former system administrator

Working as a computer techie for an insurance company was an education. No, I don't mean I learned anything about insurance or corporate politics, way above my grade level.

I learned a lot about how people behave when crowded together and not very comfortable with each other. Some of us formed tentative alliances, us against them. Some of us went it alone, stuck out his or her chin, and dared anyone to harm him or her. Some of us tried to pretend the personal didn't matter and just did what we must and maybe a little extra. I saw no evidence of us forming a group and working together as a group. No, we were individuals caught in a common noose, cats in a sack.

Urk! What has that to do with being a system administrator? Well, one of the company's policies about their computers was something like, "Well, we bought'm. It's up to you to make'm work. Oh, they're supposed to work together? Glad that's your problem."

I was the you, by default. We'd had a person who was trained to do that work. He quit to work for a company that paid him more and he thought might appreciate his work. Good luck.

The company did not replace him. No one wanted anything to do with keeping them working and working together to do what the company allegedly wanted them to do.

Eventually, they did what unmaintained devices do, they got themselves into a snarl.

As luck would have it, they did that after normal working hours on a Friday. As luck would have it, I was working late trying to solve a database problem. As luck would have it, I'm a very responsible person. Well, I usually am.

I thought about calling my boss but decided that was a waste of time. We'd wrangle an hour or more trying to assign the blame, then he'd assign me to solve the problem. I was there. I knew as much about the computers as anyone left in our group did. So I tried restarting them. They almost immediately snarled again. Oh geez! I found some manuals for the computers and was amazed at the date on them. They were published years before the snarl. Many years. But they had a section which gave me hope for finding an answer. Alas, no. The section was for setting up, actually about planning a setup so it wuld take the least time. Still, it gave me more information than I'd had.

And so it went. Either from printed information in our files or from sources on the internet, I gleaned enough information to untangle the snarl, get the computers running again, working together, and I even improved the basic instructions the computers had to work with.

In the process, I discovered the term "system administrator" and learned there was a whole body of knowledge that went with that term. So after that weekend, I more or less immersed myself in learning the core of what a System Administrator should know. I took on the job and no one fought me for it.

I kept those computers running and working together for another five years, I think, often on the verge of collapse, usually at the edge of their capabilities. It was a dicey game. I won the battles (the individual snarls and snafus of keeping them going) and lost the war.

In one of the several mergers that took my employer from being a company to being a corporation, suddenly a guy showed up from Dallas, the new headquarters, and replaced the old computers with new ones, installed a new network, replaced our old programs, and even refurbished our computer room.

Wow! So that's how you do things when you're working with your bosses!. Amazing!

And as I said somewhere else, it was past time for me to retire anyhow, so I did.

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