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It's 1707 in the UK...

It's okay, you've got a couple of hundred years before you need to worry about computers. Watch out for the Jacquard loom, that will be showing up in only 94 years.

Clearly you don't work for a company with 500+ desktop users and countless outside users hitting various web servers every day where IT is at the core of the business (like say, a large e-commerce outfit or a telco). But even in those places IT is seen by many as nothing more than unimportant computer janitors, yet when for one reason or another no one in IT is around for a few days the entire operation comes to a screeching halt and some poor sysadmin with a high fever and a headache capable of killing large farm animals has to stumble to work to fix something that someone broke, the classic examples including someone deciding that it would be ok to cut power to the main on-site server room "for just a minute" (read: 30+ minutes so most servers shut down) so they can repair the elevator (because it's easier to just switch the power for the entire building off than taking 30 seconds to figure out which switch to turn off. And yes, this meant that everyone in our main building sat around doing nothing for the 30-60 minutes it took to repair the elevator and then another couple of hours while IT rushed to repair the damage), someone in senior management deciding to power-cycle the domain controller when they can't login at 8 AM (since they denied the required server upgrade so the domain controllers can't handle the load efter merging with another company which is now using the same domain controllers) and countless others...

And in case you're wondering how they managed to find the domain controller? Well, this senior manglement character actually called a person in IT (who was actually on vacation that week) saying he couldn't login, he was told this was most likely due to too many users trying to login at once, he then asked a few followup questions including the name of the domain controller. The person being asked these questions assumed this was just curiosity/research into the possibility of pushing for money for new domain controller machines, turns out this person had somehow figured out that if he power-cycled the primary DC he'd disconnect everyone who was logging in so he'd be able to login faster and since all our servers are labeled and senior manglement has access to every part of the building....)

Dear Anonymous Coward

You are about to be subjected to a rant.

System Administrators generally don't work for the IT department, at least not in the way you seem to think. The IT department is where you find the Windows support people, while the System Administrator is the one who fixes things when the IT department has messed up, and implements safeguards to make it harder for IT to mess up, and easier to clean up when they succeed in doing it anyhow.

To use a language you might understand, a System Administrator is to IT PC support like an accountant is to a payroll clerk.

And yes, it's very conceivable that a small company can do without a sysadmin on the payroll. Just like they can do without an accountant on the payroll. The services can be purchased outside the company when needed.

But when the brown stuff hits the revolving blades, you may be glad you have them.

System Administrator Appreciation Day is about letting them know you appreciate all the times they have kept the faeces away from the chopping action, without you even noticing.
The better the sysadmin is, the lazier and more overpaid you think he is, because his success can be measured in all the bad things that doesn't happen. When your network didn't go down while your suit buddy's network did, you get upset with the sysadmin because e-mails to your buddy bounce while your buddy's network is down. You don't appreciate him for your network being up, despite all the things you and your suit friends have done to bring it down, including (but not limited to) surfing teen pr0n from your overpriced notebook while at a hotel room, bringing infected USB keys from home, "bringing" a printer home because you thought nobody used it (in reality, it would print out ALERTS, which thankfully weren't that often), or buying inadequate and overpriced hardware to scratch the back of your suit buddies at the nineteenth hole, blatantly ignorant of the problems interfacing yellow crap to brown crap. No, you leave that problem to the IT department, who can't tell crap from their own shoes (with good reason). So when the sysadmin fixes things to at least working conditions, you get upset because he isn't productive, and doesn't give you a big smile.

Dear Anonymous Coward, if you took the time to look things over, you might be astonished to find that the company does better when you are on vacation than it does when the sysadmin is. Perhaps you aren't as indispensable as you think?