the rules are now posted outside my office door.

1. Always observe the Friday Afternoon Rule.
2. Tuesdays suck.
3. Never talk smack about the servers where they can hear you.
4. Never say “no mail will be lost.”
5. Never, for the love of god and all that is holy, say “this is the worst day of my life.”
6. Never say anything at all, actually.
7. It is broken. We are all doomed.

Date: 30 September 2008
From: Random Internet User
Subject: I Clicked Your Dippy Imagemap, Whee

Uhhh… Sorry if I’m being rude or anything like that, but why is your site’s name ziggurat.org and it has nothing to do with ziggurats? Just a question.

it’s been twelve years since i first registered ziggurat.org, in October, 1996, when i was working for InterAccess, and domain registration cost $100 for the first two years and $50 each year thereafter, from the one place you could register a domain at, Internic (they were really Network Solutions, but no one called them that) — you had to FTP a form down, and then submit it back to them, and if you ever wanted to update your domain registration information, the change was authorized either by originating from one of the authorized domain contacts, by their alphanumeric nic handles, or, if you were very badass, signed with a PGP key. if, god help you, you ever had to call the internic for anything, you could write off the entire day because you were going to be on hold a while.

if i recall correctly, my nic handle was SD1439. a friend of mine was simply SN, which i thought was super elite.

Date: 1 October 2008
From: sabrina downard
Subject: Re: I Clicked Your Dippy Imagemap, Whee

A long time ago, I bought a computer and it had a chess game on it. When I’d play the game, the computer would call itself Ziggurat. Not long after, I installed Linux on that computer, and it asked me for a name for the computer, so I gave it the name from the chess game. A year or so on, I needed a domain name, so I stuck with it. That’s why.

cheers,
–sabrina

i was sorta right…

i finally managed to excavate enough boxes to get access to my desk today, and get the computer set up, and the wireless, and so forth. i plugged everything in and the computer happily rejoined my wireless network, and that’s the point where i went to go reconfigure the access point away from my old static ip ethernet configuration over to bog-standard PPPoE, and i realized that although my dsl seemed to be live, i had blinky lights and everything, but i’d forgotten to get my username and password from the sales agent on the phone. oops.

after sulking about it for a while, and trying all of the rather a lot of wireless networks i have within range all the way up here (seriously. there are like a dozen “linksysNNN” networks alone) and finding not one individual trusting enough to let me mooch bits from, i decided that… i would try the last username and password i had for sbc PPPoE dsl, and rely on basic ISP account maintenance incompetence to have prevented them from ever having purged that long-cancelled account from the authentication servers, and see if that worked. keep in mind, the last time i had sbc PPPoE dsl was when i lived in hyde park, which was before i lived in printer’s row last time, which puts it at about 4 years ago. it worked great! hooray for basic ISP account maintenance incompetence, the one thing that is universal through all providers everywhere!

Aaron Hamilton to me — 8:57 PM (1 hour ago)

I Mr Aaron Hamilton a secured loan lender,i give out loan to
Business Men and women who are into Business transaction, I give out long term loan for three to five years
maximum with 5% and minimum of 0.2% interest rate. In this you can as well tell me the amount you need so
that I can send to you the Loan Application Form to fill and return.. If interested kindly reply back for more
information.

Best Regards
Mr Aaron Hamilton

honestly. can’t scammers even afford a pirated copy of Microsoft Word for its built-in grammar checker?

i promptly clicked to see who else from my high school graduating class was on there, looked at their profile pictures, and realized we’re all old now, and closed the browser tab with extreme prejudice.

dammit. i can’t be old! i’m hip and with it! i have funny-colored hair! i have a sweet pair of red patent mary janes! i listen to indie rock! i … dammit!

i’m going to sulk over here in the corner and, like, do some retirement planning. stupid kids and their stupid facebook. dammit.

You see, I just got a cold call at work from a recruiter at that firm, asking if I or someone here might be interested in offering you employment. You are a system administrator who works with Windows, and does desktop support. You have ten years of industry experience. You are currently working for a bank, but you want to leave. I don’t know who you are, or your last name, but I know you make … well, let’s just say you’re probably not real pleased about gas prices or the CTA fare hike, but you’re not hurting for disposable income either.

This was all completely unsolicited information, that the nice man from Remington International just handed out to a random stranger on the phone, all because he happened to know I was an IT manager.

Had I had a business relationship with him, sure, it would have been reasonable to float me some background on a candidate. But I didn’t. I could have been Fredericka de Ville, the Identity Theft Specialist who dabbles in management in her spare time, for all he knew.

You need a better recruiting firm, one that isn’t going around randomly handing out details — especially details that could cripple your salary negotiations with a new employer. I wish I could get your resume so I could call you and tell you that, but unfortunately, if I expressed any interest to the recruiter, I’m sure he’d never ever leave me alone, and I like being left alone.

Good luck with your job search. Working with these guys, you evidently are going to need it.

cheers,
–sabrina.

