Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day (2016)

I thought I would take a minute out of my busy hectic day to give a shout out to all my fellow under-appreciated systems administrators out there in their dark offices on this the 17th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Consider all the work your sys.admin does behind the scene, keeping your network connection running, your email not being overly flooded with spam, your IM’s running at a decent speed, and being there to fix a server outage at 3am just so some people can go look at the funny picture you uploaded.  Consider how often this creature gets thanked on his day to day fight against spammers, hackers, lUsers, Software Updates, etc Consider this, then be happy that this IT Hero gets one day a year when (s)he gets appreciated.

So everyone, go take a coffee, cake, or gift to your sysadmin now. or at least drop by their hidy hole to say thanks.

For more information on this IMPORTANT festive day go read THIS SITE

For those about the Insane Asylum Myself & Demopengu are fond of Cake, Beer, & Chocolate (Oh and anything with glowing blue LED’s) !!!

CN

P.S.

Consider this as well. Your Friendly SysAdmin has access to your email, they know what you have been doing and to who. They see all the packets of data traveling back and forth from your machine, seeing when you are working and when your just browsing ebay/facebook/etc, They know what websites you’ve visited (and can change your history to show you been looking at p0rn in the office), Stuff you may not want made public.  They control your password, your login name, your email address, how much of the networks bandwidth you can use, what IM clients are banned, and a million other things that help you through the working day.  Consider this well, and remember, “Its only one day a year!

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 2015

I thought I would take a minute out of my busy hectic day to give a shout out to all my fellow under-appreciated systems administrators out there in their dark offices on this the 16th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Consider all the work your sys.admin does behind the scene, keeping your network connection running, your email not being overly flooded with spam, your IM’s running at a decent speed, and being there to fix a server outage at 3am just so some people can go look at the funny picture you uploaded.  Consider how often this creature gets thanked on his day to day fight against spammers, hackers, lUsers, Software Updates, etc Consider this, then be happy that this IT Hero gets one day a year when (s)he gets appreciated.

So everyone, go take a coffee, cake, or gift to your sysadmin now. or at least drop by their hidy hole to say thanks.

For more information on this IMPORTANT festive day go read THIS SITE

For those about the Insane Asylum Myself & Demopengu are fond of Cake, Beer, & Chocolate (Oh and anything with glowing blue LED’s) !!!

CN

P.S.

Consider this as well. Your Friendly SysAdmin has access to your email, they know what you have been doing and to who. They see all the packets of data traveling back and forth from your machine, seeing when you are working and when your just browsing ebay/facebook/etc, They know what websites you’ve visited (and can change your history to show you been looking at p0rn in the office), Stuff you may not want made public.  They control your password, your login name, your email address, how much of the networks bandwidth you can use, what IM clients are banned, and a million other things that help you through the working day.  Consider this well, and remember, “Its only one day a year!

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 2014

I thought I would take a minute out of my busy hectic day to give a shout out to all my fellow under-appreciated systems administrators out there in their dark offices on this the 15th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Consider all the work your sys.admin does behind the scene, keeping your network connection running, your email not being overly flooded with spam, your IM’s running at a decent speed, and being there to fix a server outage at 3am just so some people can go look at the funny picture you uploaded.  Consider how often this creature gets thanked on his day to day fight against spammers, hackers, lUsers, Software Updates, etc Consider this, then be happy that this IT Hero gets one day a year when (s)he gets appreciated.

So everyone, go take a coffee, cake, or gift to your sysadmin now. or at least drop by their hidy hole to say thanks.

For more information on this IMPORTANT festive day go read THIS SITE

For those about the Insane Asylum Myself & Demopengu are fond of Cake, Beer, & Chocolate (Oh and anything with glowing blue LED’s) !!!

CN

P.S.

Consider this as well. Your Friendly SysAdmin has access to your email, they know what you have been doing and to who. They see all the packets of data traveling back and forth from your machine, seeing when you are working and when your just browsing ebay/facebook/etc, They know what websites you’ve visited (and can change your history to show you been looking at p0rn in the office), Stuff you may not want made public.  They control your password, your login name, your email address, how much of the networks bandwidth you can use, what IM clients are banned, and a million other things that help you through the working day.  Consider this well, and remember, “Its only one day a year!

Sometimes I am a Dick

*Phone rungs*

Me:Good afternoon, Insane Asylum!

