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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.
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
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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.
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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.