2004-04-20 00:27
by Vasil KolevI feel like drinking.
Looks like I have an explanation why most of the serious system and network administrators, and computer people in general either drink a lot, or smoke, or both.
In the last few days I didn’t have enough time to read all the mailing lists, and there were a lot of messages piled up in linux-kernel, nanog and full-disclosure. lkml s nice to read, half of it goes through the del key, and you can learn a lot of new and interesting things. But NANOG and FD weren’t nice – there are again discussions about the ways of solving some serious problems, like spam, infected machines, etc, and in the end as I see it, nobody’s optimistic – in FD one guy said that after MSBlaster the users should’ve learned how to update their machines, and some other people replied to him with counterexamples from the real world, that proved him wrong.
(I feel the urge to help in the development of a worm, which uses several different vulnerabilities, and one hour after infecting the machine deletes everything possible from the disk drive. Also, if possible, it flashes the BIOS. And starts playing some harmful noise from the sound card. And does seeks over the disk drive in such pattern, that it has a possibility to physically damage it. And… you get the picture.)
I don’t want to talk about the IPv6 related thread, looks like that IPv7 will be integrated sooner, because the people who manage the backbone networks, don’t see a lot of meaning in it – practically all problems, which it solves, are solved in IPv4 also…
So – We, the unable, led by the ignorant, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful :) Unable, because we’re made to do crap, which no normal and knowledgeable person won’t make us do, ignorant, because they really don’t know what and how can be done, and push a lot of stupid demands, impossible, because when you do something and explain it to your colleagues, they start staring at you and telling themselves “He’s been learning voodoo and black magic” (hm, does the ‘voodoo people’ song by prodigy has something to do with sysadmins? I have to check the lyrics), and ungrateful, because in the end they use it mostly to create more problems for us.
I don’t know how many of the people that read this will be surprised to know, that most of the people whom I work with would like to have some kind of punishment for being stupid and ignorant, and denying to learn basic things. A lot of them will like the punishment to be public, and/or deadly.
So, how could you resist the urge to get drunk as hell, to forget some of this crap?:) And giving up the job isn’t an option – it’s something we like, and if it takes getting drunk from time to time, to keep your mental stability – so be it, we’ll even enjoy it.
(no, I haven’t started drinking yet, I’m just thinking about it :) )