And on the 8th day God looked down on his planned paradise and said,
“I need a caretaker.” So, God made a sysadmin.
God said, “I need somebody to get up before dawn, and check backups, and work all day in the 50 degree server room, check backups again, eat lunch and then go to corporate HQ and stay past five at a mandatory meeting with the higher ups.” So, God made a sysadmin.
God said, “I need somebody with strong arms. Strong enough to wrestle a UPS into its rack, yet gentle enough to plug a hot Molex connector into a CD drive without shorting the server, resulting in downtime. I need somebody to call vendors, tame cantankerous coils of cat 5e, come home hungry and have to wait for dinner until his ramen is hot and his Minecraft server is updated.” So, God made a sysadmin.
God said “I need somebody that can shape bandwidth, get a disc out of an unpowered CD tray with a bit of a paperclip, make a smartphone dock out of alligator clips, rubber bands and pencils. And…who, at upgrade time and virus season, will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon. Then, pain’n from ‘browsing wrist’, put in another seventy two hours.” So, God made a sysadmin.
God had to have somebody willing to push a cart at double speed to get the battery backups in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in the middle of the hall, whip out his smartphone, and race to help when he sees the first downvote from a friend’s OC post. So, God made a sysadmin.
God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear racks, heave rails, and yet gentle enough to clear paper jams and dust old PCs and tend the doe eyed users…and who will stop his work for an hour to click through pictures of cats on the Internet.” So, God made a sysadmin.
It had to be somebody who’d tunnel deep and straight…and not use duplicate passwords; somebody to clear the cache, avert a crash, and reboot and repeat and and reboot and repeat and ask the users over and over “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”; somebody to replenish the RAID array and then finish a hard day’s work with a five mile drive to Micro Center; somebody who’d put a personal media library together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who’d laugh and then sigh…and then respond with smiling eyes, when the users ask, “So is the server down?” So, God made a sysadmin.
