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Sysadmin Day. Yay.
Izeickl writes "The BBC is running an article about sysadmin day. One admin is quoted saying, 'We are unappreciated and no-one knows what we do for 364 days of the year.' Apparently even the online greeting cards are getting in on the action check out 123Greetings.com and put a smile on that cranky admins face! The starter of this day also has a page here." Well, most competent sysadmins probably have electronic greeting cards blocked at the router, but I suppose it's the thought that counts... Jeremy Sieminski submits a Mouse Pad Couch as the appropriate place for a sysadmin to rest his weary, uh, wrists. And of course if you've never read the BOFH stories, you're missing out.
Something makes me think having a sysadmin's day isn't going to help fix that. :)
sig.
You'll get a card when you unlock my account!
You bastard!
a bad one, like the one i have to deal with, just makes life really difficult and frustrating.
"I send you this electronic greeting card in order to have your advice."
Programmer: "Server's down!"
Sysadmin: "Thanks, server's down to you too!"
=== "Some people see the glass as half-empty. Others see it as half-full. I see the glass as too big." -G. Carlin.
The only true way to appreciate a good sysadmin is to leave them alone for one day. Don't talk to them, don't flood his mailbox with some stupid ass HTML email, don't try to hug them, don't ask them a stupid question, don't blame the network for your incompetence at clicking on links, stop opening spam, stop forwarding around 3meg powerpoint attachments comprised of dilbert comics, stop trying to pretend you get it (when it is anything computer or tech related), and for god's sake don't pretend you understand what it is like to be on call 24x7... in short:
GO AWAY
Now that is some serious appreciation.
--- I do not moderate.
Maybe you should find an admin that will do his job?
What?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/24/14272
Makes point D of this comment that I posted earlier all the more relevant.
Also, I recommend this link for the BOFH stories. This has more than the "official" site. The BOFH stories are hilarious. Will take you a couple of days to read it all, but it is SO worth it!
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Hmm.. *clickity click* You've got plenty of disk space, now... Happy BOFH day!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Puts on asbestos undies.. damn these things itch
What's the point? The story earlier this week suggested that the "holiday" was created by a SysAdmin. If that's the case, I should just create "Quality Analyst Day."
I guess I can at least be thankful that SysAdmin Day isn't Hallmark-ized yet. Christmas in July sales are on right now, and I fear the day that they merge with an extended shopping season.
If you're noticed, it means the network is falling apart. Unfortunately, most sysadmins do indeed get noticed. You do the math.
<grub> Reading
So unappreciated...
Admiration? Adoration? Acknowledgement? A sysadmin craves not these things.
If those are the things you want, J Crew Boy, you are in the *wrong* line of work.
The tradeoff of getting to do your thing with others that are like minded (or solo) in an enviornment that is very much your own and on one bothers you is that no one knows what you do (or cares..let's face it) until it's broken and they run at you like they are on fire in trade for a job where you get to do something you are good at, get paid for, and get to play with new toys all the time.
Appreciate me by not sending 100M email attachments to distribution lists. That'll do.
Only has to work 1 day a year to make sure everything is still working from the year before. =] Of course, if they do their job too well, they'll be considered as not needed, since nobody will notice it.
The 1 day out of the year they are noticed is the day something beyond their control breaks (hardware failure, etc).
What?
Whenever I felt unappreciated as a sysadmin, I would set up my old rocking chair in the server room. After a peaceful afternoon spent in the gentle breeze of server fans, and with a few critical cables running underneath my chair as I eased back and forth, everyone in the building knew what I did...
Now if you're a bad sysadmin, you're always fixing things up and braking other things at the same time so you're always doing overtime so eventually your boss hire people to help you, you become those people manager's so you let them fix all the stuff you broke and read slashdot all day in the mean time, but with a hiher pay and job security.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
hall-eh-freakin'-lou-yuh!
Aside from my home system and a friend's system, I'm no longer one for a whole network of ungrateful users. Or bosses. Hooray for that alone! And the friend is getting smart about running his own system. So yay again.
-- haaz, who doesn't miss being a sysadmin one bit.
-- haaz.
Let's see a sysadmin do the work of a construction worker at the construction worker's wage and see just how appreciated the sysadmin feels when he returns to his air conditioned cave with net access and computer toys and a paycheck three to four times as large as the manual laborer.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
Do yr SYS ADMIN a good turn, delete all of your old junk files (or at least compress them!) in your home dir and in any public dirs you use.
