Bon Matin to all those "L"-Angels on this Chritmas Eve.
 
I usually ask questions and sometimes give a shot helping fellow owners.
But what the heck, it's Christmas tomorrow and I want to give credit to
the guy handling the VM system at Brown U., Peter Di Camillo.
 
Many new list owners complain that that rarely get replies when they try
to contact their local LISTSERV maintainer. Such a person normally
cumulates that job on top of many other IBM Mainframe assignments and do
that for numerous lists ... They may or may not have a say in regard to
what list is hosted on their system, whether it gives them more work or
not. They are kind of the "unsung heroes" of LISTSERV...
 
For once in the year, I want to stop and have all rookie list owners
such as myself reflect on something: Every time you find those guys
"hard to reach" when you are asking them mailer or LISTSERV questions...
Think real hard of the times they are so quick to act when there is
either a disk failure or you need something done that is under their
responsability (getting a fileid for a template like I just did).
 
When it's their turf, or should I say, when its Peter's turf, problems
are solved quickly and I'm duely notify often quicker than when I ask my
fellow BLUES-Lers for info. They don't meet and greet us very often but
they do a mighty fine professional job essential to us keeping our list
up... Praise those good maintainers doing quality work !
 
So every time you hear a newbie list-owner rant about the maintainer not
answering *his/her* mail, remind them of what they do ... Over the years
I had a few friends in system's staff and they are the ones loosing hair
over the weekend while the "system won't go up on production, while it
went fine on test" ... Time being a limited commodity they may chose not
to reply but from the quickness on relevant mail, I sure can vouch they
do read all of it (at least our maintainer does).
 
To all system's staff, and Peter in particular, a public thanks for
making my list a success... Even if we may tease you from time to time
on "legacy issues", we respect your work in keeping "the three-tiered
computer model" working even if we can do zip with PROFS (or is it PFS
or both ?)
 
All of you have a Merry ChristMaS (Merry CMS or Merry XMS for the
hardcore IBMers ;-)
 
--
Eric Paul-Hus, BLUES-L