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System Administrator Appreciation Day
jcookeman writes "Today is System Administrator 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.' Congratulations to all who keep the electrons of our global networks flowing properly!"
Now, get back to work, Michael! Yes, YOU!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Developers and SysAdmins are mortal enemies! What's with this "Appreciation" stuff?
(I kid, I kid!)
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No, really,internet goes down today if there's not something on my desk by noon.
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Our sysadmin(s) blocked the site! They must not want to be appriciated.
We will keep re-defining success until we are sucessful.
next Friday is Hawaiian shirt day, so if you want, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.
I usually take the network administrators for granted and I think that's a testament to the great work that they do. Like the best technology, the best system administrators run so smoothly that you don't even think about them.
I've been lucky in that every company that I've worked at has had very professional and very knowledgeable system administrators. I know there are a lot of system administrators on this site. I'd like to take this opportunity to say Thank you.
I'll be sure to kick the ethernet cable out of the wall and "forget" my password just for them.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Now where are the hookers and beer? Bring me your finest meats and cheeses or I shall be forced to pipe all email through a jive translator.
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Why are Sys Admins (and secretaries, I suppose) singled out for their own special day?
Because they are traditionally the touchiest and thinnest-skinned groups within any corporation?
I swear, every year at the end of July we get the same "Sysadmin Appreciation Day" story. Can't the editors search the archives!!?!?
... for the poor saps in businesses too small to have their own IT department, but who nevertheless get the honour of running round like a tit every time a company director claims the Interweb is broken... IN ADDITION to doing their regular job.
Me, jealous? Hell yeah. Last week I had to try to recover some data from a dead machine by taking the hard drive out and sticking it in the fridge. Without having the correct size screwdriver, so I had to fudge around with my Swiss army knife and a pair of mini-pliers. (They're a bit bitey.)
I wouldn't have minded too much but when I sent an email round asking staff not to disturb the extra-large ice-pop in the freezer, I made a reference to MacGyver and got two dozen emails back in the space of five minutes asking what the f*ck I was talking about or claiming to be too young to know what the f*ck i was talking about.
Come on. I deserve cake too, don't I?
-Michael
Ok...that's as much appreciation as I gonna get. Now I have to get back to randomly switching the routers on and off.
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Funny... Hallmark doesn't seem to have a card for this.
Perhaps you are correct, but I would suggest that you consider one other possibility:
Sysadmins have one of the most thankless jobs in the world.
I only administrate my own home network. If I am at home, I am ON the network. if there are network problems, I am always the first to know.
Yet, I have my own phone line, and as soon as there is any hint of trouble with the network, my phone starts ringing. Maybe sysadmins are a touchy bunch, but you know what? 100% uptime is impossible. And anything less than that makes you the complaint department. It is nice to know that at least one day out of the year, there will be some people who think "ya know, he couldn't have prevented that DDoS attack, but hey, he did what he could to defend against it."
My whole point is that the sysadmin often looks like the bad guy, simply for delivering the messages, and in spite of all his hard work... well, let me put it this way. My ISP (Comcast) works well *most* of the time. Quite coincidentally, I had connectivity problems for ~20 minutes this morning. Did i think "Goddamn those motherfuckers?" You bet your bippies I did. Because I, like anybody else, do not appreciate it when things stop working. On the shoulders of a good administrator lies the weight of the world. He's not perfect. And nobody likes when stuff breaks. And when he fixes it, nobody cares. They're still pissed off that it was broken at all.
So... are we really touchy? maybe. Maybe we just hate it when people click "OK" on every goddamned popup window, javascript dialog window, or banner ad that happens to resemble a windows dialog window (just like my dad), and then act like it is *my* fault for fucking up his machine.
Ok, I'm over-egging it slightly, but offhand I can't think of many other occupations where every essential system the company uses is under your purview and where one mistake can hose whole sections of the company and lose man-weeks of working time.
Sysadmins probably have the least-recognised job in the company - when they're doing their jobs well you never even notice they're there, and the only time you notice their existence is when something goes wrong. And when it does all the blame generally falls on the sysadmin for not preventing it (no matter how stupid, unlikely or unforeseeable "it" is).
I should probably point out I haven't done a lot of sysadminning for several years, but I remember vividly the irritation caused by idiot managers and clueless users ("Yeah. Uh, I deleted my Program Files directory, and when I ran Excel it had an error, and it mentioned Windows, so I deleted my Windows folder, and now it keeps on giving errors... Oh, and I have a presentation to finish for 16:00").
I also remember the incredibly frustrating attitude many users seemed to have - that you were there solely for their convenience, rather than to maintain the system that keeps the entire company running.
Sysadmins, I salute you.
Footnotes:
[1] Obviously this depends on the size and complexity of the network (and how well you've got it set up), but in general I think "sysadminning" is harder than (say) "accounts", in terms of diversity of skills required and sheer amount of time you have to spend teaching yourself new things every week.
[2] Although everyone who's ever worked in an office appreciates it, there's a reason Dilbert works in IT. Whether it's because the underlings' jobs are so obscurely technical, or because IT just attracts managers who are fuckwits, the PHB-quotient in IT is easily ten times any other discipline in the company.
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They are one of the groups that if they do their jobs really well, you don't tend to notice, you only notice when they screw up, or when they are gone (janitors are the same way). I mean if the developers do a great job and create a great product, it gets noticed, if the marketing guys come up with a way to market things that increases sales, it gets noticed. However if the network and servers are running perfectly smoothly for a year, peopel just get accustomed to everything working properly and don't notice. They don't notice until something goes wrong, then they are angry.
So it's just a nice way to remember the people that make it easy and efficient to do your job. Now maybe yours don't, but if you work in an environment where the servers are reliable, systems work smoothly, etc, then you have sysadmins who are doing their job well.
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~moose/sysadmin/ pricelist.html
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