Thank You/Damn You Sys Admins!S

National sys admin day is a good day to remember the complicated relationships we've all had with them.

I remember being a sys admin intern, rolling out new machines with new images to consultants, and sometimes getting yelled at for not doing things quickly enough for them. But mostly, I remember having to do tech support at my job—subversive tech support—when it wasn't my job at all. It was often a terrible distraction, having editors you hoped would see you as a rising star or at least peer instead only come by not to think of new story ideas or get coffee but to ask you to fix their computer. I can't remember what I did, but I remember it wasn't officially sanctioned, yet, it was appreciated by the official staff. And the reward was getting to run my own machine as admin, instead of under a suffocating generic user class of privilege.

Some sysadmins are lazy. Some sysadmins will fix anything. We've all had both. And I'm just thankful for the very idea that you can have a problem at work with your PC and, unlike at home, it's someone else's problem. And you can get a smoke or coffee in while you wait for them to fix it.

So, thanks sysadmins for all the fixes, and all the unscheduled breaks.