Internet Humour

NT Admin: Recent Experience...

Graduated HS 1997 with major in sports.

1998 to June 1999: Flip tapes third shift for large telecommunications company. Learned MS Office in spare time. Was allowed to use power switch if screen went BSOD.

Upgraded 25 PC workstations to Win95. Took 10-day MCSE course, flew through exam. Wrote excellent VB app that reports when printer on 10C is out of paper.

June 1999 to Present: Senior NT Administrator responsible for directing tape operators. Have written ASP web pages describing correct response to BSOD. Act as mentor for less experienced staff.

Unix System Administrator Species

There are four major species of Unix sysads:

1) The TECHNICAL THUG: Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.

2) The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.

3) The MANIAC: Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba is willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.

4) The IDIOT: Usually a cretin, morphodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.