If you use a network on a corporate or private system, you are hereby ordered by the divine commandment of the Great Computer in the Sky to drop to your knees this instant, and thank the Most High Server that there are systems administrators. While you might be the sweetest, most enlightened person who ever used a computer in the history of the world… most people are absolutely belligerent morons who seem to take a sort of callous, passive aggressive joy in making the lives of systems administrators into living hells and nightmares that do not cease when the alarm clock goes off. If not for these digital soldiers of rightness and the binary law, our entire modern world would rapidly disintegrate into a state of chaos, anarchy and extremely low tech solutions to problems. Not to say that every person does not have the occasional bad day, but consider that most jobs only require a person to work with other people or computerized equipment.

The noble systems administrator must deal with both human issues and technological ones. Surrounded by the walls of their fortresses of extremely expensive solitude, these holy warriors of the network struggle constantly against three major forces: the inherent tendency of human beings not to understand technology, the inherent tendency of technology to stop working from an innumerable number of different causes, and the fact that it often seems the world just does not like the poor admin. To go to work every day, knowing that there will always be something that needs to be upgraded (whether there is sufficient money and appreciation or not), and there will always be a steady stream of proverbial (and occasionally literal) fires that will need to be put out.

Think very carefully about the last time you decided to download a file from your e-mail from a mysterious sender, while you were at work. Had you listened very carefully in a room cast in silence, you would have heard the admin in a distant labyrinth screaming for you not to. But you did anyway, and they saved your butt.