• Got my Ravelry invite, so I set up my profile.
  • Have entered my needle/hook collection, minus the ones that aren’t listed (hey, the site’s a WIP!)
  • Have started on the stash (minus photos). May or may not take photos for the stash. Have not decided.
  • Only added one project, my ripple afghan, and its corresponding -along, and a few transit socks so far. I should really get better at posting pictures of my WIPs and FOs…
• Continued work on developing the new sysadmin blog. I’m currently writing up a 4-part series on m4, which will be familiar to at least a couple of you who’ve listened to me blather on about it. Next, I have to review a book — I decided that it could be a sysadmin blog for sysadmins like me, which is to say that management is on topic — called The First-time Manager, and finish a short series on bcfg2. I think at that point I’ll probably make it public, once there’s actually something to read up there.
• Struggled through learning to do performance appraisals/annual reviews for my minions. (Sorry, if you guys are reading this. “Employees” sounds stupid, and “staff” sounds like there’s 50 of us. Therefore, you are minions.) Successfully completed two of the three — typed up real nice, an’ everything. I think our HR person was kinda surprised she got them a week and a half before they were due. Thursday, I shall do the last remaining one, and perhaps she will then be so surprised her hair turns pink. That would be pretty entertaining.
• Speaking of which, I hacked my hair off really short and dyed it a bright purply red. It’s good to be easily amused.
• Am halfway through re-reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — my current transit sock has gone nowhere (hah) for the past two weeks as I put it on hold to read books on management on my commute, but then a few days ago I kinda got sick of that and decided I needed something less boring serious, so I (stupidly) decided to re-read OotP before the film comes out, so I will be adequately prepared to whine about what they screwed up. Actually, if they screw it up such that HARRY ISN’T YELLING IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME, I will be okay with that. I’m just sayin’.
• Rebuilt some shelves in my kitchen. I have power tools, and I am not afraid to use them. Go me!
• I redid the sidebar to this blog a little bit. You seriously have no idea how freaking tedious it is to download all those images from Amazon, resize them, optimize them, save them, and upload them. Hours, I tell you. Hours. Bah.
• I’ve been doing Crafty Daisies’ Learn to Crochet crochet-along. I feel pretty badass now that I’ve mastered the half-double crochet, I tell you what.
• And I put in several hours on my afghan. I’m up to about 25 stripes now (1″ of length, 90 minutes of time per stripe). At this rate I may be finished by, oh, January.
• I’ve been obsessively poring over my budget and finances for a week and a half, as mentioned previously, in pursuit of paid-off credit-card debt. I have a Plan ™. I am rocking and rolling. I am … tired of that shit, honestly. I want to turn 30 and put this mess behind me. FFS.
• Anyone know when SP11 will start? I’m dying to sign up. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do, to sit out SP10 due to time commitments, but that doesn’t mean I’m not jonesing for a fix now.
• Oh, and I went to go see a couple of baseball games that the White Sox flubbed horribly. Cheers, guys. At least the Beers of the World stand has Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat, which is not half bad, I have to say.

And finally: to everyone to whose email I have been completely slow in responding to: It’s not you, it’s me! It happens to everybody, baby! Just give me a couple minutes here…

anyways, yes, trying to think of a theme (to weave throughout said observations, vague complaints, lists, and letters, naturally). would anyone be interested if i were to try and make some sort of concerted effort to write up topics of interest to a sysadminly audience?

p.s. silence indicates assent!

it is very seldom that i get a resume which i do not want to return to its owner with suggestions on how they could make it suck less.

this is my “i’m not currently hiring and it’s sufficiently after the last time i was in on any hiring that i can get away with a posting like this without obviously offending anyone” post on The Top Ten Eight Ways Your Resume Lands In My “No Friggin’ Way” Pile, in order of immediacy of the discard:

1. MS Comic Sans. (You think I’m kidding?)
2. Any clear failure to proofread. Spelling problems, typos, incomplete sentences. I’ll cut you some slack for English not being your native language (if applicable), but there’s no slack available for failure to run speelchekc. If you can’t be bothered to check your work on your CV before sending it to an employer, you won’t check your work on any of my systems, either, which is not cool.
3. 12-point Times New Roman. Seriously. Likewise fluffy fonts, more than one typeface, decorative bullet point abuse, et cetera. This is a resume, not “fun with WordArt.”
4. More than two pages. If you give me three pages, there’d better be something noteworthy (…and it’d better not be because you used 12-point Times New Roman). If you give me four, unless I’m intrigued by the time I get to page 2, I’m not even going to read it, because I’ve got 12 more CVs that I got in today and not all of y’all are getting phone screens. Hint: a good reason for 3 pages is because you had to include a “Publications” section.
5. Failure to include educational history on the CV. I know a lot of techies are college dropouts; I’m a dropout myself. I’m not going to hold it against you. But I’m pretty sure you weren’t hatched at the age of 18, so do me a favor and write something down to show that you can be taught, okay?
6. Employees are not the only ones with bullshit detectors.
7. Vagarity and handwaving. Saying “Managed Active Directory Infrastructure” might be OK if you’re talking to a recruiter, who only has “Active Directory” as a keyword and has no idea what it actually means. I, on the other hand, know what it is, and I want to know what you did with it and what you ran it on. If you say you Managed an Active Directory Infrastructure and it turns out that means you put it on two servers and a node so that your receptionist didn’t have to maintain an addressbook anymore, I’m not really going to be impressed.
8. Seriously, “References Available Upon Request” may be the most trite expression ever, but if I request ’em, please actually have references available to me?

