Look around.

+1 if I had it.

That's nice and all except that without some sort of law or regulation, stating that a company cannot work you over 40 hours without additional compensation, is pointless. Every single company I've worked for has been happy to have me working 60+ hours a week and I doubt I'm in the minority.

I was getting banged for $9.99/mo until I tracked down my son had opted-in to the free music trial and never canceled. Google cleared it up for me in a few minutes and refunded the last bunch of charges. No biggie in the long run and my kids got a fresh talk about app downloads.

I won't be contributing.

All this will do is add a piece of technology that is more prone to breakage than the gun itself. One purpose of the weapon is to defend yourself, almost always, quickly. The last damned thing I want on my gun is another locking mechanism that could fail when I need it most.

...that I wrote in PHP. We have over 140 servers and 70+ workstations. Never mind the switches, mobile phones, monitors, demo machines and loaner equipment. Keeping track of all that in a spreadsheet was getting a little tedious. It worked but it wasn't the best solution. I wrote something up in an afternoon using php and apache that allows us to add/delete/edit equipment if you log in using apache. If you don't log in you get a ready only view of everything sorted by asset tag number.

A friend of mine recently asked me the same question you asked here...and I gave him my code. I guess it is working nicely for them. Not much of a solution for you I know but I could give you the code if you like...

My friend was a painter almost his entire life. Years ago he got a degree and was a teacher. The only computer experience he had was playing the occasional video game. When he was in his late 30s he left painting to work desktop support. After a couple years doing that I got him a job as a Junior Sysadmin with my company and took him under my wing. Now he's in his early 40s and a solid mid-level sysadmin (4 years later). I don't see any effect on his career due to his age. Most hiring managers are probably just happy to have someone who knows how to fix the servers.

That's not greedy. That is doing what is best for you and your career. Why stay at the sinking ship taking less pay and doing even more work when you can move to another company that isn't as affected by the downturn and be paid a reasonable wage? Just makes sense. Good luck on your search.

For the last 8 years I've named all my systems after demons, except in a few instances. I used to work with a born again christian who didn't like the naming scheme very much and used to counter with religious names (he was a junior sysad with responsibility for a handful of our 200+ systems). Most have CNAME records that are more benign but even when users find out the real names they don't tend to care.