Last week you proved you’re creative and clever. This week we want to see your funny side.

Every profession has its standard-issue jokes. Among the more well-known are the one about the lawyer and the ambulance:

Q. What do you call a lawyer who doesn’t chase ambulances?
A. Retired

And the one about the slacker musician:

Q. What do you call a musician who breaks up with his girlfriend?
A. Homeless

We know great sysadmin jokes exist, so shoot us an email at sysadminday at opendns dot com and share the funniest ones you know. Like the previous challenges, the winner gets a $50 gift card from American Express. You have until this Friday at 9 a.m. PST to submit an entry.

I thought about summing up this post with a haiku of my own, but this week’s winner is too good to compete with. Huge congratulations to Kirk Friggstad, the winner of OpenDNS SysAdmin Challenge No. 2.

We asked all of you, Kirk included, to compose a haiku about what it means to be a sysadmin. The response was overwhelming and on behalf of the whole team, thanks to everyone who took the time to submit. You guys kept us laughing all week long.

Kirk submitted a series of haikus, each one seemingly funnier and more clever than the previous. Here’s the one we selected for the crown:

“Evening Reflection”
—————
Moon shines on water
Crickets chirp in the tall grass
Damn, it’s my pager

Stay tuned right here for details about the next in the series of four SysAdmin Challenges, to be announced on Monday. And for your reading pleasure, here are a few more of Kirk’s submissions, at least a couple being solid runner-ups.

“Server Room”
————–
Summer clouds float by
No, it’s smoke from the Dell rack
Watch out for halon

“With No Power Comes Great Responsibility”
—————
A quiet peace comes
Beeps and fans fall silent now
Power supply fails

“On the Help Desk”
—————
The one true answer:
“Try turning it off and on”
Words of great wisdom

“The Last Day”
—————
Where is that backup?
I swear it worked yesterday!
Work on resume.

There are 17 days left until SysAdmin Appreciation Day, which means it time to unveil challenge No. 2.

This week we ask you to go deep inside yourself and find your inner poet. Write a haiku on a topic that is intimately familiar to you: What it means to be a sysadmin. Compose the poem – the funnier the better – and send it to our judges at sysadminday at opendns dot com.

For those of you less poetically inclined, the only guideline we’ll give you is that haikus are generally three lines in length. That’s not to say yours needs to be, but it should give you a starting point.

Here are a few examples from Librenix:

“Email Dilemma”

Mail is killer app
spam overflows my quota
I need new mailbox

“The Script Kiddie”

My server was hacked
SSH had a hole
now my box is 0wned

The rules are the same as last week…

First place gets a $50 American Express gift card.
You have until Friday at 9 a.m. PST to submit an entry.

Good luck sysadmins, and remember: You have to send in your entry via email to the address listed above.

We asked you to tell us about the time your boss demonstrated an absolute lack of understanding of the SysAdmin profession. Submissions are in, votes have been tallied and the decision is unanimous. I trust you’ll agree the submission that takes SysAdmin Appreciation Day challenge No. 1 is worthy.

Read and laugh, ’cause you know you can relate.

So, it’s our Y2K preparations, and we’re having a project review meeting to go over our timeline and completions.
(more…)

With less than 24 hours left in the first of four SysAdmin Day challenges, I strongly encourage you to send in your submission.

Tell us about the time your boss asked you to do something ridiculous – something that demonstrated he/she has zero understanding of your job.

We want to hear it! Best submission gets a prize. (Hint: it’s a gift certificate.) You get bonus points for making us laugh out loud.

Send an email to sysadminday at opendns dot com.

Good luck SysAdmins!!

Office Space is a funny movie cause it’s kinda true.

We’re all a little bit like Peter Gibbons, asked to come in on a Saturday and reprimanded for not following some stupid office protocol. We all feel a sense of liberation when Peter, after candidly telling the Bobs about his lack of productivity, announces to his love interest he simply “is not going to go” to his job at Initech anymore.

Hopefully your Lumbergh is not as bad as the one in the movie. Hopefully your boss has an idea how much work goes into keeping a network running, and recognizes you for your efforts. Unfortunately, that’s not likely.

We challenge you SysAdmins — tell us your personal Lumbergh story. Send an e-mail sysadminday at opendns dot com. Best story wins.

Once a year, we honor the person who keeps the mail server running, restores the file you accidentally deleted and makes sure you can watch funny videos of cats. This person is the SysAdmin, the unsung hero of every great company. Ours is George. George makes sure that the right wires are connected to the right routers to the right switches to the right servers, which are connected to the right databases so that you get the best DNS service in the world.

At OpenDNS, we make the SysAdmin’s life easier every day by giving you all those green checkmarks signifying day after day of zero downtime along with the features to help make doing your job easier. SysAdmins are so important, we think it’s lame they only get one day of honor. It’s no secret that most times the SysAdmin only gets recognized when things go wrong. So this year, OpenDNS is celebrating SysAdmin Day throughout the month of July, not just on July 27th.

Every Monday in July we’ll deliver you a challenge, and every Friday we’ll announce the winner on our blog. Only SysAdmins are welcome to participate. Prizes will surely be something you consider a gift. (Hint: It won’t be more DNS uptime. You’re using OpenDNS, so you get that anyway. Hint 2: It includes the words “Gift” and “Certificate.”)

The guys at AdminSpotting sum it up so well, so we thank them for the below poem. There were a few bad words we left out of our version, read theirs for the original, in all its SysAdmin-y glory.

Read and enjoy, SysAdmins. It’s not just your day, it’s your month.

Choose no life. Choose no career. Choose no family. Choose a big computer, choose hard disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office in a range of fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why you’re logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, [omitted] up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate. Choose your future. Choose sysadmining.