Slashdot Mirror
Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day
ArbiterOne writes "The 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is today. Celebrated worldwide on the last Friday of July, this day honors those who fight in the digital trenches to keep the Net alive. OpenDNS offers a way to remind your boss about the holiday, while another blogger shares war stories. The startup Ksplice has created an homage to these heroes in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure." Reader Netbuzz submits a sobering look at the profession from Network World, which notes, "In the past year, [sysadmins'] pay has dropped, and more of their positions are being farmed out to temporary workers."
I've been a sysadmin for a while time now, and I've never had one person wish me a happy admin day. It would seem the only people who know about this, happen to be sysadmins. No one has a clue when I mention it. We need more sysadmin day advertising. Someone want to fund a commercial? Lets add it to every calendar world wide. Who's with me?
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
When we leave the bag of dog poop in their cube, we don't light it?
I think I can handle that.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
...and you know it, clap your hands!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I opened a trouble ticket with the text "Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!"
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That's like having a day for sasquatch. A Happy System Administrator? Doesn't exist!
It's okay, you've got a couple of hundred years before you need to worry about computers. Watch out for the Jacquard loom, that will be showing up in only 94 years.
Clearly you don't work for a company with 500+ desktop users and countless outside users hitting various web servers every day where IT is at the core of the business (like say, a large e-commerce outfit or a telco). But even in those places IT is seen by many as nothing more than unimportant computer janitors, yet when for one reason or another no one in IT is around for a few days the entire operation comes to a screeching halt and some poor sysadmin with a high fever and a headache capable of killing large farm animals has to stumble to work to fix something that someone broke, the classic examples including someone deciding that it would be ok to cut power to the main on-site server room "for just a minute" (read: 30+ minutes so most servers shut down) so they can repair the elevator (because it's easier to just switch the power for the entire building off than taking 30 seconds to figure out which switch to turn off. And yes, this meant that everyone in our main building sat around doing nothing for the 30-60 minutes it took to repair the elevator and then another couple of hours while IT rushed to repair the damage), someone in senior management deciding to power-cycle the domain controller when they can't login at 8 AM (since they denied the required server upgrade so the domain controllers can't handle the load efter merging with another company which is now using the same domain controllers) and countless others...
And in case you're wondering how they managed to find the domain controller? Well, this senior manglement character actually called a person in IT (who was actually on vacation that week) saying he couldn't login, he was told this was most likely due to too many users trying to login at once, he then asked a few followup questions including the name of the domain controller. The person being asked these questions assumed this was just curiosity/research into the possibility of pushing for money for new domain controller machines, turns out this person had somehow figured out that if he power-cycled the primary DC he'd disconnect everyone who was logging in so he'd be able to login faster and since all our servers are labeled and senior manglement has access to every part of the building....)
My wife told me this holiday was a bunch of garabge. So I told her no more flowers on Administrative Professionals' Day. And then I DDoS'd her server. Haha!
Somebody must have been reading the intranet site at my company because this year people brought in food for the I.T. department. It's on the company event calendar. I'm stuffed. The food and appreciation makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
"...and some poor sysadmin with a high fever and a headache capable of killing large farm animals has to stumble to work to fix something that someone broke,..."
Amen to that - I fell seriously ill on the last day of a holiday about 2hr drive from home. I also have T2 diabetes, which just added to the fun. I emailed my boss in the afternoon of that last day to say I would be staying over until I was fit for travel. My boss responded the next morning to enquire whether I was coming in to work and I replied when I managed to wake up and crawl out of bed at around 11am that I was staying another day then someone was driving me home via my doctor (who subsequently signed me off work for 2 weeks with strong antibiotics for a serious chest infection).
Anyway, when I got home there was a hand delivered letter from work inviting me to a disciplinary hearing upon my return for failing to notify my boss of my absence from work prior to the start of the working day (for the day I replied to his email at about 11).
Well, they went ahead with a formal disciplinary and put a first written warning on file, although that was only after I appealed against their initial decision to jump straight to a final written warning.
Fortunately that boss has gone now.
AT&ROFLMAO
Most IT support roles could be eliminated if the end users weren't either blithering idiots or pathologically scared of computer
No! No! Please continue in your ignorance!
Dear Anonymous Coward
You are about to be subjected to a rant.
System Administrators generally don't work for the IT department, at least not in the way you seem to think. The IT department is where you find the Windows support people, while the System Administrator is the one who fixes things when the IT department has messed up, and implements safeguards to make it harder for IT to mess up, and easier to clean up when they succeed in doing it anyhow.
To use a language you might understand, a System Administrator is to IT PC support like an accountant is to a payroll clerk.
And yes, it's very conceivable that a small company can do without a sysadmin on the payroll. Just like they can do without an accountant on the payroll. The services can be purchased outside the company when needed.
But when the brown stuff hits the revolving blades, you may be glad you have them.
System Administrator Appreciation Day is about letting them know you appreciate all the times they have kept the faeces away from the chopping action, without you even noticing.
The better the sysadmin is, the lazier and more overpaid you think he is, because his success can be measured in all the bad things that doesn't happen. When your network didn't go down while your suit buddy's network did, you get upset with the sysadmin because e-mails to your buddy bounce while your buddy's network is down. You don't appreciate him for your network being up, despite all the things you and your suit friends have done to bring it down, including (but not limited to) surfing teen pr0n from your overpriced notebook while at a hotel room, bringing infected USB keys from home, "bringing" a printer home because you thought nobody used it (in reality, it would print out ALERTS, which thankfully weren't that often), or buying inadequate and overpriced hardware to scratch the back of your suit buddies at the nineteenth hole, blatantly ignorant of the problems interfacing yellow crap to brown crap. No, you leave that problem to the IT department, who can't tell crap from their own shoes (with good reason). So when the sysadmin fixes things to at least working conditions, you get upset because he isn't productive, and doesn't give you a big smile.
Dear Anonymous Coward, if you took the time to look things over, you might be astonished to find that the company does better when you are on vacation than it does when the sysadmin is. Perhaps you aren't as indispensable as you think?
BTW whats the cake for today.
Who are we kidding? The cake is a lie.
"Before criticizing someone, first walk a mile in his shoes. Then, you'll be a mile away... and you'll have his shoes."