Just go read it.

Ah the things I think about when moving.

Oh, and for those of you so inclined, meet the bumper dumper.

My favorite t-shirt image from the site:

• DNS, email and pretty much all core services are only sexy to other sysadmins
• Long hours are part of the game at times

Friday was a reinforcement day for me on the second one above. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but bite the bullet and put time into the problem.

The positive from this was that I got the thing working for our customer.

The negative was the time away from my personal affairs.

The true take away for anyone just starting out as a sysadmin, IMHO, is that you shouldn’t be shocked when things go terribly, horribly wrong and you have to spend the night at work. It happens. Hardware will fail. Someone has to fix it or do the restores.

What *SHOULD* shock you is if this is the normal situation at your work.

For example:

When I decided that I was going to look for work, I applied at my current employer and another company that shall henceforth be dubbed DysfunCo. I had already interviewed with $employer and was talking salary before I went to interview at DysfunCo. The two gentlemen (PHB #1 and #2) that interviewed me are programmers promoted to management. The following is paraphrased excerpts of the interview.

PHB #1: “We’re looking for a sysadmin to help our developers any way they see fit.”
PHB #2: “It’s really important that the candidate enable our developers to keep their creativity going.”
Halfdime: “Can you give me an example of what kinds of things you’re looking for?”
PHB #2: “We really need a broad based specialist to help us liaise with our corporate headquarters.”
Halfdime: “What’s your relationship with corporate like?”
PHB #1&2 (together): “Oh. They HATE us.”
PHB #1: “Yeah, remember the dhcp incident?”
Halfdime: “What was that?”
PHB #1: “One of our guys was working on new appliance and he needed to have it be a dhcp server. So he plugged it in to the core router here and it started handing out leases on the wrong network. Everyone in the office was down for like two days until he realized he was the cause of the problem.”
PHB #2: “Yeah, those guys in corporate were pissed. Good thing they never found out it was us!”

What followed the numerous tales of what they allow to keep their staff from having their creativity stifled was embarrassing. When they finished and asked me what I thought I would do to help them out, I gave them an hour long treatise on how broken their organization was and that any sysadmin worth hiring would start by setting boundaries.

They didn’t call me back.

I’ve thought about sending them a bill for two hours of consulting.

The morbid curiosity in me hasn’t grown enough for me to reach out to my contacts there and find out how long the guy that DID take the job lasted.

If you’ve made it this far, I would like to wrap this one up with another thanks to my wife. She put up with the horrendous hours I had at my previous job every May through October and is as unflappable as they come. She keeps me grounded and reminds me of what’s really important.

Thanks for being patient honey. You rock!

If you’ve never read the paper, you should. [0] It’s by a gentleman whom I’ve never met named Richard Threadgill.

Basically, it is a plea to all technical workers to keep management informed about what they’re doing. For many of you, this may seem a simple concept but I’m pretty sure all of you know someone that is being described by this paper.

I’m lucky enough to have a boss that has been amongst sysadmins for a very (VERY [1]) long time and understands the oddities common in our profession. He’s good at extracting the information if someone isn’t good at giving it.

[0] Yeah. I just should on you
[1] I’m talking Multics old.

They had a fairly urgent request and wanted to make sure that it was handled tonight.

Nothing unusual, right. Our users are constantly in need of some unplanned, “my crotch is on fire” item.

To me, the notable item in the exchange was that the two of them felt it was important enough to get this done that they would come down to our offices to make the request and address any concerns.

I think it’s very important for sysadmins to be approachable. Yes, we say no often, but how we do it can be as important as that we do it. Specifically, in this instance, the two were ready for no but knew that asking would give them an honest assessment at worst and a yes at best.

They were very pleased to get their yes. The fact that they felt that they could talk to me (and my group) is, to me, the major win here.

You see, whether my users like me personally or not, I want them to trust me. I want them to seek my counsel even when they know it may not be what they want to hear.

Very often when people ask me what I do for a living, they’re confused by the term system administrator. They ask what that means. My responses vary wildly but often I just tell them, “I say no. A lot.”

I wonder if Gene Roddenberry had been a sysadmin if we would have the following:

Sysadmin, the pedantic career.
These are the rantings of your IT Professional.
His continuing mission: To deny your requests.
To seek out new insults and voodoo incantations.
To boldly say no to every request you have.

Don’t get me wrong, a healthy dose of skepticism and the ability to see flaws in logic is really important. I think we sysadmins often take this too far. We ravenously seek opportunities to show our abilities by correcting even the smallest mistakes. We thrive on telling someone that they’re wrong. This makes us seem a pretty negative lot.

Why is that? Don’t we have things to be happy about? How much energy do we waste daily in the pursuit of being right?

Increasingly, we’re told to be customer focussed.

Saying “no” is bad. Instead of, “I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.” We’re supposed to say something like, “I’m sorry Dave. I think we can synergize better if we coalesce our asset stream in a more holistic manner.”

There’s not a single pairing of ‘n’ followed by ‘o’ in that sentence. It must be better, right?

I worry about the impact that the negativity has on us as a community and in our personal relationships. We focus on what’s wrong or what could possibly go wrong in any situation. That’s constructive to a point but only if followed up by healthy changes. Perpetually saying, “That’s really broken but I’m not going to fix it” is dysfunction 101.

Going with the, fix me first, principle, I think I’m going to try to be more positive in my daily interactions.

I think I smile more than just about anyone else I know already. Perhaps I am a fool. Easily amused by the simple things in life. Regardless, I hope that smile can lift someone else from the dumps for a second at least.

Maybe I can say no in a non-threatening way that doesn’t involve a 5:1 ratio of buzz words to other words and makes me feel like a car salesman.

Maybe I’ll let it slide when someone makes a mistake and not be aggressively pedantic.

Maybe someone else will too.

Ok, so here’s the caveat, we all know and understand the being a system administrator is an interrupt driven job, and I was going to mount then umount the dir on the tmp (I still don’t know why I choose tmp and not mnt, but whatever), but I got distracted.

One of the most oft visited in my opinion is that of someone taking offense (umbrage, pique) at something communicated. Be it a stanza in an email, a snippet of an overheard conversation or an outright slight directed at someone else, our words can create a minefield for us that often affects our relationships.

If you know me, you know that I’m the last person to be preaching about the need for political correctness. I will leave adjusting your behavior to someone more qualified for correction. I will deal with the thing that’s easiest to change. Your personal perception.

Note the phrase used above was “take offense.” There’s no victim in that sentence. The person “offended” has decided that the intent of the author/speaker was to offend.

We, as the taker of offense, take upon ourselves the indignation and robe of the victim without ever talking to the alleged offender.

This frequently results in making us look the fool.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather someone call me a flaming prat then to make myself look the fool.

At times, it can be difficult to discern. Especially in a day laden with email and text messages. There’s no body language in an email. Ten people could read the same email and come away with different opinions about what it actually meant, much less whether or not they were actively being offended.

I guess the long and short of this post is this; for the most part, we’re not important enough for people to actively try to offend us. The people who are really going to try are most likely going to be those closest to us and will want to be in your face when they offend you.

Don’t fret. They are out to get you, but you’re likely to see them coming.