Tech Support Drone

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.

I like my job. I enjoy helping people. And the conditions and pay are, over all, okay; otherwise I wouldn’t do what I am doing. Still, there are days when I just don’t know why I put up with it. Like today. Because today is a holiday in Germany, and I am sitting in the office along with some – not all – of my co-workers.

There’s not really much going on, either – it’s quite evident that a large chunk of our customer base is sitting in a beer garden somewhere. And worst of all, we don’t even get any overtime pay for this – just another day off within six weeks. Crummy deal.

My alcohol consumption is very limited. In recent years, I only indulged in some wine when I was in France, or when I got to travel business class on an intercontinental flight. (And then there was this one night in a hotel in Thailand, but that’s another story.) As a teenager, I never drank any alcohol at all. This is easily explained: There was a case of alcoholism in my family (an uncle), so I had a good close-up view of what alcoholism does to people. And my fellow pupils at school served as another negative example.

Anyway, since I have now lived in Munich for half a year, I thought it was time I should at least give beer a try. Since I already know I will not become addicted – I can barely force myself to drink the stuff – and don’t get drunk too easily, I figured I might as well integrate into the local Bavarian culture and at least see if I would like beer at all. People look at you a bit oddly here when you tell them you don’t drink beer.

So last week I bought two bottles of beer. Picked random brands, but something I knew to be Bavarian. Today I considered drinking one of them. And found out I had accidentally bought alcohol-free beer.

Can you spell “fail”?

I still didn’t drink the stuff. It’s amazing how deep old habits run.

My relationships have always been weird and, you will be surprised to hear, in all of my life I have never actually dated a German woman.

It seems there are three types or stages of women. There are the teenage wrecks: Young women here oftentimes tattoo or pierce themselves. There’s nothing wrong with a tasteful tattoo, although I wouldn’t ever get one myself, nor with ear rings, but pierced lips, tongues, eyebrows, and noses are instant turn-offs for me. Let’s not even mention nipples or certain other parts of the body; that you usually don’t even know about when you meet them. Wouldn’t want to date one of these girls even if I got paid to do it; when they spit on the streets or talk in slum slang it gets even worse. Young women – say anybody born after 1985 – seem to be severely uncultured. Luckily I can always tell myself they are too young for me anyway (although a girl born in 1985 is now 23 years old and perfectly OK to date for a 31 year old guy). They also usually smoke because they think it makes them look cool and grown up.

The second type is the emancipated bitch. Usually 20-30, they have two states: They’re fiercely single at times, too good to date anybody lower in standing than Prince Charming himself, which is followed by them hooking up with some kind of macho jerk who’ll treat them badly about which they’ll complain to you, wondering loud what the hell went wrong for this to happen. Once they finally figure it out and decide to dump the guy they’ll revert to the first stage of militant singleness. They’ll also usually smoke because they think it keeps them slim.

This is usually followed by the over-forty leather goddess type, women who spent their younger years going to the sun studio every week until they look like Larry Niven’s Protectors – wrinkled, leathery skin and all that. Even if they wise up by this point – fat chance – you really wouldn’t want to touch them anymore anyway. They’re usually smoking because they are addicted and depressed. Never mind that they’re a bit old for me anyway, thank goodness.

And while some Germans are very open-minded and global in their views and attitudes, a lot of Germans will have trouble looking beyond their own plate. I have moved to different cities three times in ten years and travel as far as I can as often as I can. What would I have to talk about with a girl who’s never been further away than Mallorca and wouldn’t consider moving from their home town if you put a gun to their head?

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.