Problems. But works hard to load www.do-not-sleep.com. Funny.
I cannot confirm nor deny the allegation or allegations you may or may not have just made
All righty, let's see what I can do after 70 hours of overtime in the past two weeks (my PFY is on vacation) and 2:00 am page.
10 Easy steps Every User Should Know on 'How to Please Your Auto Mechanic':
1. When you bring your car in to have work done, leave your seat all the way up and your radio on the local rap/country/classic rock station at 20. We really love your music and would rather listen to it than work on your car. Don't forget to leave the dirty diaper in the back seat and the food wrappers on the floor.
2. Ignore the idiot lights. They are there to tell you that you have oil or that your car is hot. Don't bother to tell us, we'll figure it out from the smell.
3. When the tow truck driver says he's coming right over, go into your house and wait for him. We know where you live and will knock on your door when we get there.
4. When the Mechanic says that your AC is a little low on freon, tell him that you'll catch it next time. The AC will operate just fine while low on lubricant.
5. When the Mechanic is elbow deep in your engine and whacks his knuckles on the power steering pump, say "ouch, that must have hurt". He appreciates your sympathy.
6. Stop by every 10 minutes and ask how it's going. He appreciates the interruptions and loves to stop what he's doing to tell you what he's doing.
7. When your car is experiencing problems, drop your keys off in the night slot with nothing but your garbled phone number and feeble description of your car. We like going to each car in the lot trying the key and testing the security systems.
10. Don't learn the proper term for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by "My thingy blew up."
That'll be $935.34.
Shit better not happen!
I hope that it would be possible to turn protected filesystem off, to give you access to stuff. Otherwise, ugh, its getting proprietary past closed source! What happens if a trojan gets installed as a protected file? The user has to wait till a patch program comes out before they can disable the trojan. Dumb idea if it cant be turned off.
It's even better when they start with: "I learned this on my Advanced Word|Excel|Powerpoint course. Why doesn't it work?"
Usually, I walk to their machine, pull up the online lack-of-help and get the answer. Of course they didn't see the secret code I used so they're back the next day. (And of course they checked the help before calling.)
Oh well, I'll resign myself to being the custodian of the secret knowledge of F1.
Does this include the sys-admins whose machines were used for K5 DDOS attacks?
----------
AbiWord: The BEST opensource word processor
Check out AbiWord.
I totally agree with this. How many times has an "upgrade" caused users to lose productivity just to keep up with MS's newest release? Managers don't always figure in the cost of the upgrade learning curve.
. RTFM? What FM?
Here I disagree. These people are not just key-punchers - they really use these apps. A lot more than I do. If they have a problem with the software not performing a function correctly I will spend all the time necessary to remedy the situation, but if they need training, that is not my job. There are plenty of good books in the bookstore for which my company will reimburse whomever wants to further their education. They ought to use that resource. That said, point taken about the talking paperclip LOL.
Your job might be easier if all your users were not superusers.
God, how I wish my users were all superusers. Power users have taught me more by showing me freakish problems. I love power users - at least if they break it it is interesting to fix. Not like "I didn't know what OLEAUT32.DLL was so I deleted it" which kills me. :)
If your company runs vantive, file a 'Happy Sysadmin's Day' vantive and forward it to your support team's inbox. Sure, it's unprofessional, but perhaps you'll get some extra RAM out of it. ;)
Weapons of Mass Analysis
How I hate shit like this. MS users are clueless because MS likes them that way. Most just want their God damned word processor to not second guess them, and help them do their JOB. MS help files have gotten better, but are still not all that helpful because the underlying application is flawed/limited and painful to use. Half the pain is all the stuff that gets hidden and can only be revealed with some secret handshake, like hold the shift key while opening that database. RTFM? What FM? That talking paperclip? Don't be so smug, the user is generally frustrated by the inferior MS app that replaced the app that worked better and was more familliar.
Yes, the average user will blame IT for the software on their desk. Who else makes such decisions?
I can forgive IT at my company for being forced to use NT and office. They are generally nice about things. I enjoy making smug ones feel small.
Your job might be easier if all your users were not superusers. Dump MS, please!
Does anyone really care?
Nonono, don't get me wrong here. There are a lot of people who care, I'm sure, but a good portion of the world has no clue that it is Sys-admin's day. Hell, a good portion of the world has no clue what a sys-admin even is, what they do, why they're needed, etc. etc. Everyone's just happy that everything works, they don't care how.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
This is so obvious, why not have a telephone-tech-support day? What would the world do without someone telling us to reboot windows?! There is no spoon.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
That was the deal I was supposed to have with Ajilon. Not only did the fsckers NOT honor that commitment, they also neglected to give me my final paycheck, as well as failing to reimburse me for over $1500 worth of travel expenses that were "guaranteed" to me IN WRITING. Now, I have to hire a lawyer just to get my fscking money and he'll probably steal half of it.
