(fwd) Who's got a cool job?
Red Drag Diva
Just posted to alt.gothic. I thought it was nice.
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From: Tiny Human Ferret <kla...@clark.net>
Newsgroups: alt.gothic
Subject: Re: Who's got a cool job?
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 08:14:45 +0000
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acid church wrote:
>
> Do you have a job that is conducive to the good life? Does it have great
> benefits or somehoallow you to do what you love? Or does it just pay mad
> cash? What do those of you who love your jobs do?
I have a job which pays me quite well, thanks. Nothing outrageous, in fact I
make exactly the median salary for an American white male. However, since I
am single, don't go out much, and live at the family home -- 80 year-old mom
to look after, not to mention yardwork, etc -- the job more than suffices in
terms of income. I am actually putting cash in the bank nearly as fast as I
can make it. The benefits are also excellent, although I haven't had the
opportunity nor need to make any use of them. I am less than thrilled with
the retirement-account's performance, it's actually lost me three dollars
instead of making me the hoped-for thousand or so. Oh well.
I am a UNIX sysadmin. I don't have a degree, just 20 years in computing
in-general, the last five intensely into Linux as a hobby and sometimes as
an income. Right now I am holding down the fort on nightshift, mostly just
being the reasonably-trustable guy who has root on about three dozen
production boxes, another two dozen machines ancillary to the production
boxes, and maybe a thousand customer boxes in the field... not to mention
most of the nearly 1000 corporate workstations. Since UNIX is not exactly my
life, but pretty close to it, being the guy who has root on all of this
(mostly just l'il ol' me unless I want to piss off the development and
research guys-n-gals by waking them up) all night long... -well, that's
pretty cool. Mostly things run themselves just fine, thanks to the
combination of SPARC, Ultra, Ultra II, and Alpha hardware and NetBSD
operating system, and the development staff has gotten most of the bugs out
of the software. If anything goes down, though, it'll probably go down hard
and thrash the crap out of the network which means I will be earning my pay
cleaning up after the spills. That can be intensely exciting, in about the
same way as one might be excited by being trapped in a burning airliner
spiralling down towards an erupting volcano on a planet where the sun is
starting to go nova. Fortunately, the nice thing about being root in such a
situation is that you're the only one with a parachute who knows where the
ejection handle is... and I have a nicely organized procedure for escalation
and one bitchin' list of numbers to call.
Being root at night in a major-networking corporate campus is a weird
experience. In some ways, it's almost godlike in that I have ridiculous
amounts of access and power, and also the knowledge that things will work
best if I exercise none of that power, or exercise that power only where and
as needed. But every once in a while I get the odd thought and almost wish I
was more of a programmer, because there are one heck of a lot of spare
clockcycles hereabouts. Lord knows SETI@home could massage some data here,
"if only" -- but there are probably more worthy potential users, and we've
got so much bandwidth to and from those boxes that it practically beggars
the imagination. Of course, I'm only dreaming, I'm getting paid to make sure
things are working as directed, not do wacky stuff like track down errant
comm-signals from outer space... though looking at the 12-meter dish farm
out back, you might think otherwise. Hrm, maybe I can work something out
with one of the daytime BOFH and get SETI@home rdisted... heh heh.
There is one drawback, of course, in that I work nights and get in when
everyone else is heading off to work, so I don't have much of a social life.
This is less of a drawback than you might think, since I really don't like
people all that much unless they're close personal friends of which I have
presently very few. The job gives me lots of personal space -- the
engineering pit at night is not the crowded and hectic center of activity
one sees in the day, rather it's a very nice large personal office with a
bunch of workstations. Also, I'm getting rather beyond fashionably pale,
despite my efforts to get enough sun to prevent rickets. The neighbors
probably think I'm spending my nights lurking spookily downtown behaving
appallingly in pursuit of decadence of some sort, probably indulging
concuspicently in lewd and lascivious wise, undoubtedly in some dimly lit
dive full of chubby grrls in lingerie and leather -- that mysterious old
geek! And why do telco repairmen keep bringing more lines to his house! It's
unseemly, I tell you, and no good can come of it. But in truth I spend a
lot of time wandering around in a nicely secured building chock-full of
InterNet, checking the dials and watching the charts, and of course,
annoying UseNet.
A typical night: I come in, relieve the previous shift, read my mail as I
scan the traces of the day's activity charts. A little later, I wander
around and make sure all of the doors are really shut as tight as they
should be. I might wander into some of the stacks in the various
production-unit rooms, and listen to the hum of dozens of CPU and
powersupply fans almost drowning out the blast of the high-volume cooling
units. I watch the lights flicker, and hear the quiet and rapid
chunk-chunk-chunk of a few hundred SCSI drives erupt into a frenzied chatter
as the 'find' and 'updatedb' cron jobs kick in sometime after midnight, and
sometimes when the RDIST happens or backup applications poll the data
drives. I have no need for a boombox -- this is the music I like to listen
to; mysterious, profound, the work of one hundred thousand hands. The router
room is particularly interesting; it's really rather amazing how small are
the devices that pump 45 megabits per second of RF energy up to
geosynchronous orbit, or route traffic through the dozen T1s and T3s and the
OC-12s and 48s. I like to watch the lights: the steady green of a solid
link, the flash of howling streams of gigabit traffic headed out for a
bounce off of a bird in orbit, filling caches and streaming news and media
to four (soon to be five) continents. The rare stutter of yellow indicates
collisions but our router crew is so good we rarely see the yellow.
