17 Ways You Know You’re a Sys Admin – Cloud Blog – VMware

In this 22^nd year of celebrating Sys Admins Appreciation Day, we reached out to the IT community asking to hear your horror stories, tips, tricks, and lessons learned over the years. After receiving hundreds of responses, from systems engineers and senior technicians to security strategists and consultants, here are our top favorite reasons to thank the people who keep our businesses running and thriving—and save our sanity regularly. 

1. You spend your weekends patiently fixing family members’ computer “issues.” 
2. You find lost data, seemingly out of thin air. 
3. You answer the question “Do we really need backups?” over and over and over again.
4. You read event logs when you’d rather be doing… almost anything else.
5. You explain “the cloud” to anyone who hears that you work in IT.
6. “Sorry, I don’t do Macs” likely sounds familiar.
7. Your laptop runs three different operating systems.
8. You kept all your friends and family working and going to school during the pandemic.
9. You answer calls from work at any hour of the day or night. 
10. You hear “the software is so old it won’t connect to the device” and still figure out how to fix it. 
11. You’ve, at some point, carried an actual pager.
12. Your nightmares likely revolve around production server changes you’ve recently made.
13. The words “blade,” “fabric,” and “tin” have very different meanings to you.
14. You’ve been asked to hack an ex’s computer for a friend.
15. When COVID hit, the only thing that changed was spending more time with your dog.
16. You have a server in an apartment, in a garage, and in a country house.
17. Your CLI work often seems like witchcraft to coworkers. 

A special thanks to the Sys Admins in the Champions community for their contributions to this article. Champions is a vibrant community where customers engage with peers, speak to experts and access exclusive content. Along the way they earn points and redeem rewards, grow their professional network and share feedback about their VMware experiences. Join us!