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!"

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie

[Beolach]

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie made The System Admin Song. You can get it (and many other funny songs & skits) from their artist page [ampcast.com] on ampcast.com.

Re:We need a service...

[lucabrasi999]

We need a service to remind us of all these odd-ball "holidays".....Maybe all these "days" could be posted in advance or turned into a Hallmark card or something. I can't remember them all!

Shockingly enough, Hallmark [hallmark.com] provides a "reminder" service. As Homer would say "Mmmm....capitalism". Of course, you have to give them your e-mail address, but hey, that's the price you pay.

Re:Thanks, administrators!

[Maestro4k]

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.

Speaking from personal experience, we don't get noticed unless there's something wrong, and when that happens it's _always_ our fault. Even if it's not our fault (someone cut some cables and we can't reach the Internet thanks to that) it's still our fault. You ran that attachment in that E-mail you got from someone you didn't know and now your system's slower than a 286? Our fault of course. :P

It may vary from place to place but so far everywhere I've worked the IT department as a whole is one very thankless job. Where I'm at now it's really bad, if it takes us more than 5 minutes to troubleshoot and fix a computer problem the users will complain to our boss saying we're just sitting there doing nothing! (No shit, this happens daily, the boss just ignores them.) I do systems & network administration so I don't get quite as much crap, but all the techs don't seem to understand what I do so they complain that I'm not doing anything. That's starting to get a bit better now that the infrastructure's getting built up and they've started to realize who built it, but it's still a pain.

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 know all of us appreciate the thanks, but you might want to do it more than one day a year. Remember who has the root passwords. ;)

I'll be sure to kick the ethernet cable out of the wall and "forget" my password just for them.

Bad day for that, they're likely to show up with a very large LART to solve the problem once and for all. ;)

Re:DUPE!

[Uruk]

wget -O - http://slashdot.org/rss/index.rss [slashdot.org] | grep \/title | perl -e '%h=(); while() { chomp; $h{$_}++; } print join("\n", keys(%h));'

Duplicates? No problem for a system administrator...

an admin I use to know...

[slashdotnickname]

True story...

Our small company had to restructure it's in-house networks to accomodate a whole bunch of new equipment. It was a mess for a while (unreachable mail servers, backup systems not functioning, etc) but our tireless admin worked 10+ hours a day and weekends for 2 weeks straight. After everything was settled, some of us guys decided to take him out for lunch in appreciation of all his hard work... but not just any restaurant, this was a sort of strip club (albeit tame compared to others) that served lunch during the work week. Anyways, the lunch went well but apperantly one of the secretaries told his wife. Their marriage had been shaky for a while and in 3 months time he was deep into divorce proceedings. From what I hear, it was a pretty messy one, including losing out custody of their kid. Shortly afterwards he had to move because of financial problems. He had also been accused, at one point, of stealing some equipment so he didn't leave on very good terms.

So Tom, whereever you are now, in whatever river-side van, happy System Administrators Day!

Re:Are you kidding me?

[sanosuke76]

Personally, I find that the suits LOVE it if you adopt a policy whereby "reason-for-outage" (RFO) essays are expected when things like that happen.

Anything YOU do, can generally avoid notice and you won't have to write many RFOs yourself.

However, the joy of pulling a developer into a life-sucking RFO witch-hunt meeting for a few hours can only be compared with the joy of seeing him required to sign what amounts to a writeup for his incompetence.

Best of all, it's suit-friendly and can improve your political future at the developer's expense. What's not to love?