/home is 98% full.
especially if
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Great idea, but their animated gifs don't seem to work in Mozilla and since all the sysadmins I know are smart guys, so they use Mozilla and will probably just find this annoying.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Geekculture has a tribute to the hot but evil 'Sissy' the Sysadmin from after Y2K (AY2K) at:y 2k/af tery2kmain.html
http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/After
My boss posted the sys-admin day website (printed out) on the wall of our break room. At first no one noticed, but yesterday a few people did. We didn't realize that anyone would take it seriously but now today we got here and someone made us a cake and we got some nerf toys. Maybe where I work is the only place anyone took this seriously, but I know I feel loved (thanks to sys-admin day :-)
We tell users to read BOFH so they appreciate how helpful their current sysadmin is! Great idea...
[o]_O
Or when other people saw the office with the mouse pad couch did they think it looked like a 3rd-world prison cell as well?
I stole this Sig
And keep up the good work. And I appreciate the fact that you read slashdot and still works with lawyers :)
Rapid Nirvana
Underappreciated? WE ALL (meaning other occupations) ARE (or at least have people whining about it).
Do you get a paycheck? That's why you get one.
Don't like your job? FIND ANOTHER ONE THAT YOU DO LIKE.
Honestly, very few people deserve their own "day" (like veterans that lost their lives at war, etc...), but sysadmins don't fall into this category.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I would send our sysadmin a card but we're having network problems *yet again*. Which idiot is responsible for that stuff anyway?
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
Th
- Been the emotional punching bag for angry corporate users calling the technical support center here when they screwed up the MS Exchange server because their MCSE courses apparently didn't cover making it able to go a month without corrupting it's database.
- Been the person people complain about the MS Proxy server setup which routinely times out when going to any site outside the company thanks to the fact that the server admins keep fighting over who knows how to set it up properly.
- Been the person who gets all the fallout telephone calls from angry remote Citrix dial-up users, all because the network admin decided one night to change everything over to DHCP, versus the old static IPs, along with moving to a different IP class, causing every remote user to need their network settings changed.
- Been the person who has all the system administrator's personal telephones forwarded to him when they feel "overburdoned" because I'm just lowly tech support, and can therefore answer all their calls for them.
NoI run to the flames when others flee.
I slay Cisco, RAID and PowerPoint enemies.
I retreat in darkness until called again.
You need not know my name, for I am legion...
Yes, you have chosen a career that carries less esteem than the guy who holds up the "SLOW" sign in construction zones. What you will be doing is less understood than if you became a Tarot Card reader, and less appreciated than a digital rectal examination. You will be expected to be everywhere at once, but when you arrive your presence will be unwelcome. Things you will never see again: knowledgeable assistants, clueful cow-orkers, pay raises, vacations, your wife, and your kids. Well actually, they're not really your kids... remember that overseas Peoplesoft rollout three summers ago and how you were wondering why your boss didn't go with you?
Look, it's not too late to change majors and embark on the path to a respectful profession like being a corporate attorney for the MPAA or RIAA.
Here. Here's a song for you. Now quit whining!
1 .h tml
http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/2625/262591
wes
"Immature artists borrow. Mature artists steal."
Wes Borg
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie have recorded The System Administrator Song as a tribute for SysAdmin day. If you haven't heard of Three Dead Trolls yet, check out the rest of their music when you're done with this one for Every OS Sucks, The Internet Helpdesk Song and others.
and that's good enough for this sysadmin. Skip the cards, and buy me a pint instead ;)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
From the .plan of a great sysadmin I once knew ...
"Being a System Administrator is like being the phone company. Nobody ever calls up to say 'you know, this thing works great. Thanks!'"
Thanks, Gabe.
Thanks, Vadim.
Thanks, csoft.net guys.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Thanks, root.
by slashdotting www.sysadminday.com
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
or does that mouse pad couch seem to be in a room that looks just like a jail cell? I wonder how much money we could save if we strung a DSL connection to the state prison...hmmmm....Our expensive sysadmins days are numbered.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Yep, just like we got a day two days ago!
Perhaps we should make this a weekly thing, including getting a raise and a hardware upgrade.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Just imagine: you go to 123greetings.com, send a card to your sysadmin, and he starts getting even *more* spam!
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
... and this one time, at band camp ...
vodka, straight up, thank you!
wow! you are the luckiest stiff alive!
they got you cake AND nerf?? i just got laffed at.
True appreciation would be all users bringing you some overpriced coffee drink coated with sugar and dairy products, setting them on your desk, not say a word, not expecting you to smile or even look up, and then every one of them would turn off their computers and leave for the day. Truly bliss. :)
And of course if you've never read the BOFH stories, you're missing out.
