System Admin Appreciation Day

We often take our system administrators for granted until the day our computers cannot connect to the network and we can't get on the Internet to check our emails. No kidding! And I should know...I'm married to one!

The last Friday of July has been designated as System Administrator Appreciation Day and we bloggers who have joined Bloggers Unite want to encourage everyone to participate and show your appreciation for the system admins that keep us connected (wired and wirelessly - if you want to be specific!) as well as for the other IT people that work with the admins.

Being a system administrator is not all that easy, trust me. System Admins have to monitor all the scripts that keep programs running, trouble shoot, and often have to work odd long hours to fix things when the system just doesn't want to work the way it should. And when you get technology-challenged people calling in for assistance and the IT Help Desk can't resolve the issue, then the matter moves up to the next level for assistance. It can get crazy, but it is hard work trying to find the "root" of the issue especially when the computer user is unable to explain or point out specifically where and how the problem started. So the IT person (and system admin) ends up having to do a lot of investigative work on the system and that often takes hours!


On the other side of the picture, being married to a system administrator reminds me of my life as a military spouse (he was in the service when we first met and got married). When duty calls, your spouse is going to be "unavailable" to you for awhile. There was even a time when we were on vacation (on a road trip in fact!) and we had to pull over at the parking lot of a business three hundred miles away from home because of an emergency at work. He had to log on to his work laptop and connect wirelessly to the office and do his stuff. Luckily things like that don't happen too often. And luckily, there's plenty of ice cream available at the convenience stores (LOL!).

But you know, in spite of such a crazy life, I'm proud of my "system admin" because I know he keeps things running smoothly at his workplace and he keeps our home network running great so I can blog all I want or check out my favorite rock stars's pages (hello, Sebastian Bach!). Thank you, system admins around the world for helping keep us all cyber-connected!