Being a Systems Admin for a bunch of Muppets can be quite stressfull, it’s just the way that things are you understand. The people that you have to deal with tend to think that they are the ONLY people that you have to deal with, not realising that there are other people out there that have problems as well.
Systems Admin was always easy when the users were more intelligent than a Cat, however now the Cat’s are more intelligent than the users it’s more of a problem. Now most long term Systems Admins tend to have a certain desire to have an easy life while keeping the systems running as well as is practical, but not so the users – my system is down fix it FIRST! That’s the way that the users tend to think now, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t be more like the BOFH – that surely would make them think twice.
The past week has been very busy, hence the lack of posts. This explains the lack of posts this week, but it’s about to be rectified now with this post. I’m using this post as an excuse to grumble about the users, but also have a pop at my European colleagues who are causing even more problems than the users. The main issue that we still have is the one that I mentioned in one of the previous posts about communications, this is still the case – there is just a total lack of speeks. Yesterday I was in the office patching some systems as it was the maintenance weekend for our European colleagues, the first indication that there was likely to be an issue was when the seventy odd calls arrived in the call queue.
What were all the calls for I hear you ask, well they were just a notification that all the systems were to be upgraded – fortunately to the level of software that they were already running. This doesn’t bode well for the next maintenance weekend, this is the next clock change weekend in October and will require that lots of systems are patched. Hence the stressed feeling, I think that I’ll have to investigate a way of managing the patches so that at least we’ll have a sporting chance.