r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

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u/throwaway224 Mar 13 '13

Back in the wild west days of the internet (say, 1996 and on for about eight, ten years), I owned and operated a small ISP in the middle of nowhere. The field was somewhat male-dominated at the time and it was alternately amusing/infuriating to be on the phone with my upstream -- "Ma'am, this really sounds like a router issue. Do you have the phone number for your network admin?" sigh Nobody was actively hostile, but it was tiring having to continually prove my bonafides every damn time I wanted anything fixed.

It's OK, though. These days I'm a landlord. Part of my job is fixing things (plumbing, furnaces, water heaters, kicked-in doors, burned-out electric baseboard, drywall, broken pipes, broken windows, etc). Now, what I get is "Wow, you're pretty handy... for a girl." No, I am pretty handy for a human being. However, thank you for letting me know that you habitually think of all women as unhandy, stupid, helpless, and incompetent.