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Time to Say Thanks For the Uptime
DepecheModem writes: "MSNBC is running an article about System Administrator Appreciation Day. Ted Kekatos created this holiday three years after seeing a poster of a system administrator being bombarded with presents. Feeling somewhat underappreciated, he declared his "day" as the last Friday in July. I think we should all remind our employers that administrators are people too and proudly wear our buttons bearing "Have you hugged your geek lately?"."
Another stupid Soandso Day.
Blah.
I get paid, that's thanks enough.
World would be better with no appreciation days.
Why is it that any person who can be remotely considered a member of a group has a day for them. I consider myself appreciated every day that the servers don't go down. Just 'cuz it's not said every day doesn't mean I don't "hear" it. Plus, I am shown appreciation every other Friday when money magically appears in my checking account.
But system administrators aren't all geeks. They're often Microsoft Certified professionals, which is an entirely different animal!
Sysadmin day? Fine. I think that's great. But how about a day for all us helpdesk monkeys? We're the grunts on the front line, dealing with all the crap from the users.
Sysadmins are all safe in their bunkers, protected from the raw savagery that is support.
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Couldn't they have placed that day sometime else? Right now, 90% of the people working here are on vacation. Just the sysadmin is at work, as usual. (Actually, I went on vacation before everybody else, so now when I'm back, it's more or less a couple of weeks of vacation-at-work.)
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
SysAdmin's aren't born being Nick Burns, they're slowly transformed.
Usually they start out being the plucky, helpful guy who works his ass off to solve your problems. Slowly, the years of fixing the same problems for the same users takes it's toll. The plucky fellow tried his damnedest to teach the Luser how to use their computer more efficiently, but they just don't want to learn. "I'll just keep doing it the way I've always done it and bitch when things (predictably) fuck up", says the Luser.
You see, it *is* the Admin's job to fix computers, but babysitting arses who don't give a rat's ass about their job or anyone else's, isn't.
The SysAdmin may be the mechanic of the 21st century, but just like his "olden days" counterpart, he's stuck trying to make the shoddy technology those "I have a four year degree, I don't need to debug, I'm invincable" pricks have unleashed upon us.
For every A+ toting, MCSE waving wannabe, there's an army of competent individuals working in the background to keep those NT boxes, Unix machines, Netware servers, bizarre networks, crappy windows workstations full of dancing baby screen savers, phone systems and hoards of damned legacy software you were too cheap to upgrade working as YOU SPECIFIED so you can bitch when the *SHITTY CODE* you inserted into the production server without permission kills the database for a day.
That's why Admins guard root like it's the Arch of the Covenant; if they don't, some consultant twit or cocky developer will invariably fuck something up 4 o'clock on a Friday evening and leave without telling anyone.
It's one thing to do one's job, but an entirely different ball of wax to constantly clean up everyone else's messes and get no credit for it.
How about next time you infect your PC by installing some retarded waving flag applet, your admin just says, "I told you so" and instructs you to fuck off when you call him over and over again?
Cheers
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
...that with the exception of the Janator, system administrators are the only people who get no appreciation for a job well done.
Keep the network running flawlessly for a year. Deal with all the stupid questions (bet your CEO doesn't have to do that,) and generally do your job perfectly...
Then the first day that the PDC goes down, everyones bitching at you.
CEOs and dentists get the occational pat on the back... Administrators are generally critical to a company but still get walked over.
I think we could use a little appreciation. : )
...why not get another job.
When you're twenty years into sysadminning and finally start to realize that the sysadmin is not the 'God of Computers' that you figured him to be, when it dawns on you Finance has stronger claims on the E10K Sun machine than IT, when you spend half your day complaining about how 'politics' is preventing you from doing your job, maybe that's the wrong time to discover you would have rather been doing management.
Choose wisely grasshoppers.