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Guruzilla's /var/log/knowledge-junkie
["the chatter of a missionary sysadmin"]

2003-02-05 6:28 PM
TEH WERK

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{ Now playing: []

Recent movie: Spiderman;

Current books: II Tim.; Douglas Adams, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Schiokaner, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations; Schlatter, The History of the Christ; I Jn. (tr.)

}

So, realized recently that I don't talk about work much - at all, in fact, and that some of you fools out there may think I have nothing to do but this all day. Sadly, this is not the case.

By trade, and happenstance, I work as a sysadmin, unfortunately, on a basically all-Windows network, but I do get paid for it. Not much, but that's life at a very-non-profit. I'm not one of those truly BOFHly BOFHs who, you know, actually program stuff, or script things out, or even get to have much fun with the users' minds. (For one thing, the users' minds would have to be somewhat stable in order to make destabilizing them interesting.) No, I just try to cobble together our little arrays of old 1998-vintage beige boxes and make them talk to our sprawling, haphazard but stabilizing network of servers. It's a lot of poking at things, and trying to grok freakish error messages, and divining whether this error that's being whined about is new, or important, or just a way for somebody to have some attention paid to them. Trying to sort through "Windows always sucks" versus "Windows is sucking in a new and excitingly dangerous way today." Wondering why my backup job test didn't do what I wanted it to. Joy.

Happily, I don't have to fake my way through answering questions like "How do I do X in my mail merge?" or "What's the button to make the margins go over?" since we got a grown-up professional trainer in. Of course, that was in response to user whining, and those ungrateful brats have barely shifted from their lazy bums to take advantage of the rather extraordinary privilege. Free in-house training is scarcely offered by a lot of Fortune 500 companies, let alone ecclesiastical institutions. We don't let that interfere, though, and the trainer is also becoming our new PFY, heh heh heh.

The thing I really, really dislike about THE WERK, is our dependence on apparently random donations. We're broke at the moment. Really broke. Like, makin me nervous and thinking about what kind of expenses student loans cover, nervous. When you're running on a shoestring, it's hard to find any fat to cut (mmm, fried shoestring!). I'm not immediately worried about my job, but I'm worried about other people's jobs. I like most of the people I work with, and even the place as a whole, except for a few disturbing tendencies. I fear the worst, though, will come out when the money gets tight. Kyrie elison, Christe elieson, Kyrie elieson...

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