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.

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.