It’s Time to Explore My Feelings (or so says my horoscope)

So, yes, I’m on nights for another month or so. Nominally, I’m training somebody. Our night operators don’t seem to make it more than a few months. It’s possible that this is attributable to a pervasive incompetence in the lower levels of the IT ladder. The kind of people who apply for the job think that they’re God’s gift to computing just because they can troubleshoot a desktop or build a gaming machine. It’s a wholly different environment in a server room (and a UNIX server room at that). We don’t build our own systems. We’d rather have an enterprise level support contract, so we can have a new drive here same-day if we need to. We want remote administration (LOM, iLOM, whatever $vendor calls it). We want error reporting RAM and hot-swappable drive caddies. We want NAS clustering with intelligent rollover, and brocade switches. VLANs and BGP filtering. Yes, you can do all of these things on your own, but it’s generally not worth it. Troubleshooting comes down to the OS and application level. Enterprise-level hardware troubleshoots itself, then sends you (and ideally the vendor) an email letting you know what needs to be replaced.

Still, our night operators don’t make enough to be expected to know much about anything when they start. That’s why we train. It’s an exercise in futility. Without being here during the working week (daytime hours), you have no idea which developer handles which application. If something goes catastrophically wrong, or you have no idea what to do about some problem, you get to call somebody in the middle of the night. That person is often me. I’m ok with that, really. It’s far preferable to somebody who doesn’t even realize that there is a problem. Primary responsibilities of the night shift involve dumping files to tape. These are automated. An elementary schooler could handle it. Of our two night operators, neither one can manage. Mind, I’m training one of the two right now (and I doubt if the other will make it). This is day 6. Every night, he asks me the same questions. Repetition isn’t teaching this one. Documentation isn’t teaching this one. All that’s left to do is cross my fingers and hope that there’s a spontaneous genesis of gray matter in the next month. I suspect it’s not going to happen.

True, there is a language barrier. I don’t think that prevents one from following simple directions. If I tell you to type something, don’t blankly stare at me. Turn around and face the keyboard. I’d rather not have to spell “increment” for you each night when I watch you run one of our backups. At the age of 28, you should be able to spell “historical.” After all, you moved here when you were three. I’ve sent emails to better explain processes which are largely undocumented. I’ve walked him through the steps (ok, step: grep $thing /data/csv/spdump.csv) for finding when a particular stored procedure runs, or how to find the name of a stored procedure which needs to be run if a file hasn’t updated (it’s the same one-step process). He’s not going to make it more than a few weeks after training ends, and that’s fine with me, because you’re a cretinous lout with all the ethical integrity of a member of the house of Windsor.

It’s rare that I meet people with whom it genuinely makes me ill to speak with. This is such a person. The type who makes me realize that the modern feminist movement still has work to do. Generally, I have no problem fitting into any social situation or finding common ground with even the basest representatives of humanity. Suffice it to say that I’ve ceased speaking with him except when it’s necessary to teach him something (in vain). What kind of person complains that their wife is too tired to do the dishes, do the laundry, clean the house, and make dinner when she (by his own admittance) works 65 hours a week? What kind of person expects their wife to quit said job (which she likes) so he has more time to relax? Is it reasonable that he sees it as her duty, and hers alone, to take care of their children?

He’s a mentally stunted man, in every sense possible. After even fifteen minutes of conversation with me, it should be obvious that I do not empathize his plight. I do not agree that he doesn’t need to provide support for computers he sells. It’s great that they work at his house when he sells them. He’s selling them to people without much money, since in his mind, everybody should have a computer. Alright. I can see that, maybe. If that’s the goal, you should not bitch about people trying to negotiate a lower price as “cutting into your profit.” Selling computers which are lemons and cease to function after they are brought to the buyer’s home is not a pastime which anybody with moral compunctions engages in.

So here’s to you, misogynistic douchebag. I will relish with great zeal the moment in which you are escorted from the building, and out of my consciousness. I do not expect that to take long.

As an aside, what does it say about me when the only two people I can think of to invite to a wedding reception are my friend’s exes (note that it’s another friend’s wedding, and neither of them would really be appropriate)? Sure, I’m dating. Yes, H would likely come with me. I may meet somebody I like better by early August, but I’m skeptical at best.

It’s Strange…

I’ve never seen the point of a diary. Though I’ve never known anybody who actually kept one, recording your thoughts in a journal that nobody is going to see other than you is wasted effort. Without other people to go over your thought process, the chances of you getting any kind of benefit out of it are slim to none. Blogs are different somehow. I like the idea that people can review my reasoning and see a part of me which is rarely exposed to anything other than a pixelated screen or very close friends. I dislike that I can’t see the number of people who’ve viewed my blog here (of course, it’s been about twelve hours since it sprang into existence, but I didn’t see it anywhere in the dashboard), but that’s something which I’ll learn to deal with or code a way around eventually. It’s not at all a pressing issue, and I like the customization options available with CSS in Blogger much better than anything I happened to see on Myspace. Yes, CSS is an utter waste for a single page. XHTML/DHTML could do the job, but then I can’t drag and drop elements (not that I envision that happening). I seem to be digressing.

The last two weeks or so have been dramatic. That’s an egregious understatement. A certain friend of mine has been desperately seeking love for the last… well, decade? Sure, he’s had a few relationships. Each of them has been “the girl he’s going to marry.” Needless to say, it hasn’t quite turned out that way. I find the entire notion of seeking love to be exuding desperation in the worst kind of way. Sure, if you happen to find it, that’s fantastic. I’ve been in love, I think. It’s a a difficult thing to define. The fairy-tale, Shakespearean ideal doesn’t mesh with reality. Love is not enough to maintain a relationship on its own. You have to be a decent human being, you have to have a modicum of compatibility, you need all the other things that make two people click. Everything which is necessary for a lasting friendship should also be there in a long-term relationship. You can’t blindly hope you’ll go the distance just because there happen to be feelings involved. Eventually, those will fade, or they won’t be enough anymore.

If I’m anything, I’m a good friend. I’ll be there for those I care about no matter what how hectic things in my life may be or how ludicrous I find their situation to be. That is what I do. The happiness of those close to me is paramount, and I don’t really understand why. It’s not particularly important. Now, I’m no paragon of wisdom in a relationship, nor of virtue. I’ve been cheated on and stayed. I’ve tried to make a long-distance relationship work against all odds (multiple times). I’ve been drunk for months at a time (when I wasn’t working). I’ve also cheated. I’ve ended long-term relationships for no real reason other than boredom, never looking back as their lives collapsed into the void I left behind. For a while, I really believed that the thrill of the chase was the best part of being in a relationship, and there was no reason to stay once that was over with. All this has, at least, made me a veritable font of advice on what not to do, and how to fix a relationship (as well as when it’s not worth it).

Be that as it may, I will work against all odds to keep them happy. Even if I think it’s a waste of time, I’ll give it a go for as long as it seems feasible. Yeah, it sometimes makes me feel like a fool. That’s the way it goes. I don’t generally get in the middle of things. I’ll give advice from the sidelines and hear them out on whatever their issues may be, but I don’t play mediator. I’m a good ear, or so people tell me. I’m easy to vent to, and I give worthwhile feedback. Sure, it may be difficult to imagine, since I have propensity for speaking, but stranger things have happened. In this case, I got involved. It’s not as if I didn’t already know that they’d been having problems for a long time, but I wasn’t ever worried until recently. