The Summer Olympics are coming up soon – too soon, some say, for the organizers in Athens, Greece, who appear to need to work 26 hours a day to have everything completed on time for the opening ceremonies in August. Reading about that, I was reminded that right after the 2002 Winter Olympics I suggested that someone should organize Olympic events for network managers – The Installation Marathon, The Archive Sprint, The Client Scramble, etc. While a number of you suggested events, no one stepped forward to sponsor the event.
Perhaps I was just ahead of my time with this brilliant idea. People I approached said, in essence, “Sports for geeks? Who’d watch that?” Well, as the prime-time TV lineup over the past year or two has shown, there’s a big market for watching actual people do stupid stuff – reality television! So let’s transform the Olympics idea into a package for good old reality TV.
We could do “My Big Fat Obnoxious Finance Officer” – but that would mostly be geeks talking to nerds and making fun of bean counters. Then there’s “FUD Factor” – trapped in a room with marketing guys for new networking start-ups. Last one to run screaming into the street is the winner.
Don’t overlook “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” – a matrimonial state that’s all too common among the folks who keep the networks humming. Who has time for a social life?
There’s also “Joe Millionaire, CEO” – the story of a chief executive trying to hire an IT manager by promising a million-dollar budget. A budget that doesn’t exist. But you knew that, didn’t you?
Good for laughs would be “The Simple Network Life,” the story of two rich girls apprenticed to a network manager and charged with monitoring SNMP traps.
But my favorite would be “Survivor: The Server Room.” Two teams of network managers (one Windows, one Linux) would compete to see who could install, maintain and manage a network in a 5,000-user law office (talk about your high-tech desert!). There’d be various competitions each week, but the payoff would be that the winning team got to vote one user off the network. That’s work satisfaction!
Tip of the week
For a dose of real reality, plan to attend Novell’s BrainShare next month. While it’s bound to be more about Linux than anything else, it’s still the biggest bang for your education dollar. But register at www.novell.com/brainshare by Friday to save your bean counter $200; he’ll appreciate it.
