July 28 is the day. Are cake and ice cream (and maybe a spiffy laser pointer) in your future?
Beleaguered sysadmins, rejoice! July 28 is System Administrators’ Day, when IT staffers are given the respect they deserve – and, one hopes, maybe some cake and ice cream or a nifty T-shirt.
Systems Administrator Ted Kekatos, an IT manager for a small start-up, decided to create SysAdminDay in 2000 when he saw a printer ad that featured employees lining up to give gifts to the system administrator. He’d just bought printers from the same company. Why wasn’t he showered with gifts? “[My co-workers] laughed and told me to go back to work,” he says.
Undaunted, he registered the domain name SysAdminDay.com and built a Web site describing the holiday he’d made, which he decided would fall on the last Friday in July. He e-mailed notices about the Web site to coworkers, he explains, and they forwarded the notices to others. The site wasn’t extremely popular that year, but he estimates that in 2001 it received about half a million visitors.
That stream of users has stayed steady for the past five years, he says, and his Web hosting has even survived a link from the hugely popular technology site Slashdot.
The Web site runs on space donated by a Web hosting company and recently received a redesign by volunteers from the IT user group LOPSA. Although Kekatos has paid some money out-of-pocket for domain registrations and the like, he says that he doesn’t make any money from the “sponsors” listed on the site: it’s purely an exchange of promotion. (There is a strip of Google ads on the page, however.)
Bloggers are promoting the day, Kekatos adds, and data analysis start-up Splunk spoke with Kekatos to set up a “SysAdmin of the Year” contest to begin on Friday and end in about three months.
The site also links to “chapters” of SysAdmin Day in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and other countries, with translations and their own events. This idea was raised when Kekatos found a Web site that had taken content from SysAdminDay.com and posted it elsewhere. “Rather than antagonizing anyone – I get enough spam as it is – I decided to start some kind of chapters group,” he explains. There are more chapters that will be added to the site’s list in the future, he notes.
The site also includes pictures of sysadmins and their hardware, as well as tongue-in-cheek advice on how to work with a systems administrator. For example: “When something goes wrong with your home PC, dump it on Ted’s chair the next morning with no name, no phone number, and no description of the problem. Ted just loves a good mystery.”
Cake and ice cream seem to be the customary way of celebrating SysAdmin day for many people, although Kekatos has also assembled a list of gift ideas including fruit baskets, home theatre systems, laser pointers, and other gadgets. “Those are all things I want,” he admits, but he hasn’t gotten them so far. Though there’s still hope.
