Probably you are totally clueless what it means to be the Admin. Most of the time is horrible, in our company its different per default. Most people are nice to me, I am often nice to people and problems are solved in the blink of an eye. The secret of the administrator is his spirit - his enthusiasm: If you are on an emotional high, a total disaster can't ruin your day. You are confident and coffee flows through your veins - everything is just fine as long as its technical. If your spirit is broken, you are lost. You are not confident anymore and as you go through the day, all the little problems will stack until it all befalls you in your weakest moment: 5 minutes before closing time. This happens a lot. If you know murphy's laws you know what I speak of - he wrote some perfect descriptions years ago.
The day, Paula first came into my office was a day like that - or more precisely: it was a night like that. If you get a pile of servers from your superior to play with, you will most likely be very happy and start hacking. You try ALL the things you always wanted to try and it all goes well and you have a lot of fun… until you talk to someone about it. Everything still is fine, if the person you talk to is not too fascinated. If you impress someone, though, it will backfire at you. Once you did something great and are way too happy to keep it to yourself, you will tell someone about it. If that someone is amazed, he will tell other people and show your achievement to them, they will do likewise and it all continues until your superior finds out. Then - in my case - she will force you to deploy the great achievement into the company network. In the back of her head, she always wants to paint a colorful picture of the company to the outside world with that. “Oh look what we can do now! Isn't that great?”. That night she wanted me to deploy the office automation system I developed over the last 2 months. In the beginning it was just a hacky thing to ease my life here in the cellar. Light, lock and entrance control from the office… neat. When my lady chief found out about it, she wanted it, too, so I did what I could. In that particular night after which I met Paula, the whole office control system broke down. I messed up - got the wrong configurations, compiled the wrong revisions and wrecked everything. I hit rock bottom. It was the first time this happened to me and … well, my self-esteem broke apart. I applied a million of hotfixes to enable the early day workers at least to get into the building… and of cause to enable me to escape. Yes, don't look at me that way: I locked myself in. It was no big deal! I often sleep here, anyway.
After 7 hours of wrecking and cleaning up again, the main entrance was usable again and the offices were reachable through one of the 5 corridors. I spent another 4 hours to reactivate the other 4 and then I fell asleep in my office - hit the loading limit of my work mania - my unbreakable youthful enthusiasm. To my surprise, no one even noticed the razzle-dazzle I caused at night and in the very same moment I made myself believe that some day I would overcome my terrible failure and was ready to go to sleep, it knocked at the door. It was not the usual “Hello!? Someone there? Answer you freakin' dork!”-knock, it was more hesitating, shy, yes even a bit anxious. I was to weak to respond. Someone slowly opened the door and a young voice spiked my tired spirit, that was so damn close to finding peace. Some problem with her word processor, she said, and that was when I remembered. When - that night - I was rewiring the access control gate in corridor 3, I installed a certain software compiler on a machine in office 3.29. It was a new office … I still smelled the paint and I felt very uncomfortable in that room. I hurried, the compiler wouldn't run and so I went the long way to my office and compiled there. Since I had neither heard nor seen that person before, I figured that like the office, she too must be new in our company. Whatever she was complaining about was not her word processor I suppose. At least if she really wrote her marketing texts into my source editor, that would explain, why she didn't get the results she expected. I felt a bit guilty, so she didn't get the treatment, someone suddenly interrupting my silent hour that badly would have gotten. I just got back to her some hours later when I was able to walk again. Anyway, she was nice… and among that she didn't blame me at all. I thought I at least wouldn't blame her then, too. It was my fault anyway.
Some hours later, when I got to her office, she already was gone… I fixed her PC and and called it a day. I was nearly 5pm anyway. When I fell asleep in her office chair, my head crashed onto her keyboard and I must have snored terribly, surrounded by the smell of fresh paint.
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