The System Administrator Appreciation Day or simply SysAdmin Day occurs on the last Friday of July. In an interview to Spiceworks in 2011, Ted Kekatos, the creator of SysAdmin Day, explained how it all began. Below is a extract from that interview.

Twelve years ago I was working for a software company and every year we would have a company picnic. Near our office building there was a pond with shade trees and we’d hold our picnic there. Different employees would volunteer to bring food and barbecue grills and make burgers and hotdogs. The picnic was always in July and it was that picnic that became the first Sysadmin Day party.

My inspiration for the holiday was a print ad that HP was running showing their new model at the time, an HP LaserJet 4000 printer. I had just bought several of them. The ad showed a sysadmin sitting in his cube. Outside of his cube was a line of users bringing fruit baskets and flowers. I tore out the ad and showed it to my coworkers. I thought “Hey this is great! A sysadmin is getting flowers, fruit and wine from his users!” So that was how System Administrator Appreciation Day 1.0 got started.

I first learned about SysAdmin day when I worked as a Unix System Administrator at Linkbynet Indian Ocean. They followed this tradition and the company would give gifts to all SysAdmins.

Image source: xkcd.com