We’ve been asked along with The Mary Sue to help adjudicate the ThinkGeek’s annual SysAdmin Pageant. Based off your submissions, we’ll be choosing the best and most worthy SysAdmin King to reign for 2011.
If you have a sysadmin that is in dire need of getting some recognition, be sure to nominate them! It’s a painless process, honors a no-doubt hard working and under-appreciated person, and could win your SysAdmin (yes, yours!) some totally awesome prizes — including $50 in movie tickets from Geekosystem. So get out there, and nominate! The contest is open until midnight on the 28th, so there’s still plenty of time before a new SysAdmin King and Queen are crowned!
With that in mind, we’d like to share with you some choice excerpts from the nominations, starting with this shocking look at what a SysAdmin likely deals with on a daily basis.
Picture if you will, your grandmother, Aunt Edith and your Amish cousin on rumspringa using a computer. Now bump that number from 3 to about 120 people and you’ll find yourself at my place of employment.
And then we have this lovely little ditty penned in honor of a much-beloved SysAdmin. I’m not sure what the tune should be, so try and work it out for yourselves.
Thank you for helping me fix my iPod,
I’ll admit.
I’m an idiot.
When it comes to things that flash,
When it comes to things that blink,
When it comes to things that crash,
When it comes to things that clink,
I can’t think.
After the earlier look at the workplace the SysAdmin supports, we turn now to this look at the dwelling of the sysadmin himself.
Our amazing SysKing works by flickering LCD light in a window-less cave made of various cables and hardware on the fourth floor of our building. He subsists solely upon chai teas and tacos. The only sounds from his office are occasional coded squawks from the CB radio stashed on the back-wall equipment pile, though one may hear Master of Puppets if it’s a particularly good day, or a Friday afternoon. He is bearded. He is sarcastic. He is asking you to put it into a help request.
He is Kevin.
Closing out our stroll around the submissions comes this highly artistic and oddly poetic description.
MY sysadmin is a superhuman cyborg machine who doesn’t afraid of anything.
Truly, words to live by.