You're welcome.
Preen, preen...
I want to hear if someone fowarded a Sysadmin day story to his boss to bring some awareness and got a positive or negative reply/feedback in return or no answers at all? :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Yeah, make LOTS of friends in the sysadmin community - post their email address to a spam address harvester like 123Greeting, and make sure they get as much spam as possible! After all, what better way to show you admin you care than by causing his mail queue to fill up with crap so he cannot see the important stuff.
/dev/null, his chair wired to the 440V plant feed, his car's gas tank full of polystyrene, and graffitti with his home phone number scrawled on the bathrooms of the local bars.
Any lusr on one of my systems that did this would find his entire account sent to
Then I would get mean....
www.eFax.com are spammers
------
Subject: System Admin appreciation day
Just a quick note to say how much I appreciate all the great
things you all do!!!
You make it a pleasure to work here and are extremely talented at what
you do!
My hats off to you!!! THANK YOU!!!!!
In fact, why don't you take tomorrow off!!
------
Remind me to shoot the guy who scheduled SysAdmin day on a Friday.
Yep. I don't understand this "X day" thing anyways. Boss' day, secretary's day.. It's all bullshit. You already get appreciation for your hard work. It's called a PAY CHEQUE.
Most of you are overpaid anyways, it's not like you need some fabricated day for people to show false appreciation to you.
To the tune of "Don't Fear the Reaper" by the Blue Oyster Cult
All backups are done
Here but now they're gone
Servers don't fear the admin
Nor do the disks, CAT-5 or LAN... we can be like they are
Come on baby... don't fear the admin
Baby take my resume... don't fear the admin
We'll be able to work... don't fear the admin
Baby I'm your geek...
Linux is gone
Windows is on the run
Network geeks and sysadmins
Are so underappreciated... network geeks and sysadmins
40,000 men and women everyday... like network geeks and sysadmins
40,000 men and women everyday... recompiling kernels
Another 40,000 coming everyday, we can be like they are
Come on baby... don't fear the admin
Baby take my resume... don't fear the admin
We'll be able to work... don't fear the admin
Baby I'm your geek...
Love the Net as one
Sendmail is so fun [NOT!]
Came the last night of budget
And it was clear we couldn't work on
Then the door was open and the jobs appeared
The UPS blinked then disappeared
The GUI flickered and then appeared... saying don't be afraid
Come on geekoid... and she had no fear
And she ran to it... then they started to code
They looked backward and in passive mode... she had become like they are
She sent her resume... she had become like they are
Come on baby... don't fear the admin!
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
A job offer. It arrived via Fed-Ex this morning after 4 months of unemployment.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Don't have a sense of humor do ya?
Ah such a wonderful day when a 'prank' is twisted to mean sabotage.
...and while we have your ear, you should probably know that your job/profession is very likely going to be replaced with self-aware, self-monitoring, self-repairing computer systems/networks within the next five years. The good news is that the job market shows great growth for lawn care technicians and entry level meat packing plant chicken corpse scrubbers.
"Sorry kiddo, I hate giving good people bad news." the oracle, from The Matrix
Note to the humor impaired: This is not a joke.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
re: subject
'nuff said.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
"So, to prove your "importance" to the company, you pulled a childish prank?"
That's not what I said.
Great, so they can go home after struggling with microsoft products all day to struggling with microsoft products all evening
How does it stay together? Why does it not succumb to entropy?
[o]_O
The parent post has some good points but its tone reminds me of some unfortunate tendancy in the IT world: the beliefs that technical prowess does exempts you from offering good customer service, and that anyone who doesn't understand computers must be stupid. While I'd like to indulge the day and let venting occur - I have to deal with self righteous IT folks every day.
Regarding "Stupid questions": A huge ammount of time is wasted at my company because not enough people are asking stupid questions. They just keep doing stupid things. If you don't like to answer stupid questions, make sure that your company has a help desk (or person, depending on the scale) who's job it is answer stupid questions. Stupid questions are the oil in the corporate machine. I consider it my job to turn stupid questions into smart ones.
Arrogance: - keywords incompetence, etc: yes, a lot of people with valuable skills grew up without computers. I know a lot of IT people who think that because they understand discreet mathematics, they understand business rules better than the managers who work with them. We've lost a lot of money that way. More frequently than a lay person not understanding the network, is the problem that the guy coding business logic into the mainframes, didn't understand the point made by the non-technical manager.
If you have problems with misuse of resources on your network - you have to deal with the human element and work with trainers / managers. Where training fails, quotas. It's a simple management issue. Every job has them. Don't whine, solve it.
