Today is somewhat of a special day.  In fact, it is one that I hold dear to my heart.  Yes, today is “System Administrator Appreciation Day”.

For those of you who don’t know what a System Administrator is or does, maybe this small list will help you out. I got these from the official System Administrator Appreciation Day Site. Here are just a few of the things that a System Administrator does.

1. A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.
2. A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.
3. When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.
4. A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.
5. So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.

System Administrators are important people. Though not more important than anyone else, they do play a huge role in most others getting ANYTHING done. Take a moment to thank your System Administrator for what he/she does. They will appreciate it.