Now, this isn’t just because I’m a Sysadmin myself and have gotten showered with a few random gifts already, oh no. But today, for those of you who don’t remember, is SysAdmin Day.
What’s SysAdmin Day? Heck, what’s a SysAdmin? Aside from “that weenie who is antisocial and who is repsonsible for email”, they are the first and last line of defense when it comes to your services you just love to take for granted. XBox Live statistics? Website providers? Pornography downloaders? They’re all at some point run by some overworked, underpaid SysAdmin. If it weren’t for the fact that we were all slightly crazy and the fact that we prioritize our coffee over our productivity, we’d have taken over the world already.
SysAdmins are the ones who are probably paged when you whine on a forum about a server being down at 3am in the morning. They’re the ones who have to deal with the fact that someone thought it would be funny to forward the “Who’s on First” joke to everyone in the company 50 times. They’re also the people who clean up after the mess you made when you decided to webhost a 2 GB image. They’re like the plumbers and mechanics of the technology world, except without the necessity of seeing their buttcrack (mostly) when they are bent over in front of you fixing something.
SysAdmins should take heart, because if someone wasn’t as masochistic and as insane as them to do their jobs, then you’d have ordinary people responsible for creating passwords and accounts, putting in quotas for shared spaces, and deciding how much network traffic they’re allowed to have. It would be a very liberating hour, right before mass chaos ensued and people devoured each other like wild animals. Armed with their pagers on 24/7 call, a perpetual sleepy-eyed look that may or may not be the result of drugs, and a sense of humor that is a blend of George Carlin and Gallagher, you SysAdmins are the only thing standing in the way of people and total technological anarchy.
And they said you wouldn’t amount to anything in high school.
So remember to think of your SysAdmins, folks, and thank them for a job well done, or at least a job you don’t have to do. Why, even I got a gift today. They really shouldn’t have gotten me that 15-server downtime and that network connection fubar. They were also so thoughtful to bring down email, too.
I feel so loved.