If you are a geek looking for work, and Ajilon calls, do yourself a big favor and tell them to get bent! They are a pack of fscking lying, thieving weasels. Do not trust a word they say. If you do decide to work for them, demand that they pay any travel expenses UP FRONT.
(Fortunatly I got a job with a fantastic company where I'm appreciated AND paid on time!)
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Damn you, I was going to mention the BOFH first. :) Normally that wouldn't warrant a reply, BUT...
Here's a useful snippet. This is the address to the *complete* BOFH archives.. I don't think this can be disputed as it's the author's own page, and has material as recent as 1999!
I've been reading this for about three weeks now off and on... damn good reading.
We should have a help desk appreciation day. They are the one that have to deal with these idiots. "How do I view the ads at www.adcritic.com?" "why cant I go in chat rooms?" This is all I hear all day. At least the sysadmin get to do fun things with their computers, i just get to fix other idiots problems.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
If that is observed, I'd like to request a Programmer Appreciation Day, too :)
Now sysadmins are just as appreciated as secretaries. I can hardly contain myself.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
The average idiot is far too stupid to appreciate their sys admin... We just barely got people to recognize their Secrataries, and they have to look at those people every day. No one understands what a sys admin does, and no one will appreciate them.
Let me add my appreciation for Kuro5hin's sysadmins to the appreciation that Slashdot's SA's deserve.
And we thank you for:
Printing 500 page accounting reports on the photo-proof printer
"This will only take a second"
Five-hundred-meg pst files.
Politics. Stop telling us why you hate XYZ and how they are a b*tch.
Telling us how to do our job ("When are you going to linux? It's a better fileserver than NetWare")
Using things like napster and gnutella, then complaining about how the internet connection is soooooooooo slow.
"Why use the manual when we can ask the admin? Not like they are doing anything else."
Right before scheduled downtime, the inevitable "Wait, no, the finanicals have to go out today!" "It's 5pm, you couldn't do it *before* now?"
Eating our M&M supply. (We get a 2 lbs bag of M&Ms for every $400 worth of kit purchased)
Wondering why the mail server is slow, then proceeding to forward a five meg movie of a monkey peeing into it's mouth to your coworkers. You know, there's a reason why it takes seven hours to backup the mail server.
Dear Users,
Today is National SysAdmin appreciation day. Yes, a day devoted to the countless geeks like me, who help you work better on our computers.
We do your backups, chmod those fules, and even fix the DB2 server for you.. All the while, slowly but surely losing our sanity.
If you wish to show your appreciation by contributing a "gift" I have crafted a list of recommended items below:
-Copy of Diablo 2
-Any Nerf Weapon
-Iced Mocha from Mojo's coffee in Austin Tx.
-Mt. Dew
-Palm Pilot (Palm V or VII only please.)
-Geforce 2 video card
-22" LCD monitor
Please feel free to deposit all gifts, in the "syadmin appreciation gift basket" Located inside my cubicle.
Thank you.
(Yes, my weary attempt at humour)
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
Oh what memories
Memories ? The BOFH is still alive and well and on The Register - BOFH 2K: Kit and Caboodle.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Users ask me all the time about things like that. Not that I couldn't figure it out in a couple of minutes, but I am not really interested and take the attitude RTFM.
Perhaps that is why I make it a point to eat a large bag of garlic and vinegar flavored potato chips in the afternoons to cut down on nonsensical calls. Then again maybe it's just cause those chips are so good ;)
Sysadmins don't want to be apreciated, we want to be left alone!
Now please excuse me while I take these disks to the bulk era....er..bulk virus scanner...
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Hmm. I'd have to say we should appreciate the Windows administrators tomorrow - they have such a difficult and frustrating job compared with unix administrators. Let's hear it for those who are in the worst areas of the front line trenches!