Sorry, geeks. You can't isolate yourself from the humans you work with. I actually consider it one of the pleasures of the job to work both with humans and their problems, and machines and theirs.
Note: I've worked on various sides of the system administration fence. I've been soley responsible for a small (50 device) network, and user in a large one. Currently an informal part of my job is to act as buffer/liason/interpreter between IT and business process. I appreciate my current sys-admin specifically because he makes his knowledge available, has a system to handle stupid questions, and recognizes that there are skills of value not learnt in the CS department. I think I'll give a basket of fresh fruit and a hug.
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
OK, I will.
One simple rule that would make EVERYBODY happy:
Don't give out somebody's (email|phone/pager number|address) without their EXPRESS permission.
If you think George needs my email address, then YOU ask GEORGE for his address and (with George's permission) mail me, asking me to please send George my address. Same thing with phone numbers - get George's number & permission, then phone me!
Just think what would happen if people followed this simple rule:
1) Companies would no longer sell your email to spammers - instead, if Company A thought you might want to hear from Company B, they would send you a mail asking you to contact B if you wanted to.
2) No junk like 123Greetings.
3) No telemarketers.
Of course, this is little more than a specialization of the Golden Rule, and look how many people follow that....
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'd love to send an E-Card, but the site's been blocked by the firewall.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy (SNL) "He'll fix your computer, then he's gonna make fun of you..."
s/364/365/
today has been no different for me.
-f
www.blackant.net
I asked my boss why there wasn't a Sysadmin's Day, and he said, "every day is Sysadmin's Day."
Shouldn't the day be Feb 25th?
Travis
I am a Chief Engineer of a major market radio station. This job used to be fun, but now it's a drag...and I work for one of the better stations! I'm responsible for IT, Audio, RF and even janitorial stuff. The Production Director comes to me to have me buy HIM CD-R's! Salespeople have to be the most computer illerate people going. I'm constantly being berated because obsolete equipment is being used in ways it was never designed for..and when it (frequently) doesn't work, guess whose fault it is? I mean, 166 MMX computers with 32 megs of RAM just don't open 25 page color Powerpoint presentations well. My requests for newer, better, more reliable equipment fall on deaf ears. As CE, I'm responsible for a transmitter plant that's 30 years old and 20 miles away from the studio. I swear that when I say: "I'm going to the transmitter", management hears: "I'm screwing off for the rest of the day". Last week, I got a really bitchy phone call because the 'net was down (for 10 minutes by the way). I was 25 miles away running a remote broadcast. Next day I got a nasty email from the General Manager insisting that I be in the building during normal business hours. I replied "Okay...but don't expect any remote broadcasts to get on the air then". He called me up and asked why. "Because I set them up, run them and break them down" was my reply. Two days ago I was scouting a remote location. I got called that the 'net was down again. When I came back two hours later I got bitched out by a salesperson that he couldn't email presentations, and it was MY fault! Turns out that HE was screwing around with the FAX machine (god knows why) and somehow managed to unplug the DSL modem from the wall jack! It felt good.. REAL good...for a few minutes at least.... Thanks for putting up with my rant...it feels good to get it out.. PS: mIssed the meet last night...Guess why? A remote broadcast that lasted until 9 PM!
Nothing like saying thanks to a sysadmin, by sending him a 123 card :-)
- that is not visible in his browser
- and subscribing his email address to spam houses (how do you think the greetings site make money? they sell emails to their 'partners')
yep. letting you look at pr0n all day would certainly increase productivity i'm sure.
but i imagine you deserve it because you _are_ special.
Gee, you KNOW when you've been doing your job, because they LAY YOU OFF! I love it, I'm looking forward to trying to find and fit in to another job. All the potential of a dead end job, whoopee!
I love working for Verio, they make my life complete.
S c
r sm
a
a
This sysadmin is getting the boot and it's not because we are losing money...it's THEM!
People are laughing at you not with you?
God sysadmins are so pitiful. Yay for you, you have the root passwords. You can 0wn my workstation. You can play Quake at work. How nice. Luckily those of us who actually do the work contribute to the profitability of the company, rather than the overhead.
Oh, and take that sign on your door saying I can't talk to you directly and shove it up your ass. Call the help desk? Yeah, nothing I like better than explaining to those monkeys how to do their job.
Now admittedly, there are some very professional sysadmins out there who can save your ass. But most of the ones I work with are self-important jag-offs of dubious usefulness.
God that felt good, burning karma is almost as stress relieving as drinking.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
*clickety-click* :-)
Will work for bandwidth
-JDF