Does system administration dumb down the brain?
greatfog: From alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ v1.799999999999999998...
[http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/]  Perhaps Abby Franquemont summarized the life of a sysadmin the best, when she described us as:

  "disgruntled, disenchanted with things we used to really get a kick out of,
  foul tempered, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, overworked, with no real social
  life to speak of."

  Or perhaps she was being optimistic.

I have not had responsibility for the operation of a large computer and communication system since the dinosaur era, but I found the work so repetitive and tedious that it motivated me to go back to college and get an EE degree.Over a decade of lurking on asr shows that some sysadmins preserve sharp perceptions, wide-ranging interests, and pointed communication skills.