The Thankless Job

Did you know it was Sys Admin Day? Well, now ya do. Too late on those Hallmark cards though, so tough titty getting one for your sys admin.

I truly believe that to be an effective Sys Admin you should be damn near invisible to the end user. Now note I said end user and not boss, but it is sometimes tough to accurately display your worth when you spend 95% of your time with your ass in a seat.

I?d also like to note that this sort of job does nothing for your figure. Wanna lose weight? Cut wood for a living.

Anyway, in all of my job interviews, whether they were the ones leading to bank jobs or the one I currently have, I always made it a point to explain this to them: If I?m doing my job, the end user doesn?t know it. This analogy is always nice: You don?t call up Bellsouth and thank them for keeping your telephone running, and neither should the end users be calling the IT department doing the same.

Of course I phrase that a bit better/wittier based on the room and the people in it, but the gist is the same. To be effective you must be invisible. Definitely a conundrum not lost on yours truly.

The unfortunate flipside of this truth is that the end user will, by en-large, only hear from you when you screw up or when there is a problem. This creates a weird dynamic of appearing incompetent or inconvenient the times you may be seen or noticed from your non-IT coworkers. A call from the sys admin usually spells trouble, not unlike these calls:

?Ma?am, you are past due??

?Sir, you are past due??

?Ervin, is it? No? Well, I?m calling on behalf of??

?Sir, did you know you could save 15% on??

and on and on. Translation: These are not calls you look forward to, both in the making or the taking.

I?ve spoken about the pain of change before, but all problems require some change, even if it is in the minutia of your daily routine. And what?s worse is that Sys Admins can have the worst egos, or bad attitudes.

One place I worked at for awhile made absolutely sure (I found out through speaking with my references) that I was a nice guy because of the horribly grumpy guy who had just left the position. As those who know me can protest, I?m nothing if not polite. My kids are much the same way. We enforce a strict ?Thank you? and ?Please? policy in the Erwin household, and it is abided by all the family members. Annie had to get quite a few spankings before the words ?Shut up? left her vocabulary, but such are the tribulations of parenting.

To wrap up here, I?d like to say I really enjoy having the thankless job. Sure I get recognition from coworkers from time to time (the term Thankless is eternally mallable), but I?m happiest when I hear nothing back, the beautiful silence, the machines humming and running with appropriate zeal. Somewhere in that silence is the Zen of System Administration.

Excuse me while I try to go find it. See ya next week.

Disarm myself, I don?t want no one else
All I want is you

Tags: Sys Admin System Administrator Administration Lose Weight Bellsouth IT working help desk Polite