Praise the geeks

Today is sysadmin day.  It is a pretty thankless task.   No-one notices that the network is running fast, or that you can get to all the printers you need, or that email is working.  Only when things break down do you get noticed.

There are some telling comments to the BBC News story Celebrate the hidden computer helpers, which asked how people would reward their sysadmins.

To celebrate the sys admin people in my office, I will be turning them off, waiting a few seconds, then turning them on again. That's if they ever get back from the pub.

It's just an internal support job and no different or important to that of finance, human resources, etc. Or the post man for that matter. In my experience (and I have been one) they tend to be full of self importance and generally reluctant to help "idiot" users.

How to mark sys admin day? Perhaps by finding one who knows what he's doing.

Most sys admins I've come across are lazy and incompetent. I normally end up fixing the problem myself.

A thankless task indeed.  A reboot really does solve a lot of problems.  Trouble is, there are far too many users who call the helpdesk or chew out the sysadmins because the user did something stupid and can't be bothered to read the help files to sort it out.  Or users who expect the IT people to stand over them every second and baby them through the mammoth task of printing out a file.  The few users who do fix their own problems rarely get noticed among the flood of those who create their own problems and then whine about it.