The Grumpy Old Techie » asr http://www.grumpyoldtechie.com/wordpress2 Rants and Raves about Technology by the Grumpy Old Techie Sat, 19 Jun 2010 23:03:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 If you can read this, thank your sysadmin http://www.grumpyoldtechie.com/wordpress2/2008/07/25/if-you-can-read-this-thank-your-sysadmin/ http://www.grumpyoldtechie.com/wordpress2/2008/07/25/if-you-can-read-this-thank-your-sysadmin/#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:33:19 +0000 Grumpy Old Techie http://grumpyoldtechie.com/wordpress2/?p=882 Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day

You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”

The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”

Why does one stay a System Administrator then if the stress is so much. You will find the answer in the scary devil monastery FAQ

Sysadmins are driven by a desire to _make_it_work_. We loathe non-functioning
pieces of crap. Similarly, we hate seeing equipment working at substantially
below its potential due to moronic admin decisions.

Doesn’t this mean we should shun sysadminning, then? Well, as you will
see from discussion in ASR, we have this tendency to drift into the job.
It starts when you’re given a machine on your desk which crashes every
five minutes, and you know how to make it crash only once every five days.
You get given the root/administrator password. You end up fixing someone
else’s machine too. As word gets out, you have more and more people
calling on you for basic computer administration assistance every week.
Eventually you get told that your sysadmin work is more important than
what you were doing before. Since you seem to be the only person in your
company who is doing any work, you have to agree.

After a while, you quit and go to work for somewhere else, where you’re
promised you won’t have to be a sysadmin.
But the machine on your desk crashes every five minutes…

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