Hopefully I don't see red as I drift through the fields at the rack farm,
but now and then I get to jot down a device name and note a few parameters
and head back up to my desk to look someone up and give them a call. In the
rack farm, the cool breeze of the industrial cooler splashes against the
glass doors of the rack cases, mixing in temperate eddies with the heat
pumped from the backs of the servers, and the drone of the rack-case fans is
almost as comforting as the constant background lowing of contented cows.
There are no predators here, although if Carnivore was running on a few of
those boxes, I would not be surprised. Mostly, though, I am alone in a
strange kind of nature, walking in a dimension parallel to a world of
forests I can't see for the trees, knowing that there's "life" hiding in
those boxes, occasionally wondering if the elves come out to play when the
man has moved on -- but I'd never see them in any case, so to all intents
and purposes, I'm all alone in the night.
People live their little cyberlives on some of these boxes. Occasionally,
people I used to send e-mail to regarding problems with my account, or with
their machines, will now phone me and ask me to go unlock a cabinet and
powercycle their machine. I might just go flip the switch both ways and wait
for them to phone me back and report failure or success. I might have to
drag a terminal over and latch a serial cable onto the back of some SPARC
and kermit to the machines that don't have monitors or keyboards but
otherwise just serve serve serve. If some of these boxes go down, it's not
going to affect national security, but it could very well be that huge holes
would develop in the landscape of chat. Some of the servers here concentrate
UseNet into a stream that feeds the edges of the global InterNet, creating a
sort of donut topology of recirculated propagation. We're not the largest
news provider by far, but within about ten seconds of me hitting the send
key, this message will be literally almost everywhere on this planet, to
begin percolating from the edges back towards the "center" from a thousand
reception points connected to perhaps ten thousand networks all feeding into
the global InterNet. Whee. Aren't you glad I hate SPAM? Sometimes I put all
of this bandwidth to good use, scanning the world and occasionally finding
unsecured world-readable ports 119, and firing off letters to the
newsadmins.
I stay busy. Little ol' me, that stupid-looking guy in the camoflage cap,
driving a piece-o-crap little red Nissan station wagon because I think I
want to save up my money and buy a nice mid-range car new, nothing special,
screw my credit record 'cause I will pay cash -- if I can find the time to
even decide what I want to drive -- nobody would think for a moment that
such a complete obvious loser has the intelligence to pronounce "duh", much
less suspect that I've got root on enough UNIX power to take over a few
small countries. Screw them, _I_ know what I do for a living, and I'm glad
to be doing it, eight hours a day, I'm keeping the InterNet safe for
democracy.
But after the night's work, wandering around in the rack rooms in the
solitude of this strangely sanitary landscape awesomely and invisibly
populated with lightspeed electronic "lives", my relief comes, and I have to
leave it all behind, the godlike powers and the responsibility for keeping
an entire microcosm alive and well is ended for the day, and I believe I'll
have a drink. And the shopkeepers will take my money but what must they
think of that pathetic alcoholic in the camo cap that drives up and buys a
six-pack at eight o'clock in the morning and then goes home to his aged
mother's house to get drunk and pass out before noon. I'veot to drink to
get to sleep, to stay asleep to be sufficiently rested to have the mental
resources to deal with the unpredictable and rare certainty of a network
flap or a process path cascade failure. I need that sleep, and I have to
drink to get there...
Because I'd really rather be off at work, a town or two away from where
people spit as that drinks-before-noon alky drives by, disrespectful of a
man who hasn't got the _time_ to go shopping for fashionable clothes and an
accessorized ensemble or a tricked-out "personality" car... I'd rather be
the guy that nobody sees, making sure that if people who despise me want to
send each other e-mail about what a loser I am, they'll get their mail
because I'm the guy who likes to stay up when they're sleeping, making sure
to exercise diligence and responsible management of "my" small segment of
the support systems for their economy, their society -- their very lives --
making sure that all of this runs and runs smoothly.
I am a UNIX sysadmin.
--
Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae.
"...lame duck Congress, they're coming | I'm NRA, and Goth, and
back whether we want them or not." | I sure did vote!
-- Cokie Roberts | Enjoy.
(copyright 2000, all rights reserve. Non-UseNet retransmission prohibited.)
--
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"The pluses in my current job include laughing in the face of Nobel laureates
who have just lost the only copy of their data. (Hey, I'm still a BOFH.)"
(Bob Dowling)