Caller:Hi. can I speak to Joan Crawshore please.

Me:Who? Sorry no one of that name here.”

Caller:Sorry it’s who I have down as a contact there, well who can I talk to about changing your power supplier.”

Me:Humm. that would be a Dave Jones”

Caller:Can I speak to them please?

Me:Sorry, He’s on holiday atm. He’ll be back in 2 weeks.

Caller:Thanks, I’ll call back then.

 

Two weeks later :-

 

*Phone rungs*

Me: “Good afternoon, Insane Asylum!

Caller: “Hi. can I speak to Dave Jones please.

Me: “Who? Sorry no one of that name here.”

Caller: “Sorry it’s who I have down as a contact there, well who can I talk to about changing your power supplier.”

Me: “Humm. that would be a Thomas Evens”

Caller: “Can I speak to them please?

Me: “Sorry, He’s on holiday atm. He’ll be back in 2 weeks.

Caller: “Thanks, I’ll call back then.

 

Two weeks later :-

 

*Phone rungs*

Me: “Good afternoon, Insane Asylum!

Caller: “Hi. can I speak to Thomas Evenss please.

Me: “Who? Sorry no one of that name here.”

Caller: “Sorry it’s who I have down as a contact there, well who can I talk to about changing your power supplier.”

Me: “Humm. that would be a Susan Jenkins”

Caller: “Can I speak to them please?

Me: “Sorry, She’s on holiday atm. She’ll be back in 2 weeks.

Caller: “Thanks, I’ll call back then.

 

This may have been going on for several months now….

I’m slowly running out of made up names.

 

Conversations with Customers

CodeNinja: “Hello!”

Customer: “Hi, I am on holiday…..”

CN: *interrupting* “You phoned up to tell us you’re on holiday? that’s a bit of a Dick move isn’t it?”

C: “What?? No I’m on Holiday at the minute……”

CN: *Interrupting again* “So you thought you would phone us to rub it in, thanks…”

C: “but…”

CN: *Interrupting and speaking to DemonPengu who was in the room* “Hey, this is great, he’s phoned up just to boast he is on holiday the git!!”

C: “No i didn’t….”

DP: “Who is it?”

CN: *To DP* “X from X”

C: “hello???? I’m still here”

DP: *speaking loudly at the phone* “GIT!!!”

C: “hey, I’m on holiday but customers keep phoning”

CN: “They do that.”

C: “Yes, it’s annoying”

CN: “Yes it is, you are trying to do something and they keep phoning you, and they are always whining about some trivial thing or another”

C: “exactly. it’s very annoying…….” *Pauses as he realises in this conversation he is the whining customer* “err, anyway they have broke their emails, can you disable SPF checks for them for now”

CN: “Not a problem, just drop the request to us on an email, we need a paper trail”

C:But I’m on holiday? everything’s shut down for xmas, can’t you just do it.”

CN: “Yes, as soon as I get an email request I can do it.”

C: “Come on, don’t be an arse”

CN: “says the guy who phoned us to boast he was on holiday”

*INSERT 10 minutes general grumbling as he goes to turn on his home computer, logs into his work account to send the request all the time insulting me*

C: “Right, I sent the bloody request, when will you be able to do the change?”

CN: “Oh that, I did it 15 minutes ago when you first asked.”

C: “AAAAARRRRRSEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!”

CN: “Happy Holidays!”

Dear Constant Reader I should point out that the customer in this conversation is one who often laughs and jokes around with us here, and often phones me for advice/help with his personal engineering/electronic/computing projects.

Customers are Special

So the other day the Support Guys were a bit confused over a request in the Ticketing system.

Subject: Website URL’s

Please could you set the following websites to point to IP 192.168.123.2

www.******.co.uk
www.******.co.uk
www.******..co.uk
www.******..co.uk
www.******..co.uk
www.******..co.uk

******= to protect identity.

The more observant amongst you will have noticed that is a Local IP address, and if Websites are pointed at it they will not work for anyone else in the world. So We queried the IP, and asked them to double check.

Imagine our surprise when they responded telling us that was what their IT company was saying needed to be done, or they would not be able to create email accounts on the exchange server.

Yes. Apparently an IT form needed websites pointing to a 192.168. Local address before they could create new accounts on an Exchange server on a different IP range/network.

This leads us to a conflict of interest.

Professionalism V “The Customer is always Right”

Vote in comments to help us decide!!