Slashdot Mirror
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.
You'll get a card when you unlock my account!
You bastard!
"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.
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!
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
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.
------
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.
Great, so they can go home after struggling with microsoft products all day to struggling with microsoft products all evening
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."
So you're saying your job has paged you on a December 24th at 23:40 to work on a QoS report through the night, staying twice as long as you needed to cause none of your support services were available? *grin* Being On-Call means someone owns your body, and you dont get anything extra for it. But you do it anyways cause someone's gotta do it, and it doesnt look like anyone else is gotta, so it's all you, man... ..Yeah OK I dont know if I would want anyone at my company hugging me, but if someone said "hey thanks for you know, always being within 40 minutes of our data center no matter what" then I would go "hey, you know, you're welcome."
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue