Tech Support Drone

“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.

The night before last night I slept really badly. I was feeling sick in the evening and felt sick in the morning. However, when I was about ready to go to work my stomach had calmed down sufficiently that I decided this shouldn’t be my first sick day of my career and went to work.

During the day, two colleagues told me I looked awful. “Hey Support Drone, you look even worse than I do,” said one. “And that’s an accomplishment.” The other remarked on my unhealthy yellowish simpsonesque appearance. D’oh.

So I went home at 5pm for a change. Early bedtime for me sounded like a good idea.

Only I couldn’t sleep until about 11pm. Wasn’t even remotely sleepy, so I played around with Inkscape (I am trying to learn). When I finally did fall asleep, I had a nightmare about space aliens impregnating Earth women and trying to colonize the planet that way. Woke up at 3am, couldn’t sleep again until 5:30. At least I got an extra hour of sleep before I had to get going.

Wonder what my co-worker will say today. So far I feel relatively relaxed. But tonight I better catch a full eight hours of sleep, or I will be downright grouchy tomorrow.

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 I finally made myself drink the alchol-free beer I accidentally bought. I must admit: I threw most of it away. It just didn’t taste nice. I guess it sort of tasted like a watered-down lemonade, except someone used burnt wheat instead of lemons. How anybody can get addicted to this stuff is quite beyond me.

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.

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.