(Aftering being accused of “playing” sysadmin)
I remember back when I was younger, there was this empty lot in the neighborhood with a bunch of old computers in it that had just been tossed aside. Big iron. With a lot of vaccuum tubes. Punch card readers, drum disks, etc. All us neighborhood kids used to get together and play ball games in that lot. Sometimes neighborhood girls would want to play too, and somehow, us boys got suckered into playing house, doctor or sysadmin with the girls. Us boys would much rather have played house or doctor, given the choice. Playing sysadmin was the worst. The girls would make us sit in meetings where we would fall asleep. Sometimes, we could hear our mothers calling us to dinner, but we had to stay because “a server just crashed”. We’d have to do upgrades, clean up after a virus attack, and do backups. One summer, I got cooties from working to closely to a girl on a new project rollout to production. Which we promptly had to remove because the boy playing QA didn’t get the correct requirements from the girl playing PM, and his test environment crashed because it was setup incorrectly by the group in support. After turning 13, I got bumped to Level 3 support, and spent most of my time making out with this other girl waiting for serious requests to come in.
You’d be surprised how much data kids can pretend to process.