At a ceremony on April 9, 2009, the CalMail Dynamic Duo — IST's Paul Fisher and Jim Blair — received the Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award (COSA). These awards are presented to teams and individuals who, in addition to performing their normal job duties with excellence, also take initiative and go above and beyond in their contributions to the UC Berkeley campus community and mission. The Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award is among the highest honors bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor. The Chancellor's Staff Advisory Committee (CSAC) established and administers the award on the Chancellor's behalf.
The following was read at the ceremony:
Paul Fisher and James Blair, affectionately called "The CalMail Dynamic Duo", are the principal administrators for CalMail, the campus email environment. This critical piece of campus infrastructure provides 24/7 email service to over 70,000 account holders. Over the past few years, Paul and Jim have revitalized and improved CalMail for long-term reliability and sustainability. In the words of their nominator, "Please join me in acknowledging these outstanding individuals who have worked as a team, tirelessly over many weekends, nights, and holidays during the last several years, to make sure that neither rain, sleet, snow, viruses, hardware failures, or software upgrades have prevented delivery of your important email messages — all 100 million of them."
Please join me in congratulating Paul and Jim on receiving this impressive and well-deserved award.