Being a system administrator is not easy, non-stop learning, 24/7 on-call, always the one being blamed when things go wrong, etc. etc. If you are new and are thinking of being a system administrator as your main career path, you need to be prepared for all the dirty works involved and the little secrets about working as a sys admin.
But hey, there is one special day in every year that is only meant for us, system administrator, a day called System Administrator Appreciation Day that happens today this year, last Friday in July. And we will all be appreciated by people around us about our amazing work that keeps their work and life easier. So happy system administrator appreciation day to all sys admin or sys-admin-wanna-be fellows. We all deserve it. 🙂 Special thanks to the sys admins participated on Server Fault sharing this awesome motherboard cake to all of us.
And because today is our day, we also should celebrate a bit more by sharing some of the cool stores with you, pretty much from one post on Server Fault. After all, we only have one chance every 365 days.
Start with having fun with the domains:
Once a nice, old lady called our company asking about an internet domain of her hotel. Her statement: “You are the company “.com”, right?” and she wanted us to “redirect” all the email from one “city to another city”, because during winter time she lived there. – @splattne
Followed by the power that we as sys admin can control the Internet:
The internet is down. Can you fix it? – @scraimer
Can you pop the Internet on a floppy for me? – @Wayne Koorts
I’m having troubles logging in to the site, can you come look at it for me? My address is 123 Main St, Pennsylvania. – @nickf who lives in Australia
Having fun so far? let’s keep going:
Me: Type A:
Customer: How do you spell that?
Me: The letter A, then the colon symbol
Customer: …
Me: It’s next to the L
Customer: which side?
– @Mr. Shiny & new
And end with one from myself:
I was in computer lab one day after having a basic computer class that taught us some of the very basic DOS commands. And that was my first time sitting right in front of the computer back to the mid 80’s when I was still in high school.
After a few tries without any success of practicing the commands I learned from the class. I finally shouted it out loudly that “where the heck is “dir†key on the keyboard?â€. Obviously, I didn’t even know that I need to type them in letter by letter. Shame on myself.