Sysadmin Day - 31st July 2009

Although sysadmin day has been around for many a year, I have never recognised it as a "day". That is probably because I am usually too busy.

However, this year I am still very busy, but the hell with it, I am taking it off. Indeed sysadmin day should be a public holiday all over the world for sysadmins!

If you are a proper sysadmin or you employ a proper sysadmin, consider all the times they have worked 72 hours straight doing data centre or customer migrations, all the times that they have worked past any "normal" working hours, 03h30 in the morning when something was not right, had to stress over recovery of some FUBAR service, selflessly given up weekends and sleep hours to carry out things with the least disruption, driven to data centres at ungodly hours, had their plans cancelled because of some failure or other, always solved the company's problems, always explained to others why things are the way they are (even in the most difficult situations), spoken to people and assisted anyone whenever called upon (staff, Board members, customers and visitors), researched, investigated and solved problems, always tried to keep your stuff safe, ensure your backups ran and did not fuck up, restored your data when you lost it, showed you new things, tools and services that would make your life easier, ran the company ebay account to save you money, put purchases on their own cards as they are just needed to be made, spoken to your potential customers and reassured them of the stability and specifications of your systems infrastructure, organised your secure connections to your networks and others, kept update to date with the latest vulnerabilities and patched your services (even though sometimes painful), always bowed to your commercial wisdom even when they know you are being a fool, always kept all your passwords safe, never using them for personal advantage, ensuring your machine was fixed when you let your kids download some game or other, configured your phones to be little internet/email machines, ensure your presence on the net is recorded and analysed logs, wants you to succeed and grow in an "interesting" way, finds out where, how and/or who caused problems, been called on holiday to fix something or other, always gets you where you need to go and never say no.

For all these reasons and more, sysadmins should be recognised. It may be fair to say we are on duty more than any doctor, politician, CEO, pilot, teacher, priest and probably most other professions. Our is a 82400/604800/31536000 environment, we are 24/7/365 because our responsibilities never sleep, therefore this probably has a more disruption nature than any other job in the world. And we cannot help ourselves, we have to fix it, anytime of the day, anytime of the year, it is in our nature.

Ironically we cannot take off sysadmin day, but we can be on call and perhaps for that one day in the year, we should remove ourselves from the matrix and do something different, unplugged... after all we are only a mobile call away (even when surfing if using Aquatic Mobile 3.0), we are always on call 24/7 anyway.

So have a HAPPY SYSADMIN DAY!!! an escape from the machines.... unless you use http://www.snyping.com then the machines phone you when one of yours goes down....

Maybe nominate your sysadmin at thinkgeek in their 2009 SysAdmin Pageant.

Friday, July 31, 2009, is the 10th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day - http://www.sysadminday.com/