There are No Hugs for a Network
Administrator
Douglas Chick
You
know, I get a lot of e-mail from aspiring computer people that ask questions
about being a network administrator, such as; what operating system should
they know? What certifications
should they have? In addition,
what are the duties of a Network Administrator?
These are all simple questions to answer.
NT and Unix if you want to make money.
Novell and Linux if you want to make a stand.
MCSE and CCNP if you want to be a network administrator.
A+ and Network+ if you want to work on a help desk.
And as for the duties of a Network Administrator...
The basic duties of a Network Administrator are maintaining the company’s
servers, data backups, network security, keeping up with the latest and
greatest computer technology, and assisting the help desk.
In addition, I admit that this is a vague description and it depends
on the size of company that you work for, or going to one-day work for, but
that is a fair description for my example.
Now in theory, that is what a network administrator is suppose to do,
what he or she actually does is say "reboot" a lot, take someone's
printer off of pause because there are over a hundred print jobs in the
queue because no one bothered to check for paper, so they all click print
ten more times each. Moreover,
if you really want to know what is the best certification, it's fax
machines, because for some reason everyone in the entire company thinks that
a fax machine is a computer, you’re responsible for replacing the ink, and
removing jammed paper.
I
can't tell you how many eager, new computer people that enter a company
smiling and happy that they have an opportunity to practice a job that they
studied so hard to learn, read so many books to achieve and reinstalled
software so many times only to become bitter and jaded within a matter of
three months. End-users are
mean, nasty, arrogant, demanding, without any accountability for their own
actions, and stupid. No, they
are very, very stupid. The kind
of mind numbing stupidity that one can only get from reading romance novels
and knowing the names of all of the people that have ever been on the show
Survivor. I mean if they were
retarded you would at least get hugs everyday, but you don’t.
What you do get is blamed for every stupid thing that they do on
their computer.
So
lets sum up:
Learn all you can about fax machines, wear a shirt that says,
"Reboot.” I can't print means Trigger Finger Sally is out of
paper and you'll need to start and stop the printer spooler, and 3 months
after you start your first job, read this again.
Finally,
of course, you don't get any hugs.
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