And as a special bonus, The Top Ten Seven Ways You Sabotage Yourself Once You Actually Get Past the Phone Screening:

1. Don’t look at me while answering a question I asked you. Full stop.
2. If it’s a group interview, answer my questions by addressing a male colleague. For the record, this happens all the time.
3. Interrupt me on a regular basis.
4. Make something up instead of admitting you don’t know. Bonus points if you make something up in response to a question I just made up in order to test your willingness to admit you don’t know.
5. Don’t even try to answer a question. If I ask you a question and you look blank and sit there like a lump, I will not be impressed by your troubleshooting process.
6. Express no curiosity. If you’re not curious, what the hell are you doing working in technology??
7. Mock or otherwise slag off your former/current employer. It’s not just tasteless, it’s irrelevant. Also, if you’re trying to impress me with said commentary, I guarantee you it’s not having the result you’re shooting for.

and oh, by the way, i absolutely do google you as a matter of course, generally as part of the prep for an in-person interview. if i find your web site and it includes materials that reflect poorly upon you as a person, i’m totally going to have that in mind. (this is, for the record, why i list this blog on my own CV. i like to think of it as saving a potential future boss the bother of looking for the embarrassing shit i write… though, admittedly, not much time savings since ziggurat.org is the first thing that comes up if you google me. hi, Dieter!)

but, although i am very picky, all hope is not lost. here are Top Ten Seven Ways To Get In My Good Graces:

1. Hobbies section of the resume. (Short, please.) I’d like to know you’re not a zombie and you do actually leave the Intarwebs from time to time. You’ll be a better employee if you have a broader range of knowledge, even if your knowledge happens to be of independent zombie filmmaking. I like zombie movies too.
2. Accept that you’re not going to know all the answers to the questions I ask, and be in good humor about the ones you miss.
3. Think through a question; take a stab at it. Describe how you would go about finding the answer, since you don’t know it offhand.
4. Ask what the answer is, if you don’t know and can’t figure it out.
5. If you had more stuff but you didn’t want to make your resume longer than two pages, since you know I have a dozen others to slog through (thank you), offer me the Extended Director’s Cut version of the CV in your cover letter.
6. Speaking of which…include a cover letter. It’s nice if you include a sentence that indicates you actually googled what the company does, and why you are sending me your CV.
7. Offer me code or documentation samples. I really like those if they are proof of the accomplishments listed on your CV.

well, that’s just a few thoughts i have been sitting on for a while. i don’t actually mind hiring; i like talking to people. but i do mind when people send me crappy resumes and think that i won’t notice that they consistently misspell LDAP and, also, they don’t appear to know what it is.

Edit, 2014-02-02: I just re-read this for the first time in ages. I think I mostly still agree with everything, except maybe I’ve relaxed a little about the 12-point Times New Roman thing. It’s the Word default, so even though it’s a big point size (that’s my main beef with it — using a fat typeface to take up space and make the CV look longer), I guess not everyone is a typography nerd and understands that sans-serif typefaces are the best for documents to be read on a screen.

Also, I got a resume the other day that kind of broke my heart, it was so bad. It was from someone who wanted to break into system administration from another field, and he’d been going out taking classes to learn Linux, but it was so bad. Entire paragraphs were boldfaced for no reason, and everything was double-spaced so it ran for pages. There were multiple glaring typos, one with “excellent communicator” right after it. (Facepalm.) Just completely obvious he hadn’t proofread the thing at all before submitting it. And worst of all, some of his previous jobs didn’t even list things he did, and he missed the absolutely golden opportunity to tell me how his previous experience would make him a good sysadmin, how things he’d accomplished demonstrated skills that would translate into systems work. There are so many portable soft skills that would look great on a sysadmin CV, but they just weren’t there. I had to pass on him, but even now, days later, I am absolutely dying to tell him how he could have made his resume a winner, but of course I can’t do that directly. So, I cry unto the abyss: Internets! Please! For the love of pete, spellcheck, and please please please use your resume to sell hiring managers on why you are a great fit. People who are lucky enough to have open headcounts really want to fill them, so if you think you’re right for a job, please please please make it clear why! And then proofread it like crazy, and USE YOUR SPELLCHECK AGAIN!

[regarding a particular open-source software package that is supposed to be the bee’s knees]
<GuyWhoRunsIt> the learning curve is *huge*
<OtherGuyWhoRunsIt> +1
<GuyWhoRunsIt> and the docs are ass
<niqui> hahaha
<OtherGuyWhoRunsIt> +1 ass docs
<niqui> well if those aren’t two excellent selling points i don’t know what is!
[PRIVATE] *GuyWhoRunsIt* you should seriously consider [OtherPackage]. :)