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