Okay, obviously Admin’s have nothing to do. At all. Ever.
What we REALLY want from users is the most ambiguous shit you could ever come up with JUST so we can spend the next 30 minutes either trying to figure out if there’s a problem with a server in the first place, or grilling you for the actual problem.
Say you can’t ssh to *one* of the several ip addresses that are on a single server. What you should do (and we love this I tell you) is IM your sysadmin, because he hates the usefullness of the trouble ticket system, and say “such and such server is down.”
Immediately start getting pissy because we start asking questions because you were vague. I cannot stress this part enough. We will not work faster or drop everything else (which is nothing, remember?) that we were doing unless you start to get personally offended that we are asking you a question.
When you answer the question, try your hardest to sound like you know what you’re talking about by using any buzzwords that might impress your sysadmin. When your sysadmin tells you that the thing you just asked *was* working, assume that your sysadmin is the one that’s clueless and threaten to escalate the “issue.”
Then, argue about it for a while longer until you actually feel like leaking out what is really wrong. Finally, get ambivilent about the fact that there wasn’t an issue in the first place, just that something changed because your sysadmin sacrificed your convenience in the name of something trivial like security.
Your sysadmin will honor and respect you and will never scan your computer for “unauthorized and prohibited” material on your hard drive.
