A Sys Admin's Perspective

A friend of mine and I were talking about how sometimes certain folks can get worked up over little issues. As we talked, I was reminded of a saying that a former supervisor would often say, "If only I had just one application to support..."

His comment implied that as a Systems Administrator, we are often responsible for dozens if not hundreds of individual systems critical to the success of the organization. I've been told I can seem like I do not care about the plights of others when their system is not working as designed, but in my mind, I look on it as a minor issue that will be resolved in due time (which helps me keep the stress level down, too). Then I remember to put things in perspective: Given the scope of our operation, we are essentially a nation-wide enterprise, with 45 remote sites, various business units and needs, political pressures, WAN bandwidth diversity, and a sleuth of incredibly complex and intermixed systems. To me, a big problem would be when many of the little systems stop functioning (say, because the DNS servers were unresponsive!).