In college, I had the pleasure of being posted as the undergraduate system administrator for the computer science department working with graduate students on 200 or 300 mostly unix computers. We were called wizards. There is a reason. I’ve been working non-stop since Friday 6pm (it is now Sunday at 10:20pm) with a brief break Saturday night to celebrate my wife’s belated birthday. This was after an all-nighter Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning. What have I been doing? Recovering data for a database server that crashed. A business relies upon this data. My wizardry? Firstly, trying to bring the deceased server back to life. Secondly, finding the data, analyzing the data, rebuilding and merging tables in the database, bringing the database back to life on a brand new server.
To the non-technical this is magic. Even to those of us in the know, sometimes what we do involves prayer, miracles, and some lucky but it is all based on a deep, technical knowledge that I think we wizards take for granted. Weekends like this reminder me that I’ve forgotten more about technology than many people will ever learn.
Time to start my weekend chores.
