Tech Support Drone

Here’s what my relationship with Lin is like at the moment: She tells me that she likes me and wants to be with me, but still insists that she’s in Tokyo. In reality, she is in Berlin. I pretend I don’t know about this, and try to encourage her to make up her mind and stop the pretense. I feel very annoyed and depressed by all of this. It isn’t so much the suspense of not knowing what’s happened inside the box; it’s just that at my age I feel tired of this type of game. I am almost at the point where a dead cat wouldn’t bother me so much – sure, it would be sad, but at least it’s a kind of closure.

Am I taking the analogy too far?

But why do girls have to make everything so difficult? Why couldn’t she just say, “hey, I will study German in Germany, when it’s all done I’ll visit you because I really like you”? Or just do her German class and stop pretending to like me. And it’s not like I had a weak moment and professed my undying love for her, and she’s just trying not to hurt me – she started it.

I am much simpler. If I like a girl, I’ll either tell her or shut the hell up. If a girl tells me to get lost, I get lost and never bother her again. If a woman likes me as well and we start a relationship – no matter how tentative – I do my best to make it work. And I never, ever tell lies to a girlfriend. Nothing on the scale of pretending to be on the other side of the world for months when I am basically next door.

I’d just tell Lin to go to hell – except that, unfortunately, I like her. So I let her walk all over me. What a pathetic geek I am.

“I cannot configure my cluster,” the customer told me on the phone. “I need your help.”

“What is the problem, sir?”

“Every time I connect to my server, it just disconnects me.”

“How do you connect? Telnet, ssh, web gui?”

“SSH. The web page does work.”

I pondered this for a moment. I had the customer check that ssh access was actually enabled. It was. So I asked the customer to tell me exactly what steps he was taking, and how exactly he was getting disconnected. Did the connection get refused, or closed?

“Closed – it just says ‘disconnected’ in Putty’s text window.”

Wait a minute. Putty doesn’t do that.

“Sir, it doesn’t mean your ssh disconnected – it just means your cluster nodes are disconnected. If you try to enter some text, it should work.”

“You know something,” the customer replied after I heard some keyboard clicks, “it does.”

Well, another job well done. I then walked the customer through a configuration I had never seen before – I am still learning about these products – and it actually worked afterwards. At least I now know why I am sitting on this end of the telephone line.

Until the end of last year, I was an infrequent player of World of Warcraft and Eve Online. This is actually an interesting thing because I don’t really like either games. I find both to be very repetitive. At elast Eve-Online is well-balanced and pretty well designed; something that can’t be said about World of Warcraft. On the other hand, World of Warcraft at least has some role-playing going on.

After I moved to Munich at the beginning of the year, I canceled my accounts. This was mostly done because I was on a short budget (moving costs a hell of a lot of money). With one WoW and two Eve accounts, that’s about 45 Euro a month or – now get this – 540 Euro a year. No wonder everybody and their pet dog are jumping on the MMORPG-bandwagon!

I had originally considered to subscribe again once my bank account had filled up a little, but to be honest – I couldn’t care less. Yes, there are some people I left behind – especially in World of Warcraft – that I would never talk to outside the game. But you know what? If a friendship can not exist outside an artificial world, then what kind of a friendship is it anyway? And, yes, I did try to keep in touch. My MSN messages remain unanswered half of the time.

“Sorry, I was busy raiding.”

Well, good for you.

This morning I got spam for:

• Wine
• Cigarettes
• Penis enlargements
• Breast enlargements
• Viagra

Sounds like spammers know how to party.

I may be a terrible geek, and rather plain-looking too, but I can proudly say I have had plenty of relationships over the years. However, it seems that most of these relationships are really, really weird.

My current “girl of interest” is a Chinese girl who lives in Japan. Let’s call her Lin. She isn’t officially my girlfriend – the distances involved are way too large for this. However, we spent some great vacations together in the past, in Japan, China, Thailand, France, Germany, and a few other countries; and we talk to each other almost every day.

Of course we’ve discussed the problem of distance in the past, without any real conclusion. It’s just very hard for me to learn Japanese, or Chinese for that matter; and even if I did it would literally be years before I could speak the language well enough to live there.

Things have moved ahead a little recently; two months ago she told me that she signed up for German classes, which would begin in May. She claimed there was no deeper reason for it. “After I was in Germany, I simply became interested in the language.”

Right.

That’s not the weird part yet. Near the end of April, she suddenly disappeared for a few days. I was already starting to get worried, but she showed up online again and everything seemed back to normal. Except she replied to my text message with an email, didn’t want to be called on Skype, and significantly changed her behavior online as well.

I finally figured out what is going on, partially at least. Her email shows that she’s currently located – get this – somewhere near Berlin. She’s completely avoided mention of this, pretending to still be in Japan; and she hasn’t showed up here in Munich either.

I am fairly certain she didn’t find herself some other guy in Germany; and when I asked her why she’s acting so oddly she said she would explain it soon, but it “wasn’t anything bad”.

I am not sure whether I should be happy – because she’s learning German – or angry – because she’s not telling me what’s going on. I guess I just have to wait and see what happens.

So let’s get started with the most important thing on this blog: Me. I write it, so without me there wouldn’t be any blog. Ha. Take that, modesty.

The foundation of this weblog, yesterday, coincides with my birthday – May 5th, so I am now a 31 years old guy (or “old man”, as I tend to think of myself). I live in the beautiful city of Munich, Germany, but was born elsewhere; I came here in December of 2007 to start my current job in technical customer support for a very large multi-national IT company. Hence “Tech Support Drone”. I like my company, and I like my job, but if you know IT you’ll know that it is a very thankless job and you get to talk to a lot of people who should clean streets instead of admin computer networks. We’ll get into that more over time.

As a self-professed geek, I have an interest in science and technology in general. I read (way too little at the moment) and I also write (just for fun, I don’t publish stuff). I enjoy traveling, and while I am not the most-traveled geek in the world, I have gotten around as much as I could afford to. And of course I also treasure a good game of Dungeons & Dragons (or one of the various derivatives) but haven’t found a gaming group here in Munich yet.

I’m single – this isn’t to say that I am a hermit, like many geeks tend to be, or that I am a thirty-year old virgin. Rather, I suffer from the problem of seemingly being unable to find a woman that is interesting enough and that I can get along with for extended periods of time. I’ll get into more detail later; my relationships tend to be weird and messy. I am currently interested in a Japanese girl, where the complication is that she’s back in Tokyo for now. As you can imagine that isn’t helping.

I think this covers the essentials. That’s little old me – unfortunately not a millionaire playboy, but I guess I could have had worse luck in life so far.

I just turned 31 and I guess I am getting to the point where I don’t tell myself “you’re not that old yet”, and instead begin to question my life thoroughly. I am not really unhappy with it, but it does leave some things to desire, and there’s a lot of stupid stuff going on in my life. So this weblog will serve a simple dual purpose:

1. A diary of the weirder moments of my life, including zany tech support stories
2. Angsty self-examination in an effort to understand and improve myself and my life

I’ll also throw in a good measure of things that interest me – I am a geek and this is my blog; we’ll see what happens.