Tag: work

During lunch yesterday a user said something to the effect of:

No offense to anyone, but I don’t think network administrators know what’s wrong half the time and they make good money.

I know the user didn’t mean it exactly the way it was said, but it still made me chuckle inside. This coming from someone who complained about their computer “acting weird” and needing help fixing it. Come to find out, there was a folder resting on the escape (Esc) key on the keyboard.

Trying to be civil, I bit my tongue and just remarked that every computer acts slightly differently. What I really wanted to say was:

First, there’s a huge difference between network administration, system administration, and help desk style support. Network administrators typically do know what is wrong, that’s why it gets fixed and business continues as normal. This is also why business critical servers are kept behind locked doors – so no other non-network admins can fiddle with them and muck something up.

Second, this is why system administrators in larger corporations lock down users’ computers. You are not typically given administrator privileges on your machine for this exact reason. The human factor brings too many variables into the situation and it’s rare that a user can tell you completely and accurately what exactly they did to experience this problem. Many times users will flat out lie to administrators as well. Nobody is baby sitting your computer use and looking over your shoulder. It takes time to investigate, meanwhile the user barely wants to give up their chair and certainly doesn’t want to wait for an administrator to investigate the problem – just fix it.

Third, do you really think companies would pay someone a salary to be right only 50% of the time? Don’t be so naive. Only meteorologists on your local TV station can be wrong that much and still keep their jobs.

Fourth, your opinion means nothing. You are a low level user that barely knows how to work your email and you even manage to screw that up. Why would you think an administrator is going to convey what went wrong to you? The details would fly right over your head. And eventually you would come to hate the administrator because almost everything that goes wrong will be traced back to it being the users’ fault. You would feel even more stupid on a daily basis.

I just have to laugh when someone who clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about shows their ignorance by voicing their unfounded and worthless opinions.