Sysadmin Day 2014: Quick, there's still time to get the beers in
It is 25 July, and that means it's Systems Administrators Appreciation Day once more. Sysadmin Day is that one special day a year where syadmins the world over say to each other "Wow, I can't believe we all made it another year", and everyone else forgets that this has been a thing for 14 years. Despite the inevitable apathy …
-
Friday 25th July 2014 11:18 GMT IglooDude
Marketing, contests and prizes are all well and good, and I'm certainly fond of the free beers that this day typically produces, but can we start a movement whereby on this day ritual sacrifice of "most user-ish user in the office" becomes traditional? I mean, we don't have to *actually* remove their beating heart or chuck them into a volcano, I'd settle for a simple ceremonial gesture such as a good flogging in the server room where no one can hear them scream...
(Beer, because I can't bring myself to apply the Joke Alert icon here.)
-
Friday 25th July 2014 11:49 GMT Joe 48
Some jokes... Well... Almost jokes
So one day the sysadmin drove to lunch with a few Users that hadn't broken anything lately, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a chemical engineer. On their way back to the office, the car stalled and wouldn't start. The mechanical engineer suggests an engine problem and that he might be able to fix it. The electrical engineer says its probably a wiring problem he can fix. The petroleum engineer thinks there might be water in the fuel, and that he should check the filter. The sysadmin speaks up authoritatively, sure of the solution, and says "everyone get out of the car and get back in".
Q: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. It's a hardware problem
Q. Where does a sysadmin go after work?
A. 127.0.0.1
#thesejokesmayhavebeenstolenfromgoogle
-
-
Friday 25th July 2014 12:20 GMT Joe Drunk
Re: I can't believe this started before the War on Terror
I wholeheartedly agree. I raise my glass today not only in honor of those who didn't make it but to those of us who worked even longer hours than our normal 80+ hour week on the grueling process of restoring the infrastructure in the aftermath.
-
-
-
Friday 25th July 2014 15:11 GMT LucreLout
Kick in the nuts
All my admins will be getting from me is a well deserved kick in the nuts.
Another year of hiding behind paperwork rather than delivering productivity. Another year dealing with "Dr No". Another year of random outages. Another year of stealth changes that knock out whole chains of systems. It just goes on and on.
-
-
Friday 25th July 2014 18:34 GMT Tom Maddox
Re: Kick in the nuts
Try supporting the environment yourself and see how well you do. (I say this as someone who was awoken before 6:00 AM today to resolve a problem with house-of-cards code written by an ex-contractor, for which the apparent key dependency is a human constantly monitoring execution and providing workarounds as needed when it fails.)
-
Saturday 26th July 2014 21:32 GMT Peter2
Re: Kick in the nuts
> Another year of hiding behind paperwork rather than delivering productivity. Another year dealing with "Dr No".
Yes. Because if your being told "no" frequently then you have clearly done all of the compliance work required for your industry instead of leaving it to IT to do your compliance management, discover it's non compliant and then come back and say "sorry, but no".
> Another year of random outages.
Personally, my core infrastructure dates back to the pre recession days and it does have random outages, part of the price of running hardware that old. Not exactly the IT staff's fault if the hardware is running on borrowed time! Presumably the management feels that the cost of the downtime is less than the cost of replacement equipment.
> Another year of stealth changes that knock out whole chains of systems. It just goes on and on.
Doesn't happen in my environment, but then nobody can actually install anything I don't support!
-
-
Sunday 27th July 2014 06:44 GMT Alan W. Rateliff, II
Geek culture?
I protest. As the main-stream adoption (corruption) of the term "geek" now requires the inclusion of gamers, it is important to note that not all system administrators are geeks. In fact, to a large degree, gamers rely upon us sysadmins as without us their fun times would be over. Or we befuddle said fun times with useless DRM or Internet connectivity requirements. Which ever.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
