🚀 go-pugleaf

James Armstrong (jca@netcom.com) wrote:
: I've run into quite a few system administrators in my career, and it
: seems the field attracts some very good people, and some very bad
: people...  Buddy Bear, I'm afraid that you sound like you're one of
: the very bad people.

Well you could never convince any of my users of that. 
Quite possibly, you may find some vendors that I deal with who would 
join you in finding fault in my methods, though, as no excuse that they 
come up with is ever good enough for me to accept them causing my users
a loss or degradation of service. 

: It seems to me that the role of the system administrator is to
: provide service for the user community, and that includes complying
: with user requests as quickly as reasonable, and providing information
: quickly.  

Yes, indeed. 
The operative word, here, is reasonable. If a user requests
that I find a file that was lost, I do my damnedest. Most of the time
I can accommodate him. Sometimes, though, due to events completely beyond
my control, that sucker is just flat lost. 

We have all sorts of users who cover the full range of understanding about 
how computer systems work. Some can barely figure out how to log onto the 
primary system. Some coulddo my job, if they were of a mind to. 
I only have about 300 users to deal with, and generally manage to keep 
them all pretty happy. 

Netcom has a few more than that. for them to try to recover lost files 
for every bozo out there, and comply with EVERY user request as quickly 
as the users feel is reasonable, they could not meet the demand for the 
money they charge. 

: The original request was not at all unusual, unreasonable, 
: or absurd; the restoral of archived files is a perfectly reasonable
: request of a system administrator.  

The request for restoration of lost files, due to a mistake on netcom's 
part, was not the issue to which I was responding. It was the idea of 
storing such critical data on such a volatile system, where the 
possibilities for problem is almost assured. 

The bozos to which I refer are the ones who don't think about what 
they are doing, and when things go wrong, are the first to piss and moan 
about how they were screwed by the "system" ( Or the sysadmin, in this 
case). 


: If I were in a hiring or firing
: position over someone who called a user who requested a file be
: restored a "bozo," that person would get their walking papers no matter
: how well they did the rest of their job.

Were you to be in a position to hire and fire, I would be very concerned 
about your apparent lack of attention to details, and tendancy to leap 
to conclusions. These are qualities that would give me no sense of 
security that the people for whose lives you are making critical 
decisions are getting a fair shake. In fact I would find these tendancies
to be very undesirable no matter the position you were in. I hope you 
are not a mechanic for the airlines, of perhaps an employee at a nuclear 
power facility. Or worse, a teacher, or cop. 

-- 
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Buddy Bear   at L & M Enterprises
"It is a great mistake to try to cure a man of paranoia, for it gives him 
just as clear an understanding of the innards of the universe as Psychology
or religion."
             - Peter S. Beagle, I See by my Outfit. 
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