Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Maybe you heard? If you’re reading this blog, you probably did. Statistically speaking, you’re in the minority. Most people don’t know about it. Heck, it’s not a REAL holiday, so most people can’t be blamed. There’s no special section at Hallmark, you can’t go buy clothes on sale at Macy’s, and we don’t even get a banner strung across main street in a sleepy little farm town.

In the immortal words of Anonymous:

Any father who thinks he’s all important should remind himself that this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a whole week.

And Fathers Day has cards.

No, System Administrator Appreciation Day is put below many other holidays, most of which are just as made up as ours. We’re on the bottom rung of the holiday scale. Administrative Professionals Week (formerly known as Secretary’s Day, which got an upgrade of both nomenclature AND time span) is fully deserved. But more fully than System Administrator Appreciation Day? I’m probably biased, but I don’t think so.

At the same time, “System Administrator” is an odd sort of title. Technically speaking, it’s the title that I have on my business cards, but it doesn’t really describe half of what I do. I know most of you are probably the same. “System Administrator” also precludes non-system administrators who are just as valuable to the infrastructure. Many large companies’ system administrators wouldn’t have much to do without the dedicated workers on the network side. Network Admins, System Admins, security, domain, storage, and application administrators are all necessary and vital to the functioning of the entire infrastructure. But System Administrator Appreciation Day sort of leaves them out in the cold.

So here is what I propose: Let us take a page from the Secretaries’ book, and rename our holiday. Each one of those valuable people above fall under one titular umbrella: IT Administrator.

Let us celebrate “IT Administrator Appreciation Day”, and include the network admins, the storage admins, and let us have one unified front to present to the world, and to Hallmark. Maybe we’ll even get one of those cool cards with the lights and microchips.

Happy IT Administrator Appreciation Day.

I leave you with this…