The main advantage to this is that I have root access to this personality, which has (very wisely, I may add) taken the name of sledgehammer.zippy.com. (I have nothing to do with that part, honest!) Many of us surf (or is that suffer?) the net from Unix-based machines. I am sure that more than once, when we have been exploring the damp, dark recesses of our home systems (possibly under the pretenses of finding the games directory on the system), the dreaded "Permission denied" error has hindered our path more than once.
Yes, many of us pine for the day when they can get the root password to their machine (although their mail reader has little to do with it.) We long for the day when we will never have to see the "Permission denied" error again. We would be in total control of the system, controlling the destinies of users, Deciding their social lives (for those cases of users who have no social life beyond IRC or USENET,) and even deciding which accounts live, and which get deleted. You also get a whole bunch of cool Unix commands that nobody but root can use. Ahhhh, the life of a sysadmin must be an easy one. Nothing to do but exercise absolute power over the users all day, every day. Almost too good to be true.
Of course, as are many other things in life, it is. The harsh reality of the life of a sysadmin is that he/she is more of a scapegoat than a (Grand Poobah/Dictator/take-your-pick) of the network (My preferred title is "Executioner". It is a proven fact that lusers tend to be major whiners. At times, it seems that there's no need for diagnostics on your server, since you already find out about everything wrong with the system (as well as every bit of knowledge lacking in the general luser populace) from endless whining e-mail and phone calls. The less experienced lusers will call to ask you how to do something that you've known how to do for years, then require it to be explained many times before it soaks in, and the truth comes out that they've managed to get 17 floppies in the drive at once. (For a more detailed description of these users, see column Repeated User Error--Launching BOB.EXE for a more detailed description of this kind of luser, and may others.)
There is one more point to consider before you take the bullet train to heck that sysadmins must travel down to build up sufficient cynicism to survive. I'm sure that all of you have heard the saying, "To err is human, but to realy mess things up requires a computer," right? I'm sure that for those of you who read The Sledgehammer frequently enough have seen plenty of proof to this adage too. For our purposes now, the phrase is modified to "To err is human, but to really mess things up requires the root password." Unlike in the Wintel environment, UNIX doesn't allow undelete. If you delete a rather vital file (or hundreds of them,) all that I can say is that I hope you back up frequently... A list of sysadmin horror stories can be found here (Note: This is a rather lengthy document. You may want to save it and read it later.)
The sysadmin of any given system is subject to plenty of whining and abuse every day, especially when things aren't working exactly how the lusers (or, many times, just a single luser) think they should work. For this reason, many sysadmins always have a LART* handy. Other things that are essentials to being a sysadmin are a significant supply of heavily caffeinated drinks of some sort (my choice being Mountain Dew,) and a good supply of excuses for luser appeasement purposes. A handy supply of one of these can be found at the local 7-eleven (or equivilent convenience store,) and a convenient supply of the other can be found here. For those of you who are novices to the fine art of being a sysadmin, the BOFH would make a good example to follow on the path to oppressive tactics to use against the lusers. Here, one learns such tactics as the "clickety-click," useful for deleting users who whine, and the fine art of making everyone else on a 100-node LAN share 2.4K of bandwidth while you take the other 125.6K for your "little" game downloads.
Still, the fact remains, that the life of a sysadmin is not all it is cracked up to be. There are many sysadmins out there who like to vent their frustrations on alt.sysadmin.recovery. If you ever find yourself mentioned on this group (particularly after a long and drawn-out talk with your friendly neighborhood sysadmin,) do yourself a favor and answer the Clue Phone.