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Yeah, lets celebrate by slashdotting the site, make the poor sysadmin at "www.sysadminday.com" work his ass off!!
witty sig goes here
Oh what memories... :~(
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Why Santa is a System Administrator
- Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny. (KM)
- When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal. (KM)
- Santa seldom answers your mail. (KM)
- When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he's got, he says, "Elves make it for me." (KM)
- Santa doesn't care about your deadlines. (KM)
- Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves. (KM)
- Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions. (KM)
- Santa laughs entirely too much. (KM)
- Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME. (KM)
- Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence. (KM)
- Santa is forced to do all his work when his users are in down time. (TS)
- He's forced to work even on observed holidays. (TS)
- He claims he's unique, but you see people just like him at the mall. (TS)
- Users make an incredible number of unreasonable demands, but in the end, the only thing that really interests them are new toys. (TS)
- Somehow, somewhere, by some unknown process, he found a wife just like him. (TS)
- Where people don't believe in him, inevitably there are other people who do the same job, just with a different title. (TS)
- Users aren't happy enough to see the results of his work. They keep asking perstering questions about how he manages to do it. They can't accept that it's just some sort of "magic". (TS)
- Even the non-religious pray for him to arrive. (TS)
- He's the only one who laughs at his message of the day. (TS)
- He'll never get another job; his resume is too specific to the job he currently has. (TS)
- Some of the users who make requests are kind of sophisticated, but most of them are having a good day when they avoid peeing their pants in his presence. (TS)
- He's forced to crawl into unreasonably small, dirty spaces to do his job... even when he's wearing a nice suit. (TS)
- Even if his work is really mostly spiritual, the world is a better place because of his existence!!! (TS)
- People expect everything from him, within 24 hours, and at no cost. (SS)
Credits:KM = Keith Meidling
TS = Tony Shepps
SS = Steve Simmons
--
Any computer system of any size needs a sysadmin for one obvious reason, at least: it frees up the users to use the computer, and not have to worry about keeping the thing running. If there are 10 users on a system and each is spending 10 percent of their time keeping the system running, then they are already devoting a full person's time keeping the system going. Better to let one person do that and let the others spend their full time using the computer.
It's common in any large group: people specialize in what they're best at. It's been going on since the beginning of time: towns didn't have everyone dabbling as a blacksmith, or a preacher, or a mortician, even though anyone could do those things. Generally even very small towns usually had one of each. The same applies with sysadmins.
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
They are really celebrating over at Napster. Tomorrow the sysadmins will get the day off!
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Does this go for the fine folks who got their MCSE or whatever, and click on buttons to administer their NT servers?
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
At best it should be treated as additional duties assigned to one of the programmers or other tech staff member, or even outsorce the job as needed to a temp service.
*sigh* You are completely clueless. There's nothing worse than a system run by a non-sysadmin. Programmers make the worst sysadmins on the planet. A monkey could do a better job of it. Honestly, you're better off with no sysadmin at all than with someone who really does something else but got forced into the job because nobody else wanted it.
Yet in some ways your analysis is correct: the really good sysadmins really don't have anything to do all day. They've already spent twelve 100-hour weeks setting everything up so perfectly that it runs itself, never needs fixing, and will last till the day the machines burn out. The programmer-sysadmins, on the other hand, seem to spend an awful lot of time fixing problems with the systems. Funny how that is. The fact that everything is working really is attributable to the admins. I've seen shops where things usually don't work right. Trust me, it's plenty possible to be a sufficiently lousy sysadmin that nothing ever works right. Of course, invariably those people are programmers or managers or brownnosing idiots or CIS/MIS fuckwits who are stuck doing sysadmin work until they can get back to their real jobs.
Go thank your admins for the fact you you never see them and the fact that they never do anything. That's the way it should be.
I think there should be system user hate day
That only happens on days that end in 'y'
10 Easy steps Every User Should Know on 'How to Please Your IT Department':
1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it
buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals,
dried flowers, bowling trophies and children's art. We don't have a life,
and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
2. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages
from here.
3. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. That
way you won't be there when we need your password. It's nothing for us to
remember 700 screen saver passwords.
4. When I.T. support sends you an E-Mail with high importance, delete it
at once. We're just testing.
5. When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and
spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.
6. Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and
flags it as a rush delivery.
7. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person's
chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We
love a puzzle.
8. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print
jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.
9. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to all
68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.
10. Don't learn the proper term for anything technical. We know exactly
what you mean by "My thingy blew up".
These are the same creeps who are squatting on all the slashdot.org misspellings and putting our beloved News For Nerds site into frames.
Moderators please jack this up so people get the right site. (either way, it's still slashdotted right now)
Screw Micro$oft.
Thanks for:
Playing XBoing all day
Telling everyone "I'll get to it in my *spare* time".
Insulting the boss and getting away with it.
That *interesting* oder..
Deleting my home directory then blaming me for not backing it up!(ass munch)
Never explaining ANYTHING!
Getting paid more for doing less.
Knowing *everything* and never being wrong.
Your incredible lack of patience.
And all the other little things that make you soooo invaluable.
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
I think there should be system user hate day
Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.