Today is the System Administrator Appreciation Day! Interview with the founder.

System Administrator Appreciation Day

In preparation for System Administrator Appreciation Day (Sysadmin Day) , Nic (Spiceworks) sat down to chat with Ted Kekatos, creator of Sysadmin Day and webmaster for sysadminday.com. I was interested in learning more about how Sysadmin Day came to be and hear about some of the fun events that go on during this most important IT day.

How did you get the idea to create System Administrator Appreciation Day (Sysadmin Day)?

It was a tongue in cheek offshoot from Secretary's Day (now renamed to Administrative Professionals Day.) Twelve years ago I was working for a software company and every year we would have a company picnic. Near our office building there was a pond with shade trees and we'd hold our picnic there. Different employees would volunteer to bring food and barbecue grills and make burgers and hotdogs. The picnic was always in July and it was that picnic that became the first Sysadmin Day party.

My inspiration for the holiday was a print ad that HP was running showing their new model at the time, an HP LaserJet 4000 printer. I had just bought several of them. The ad showed a sysadmin sitting in his cube. Outside of his cube was a line of users bringing fruit baskets and flowers. I tore out the ad and showed it to my coworkers. I thought "Hey this is great! A sysadmin is getting flowers, fruit and wine from his users!" So that was how System Administrator Appreciation Day 1.0 got started.

I was doing websites and domain names at the time so I went home and registered the name and put up a simple website. The last Friday in July seemed like a good day to have a company party with ice cream and cake so that is the day I picked as the official day.

Interview with the founder of System Adminstrator Appreciation day | Spiceworks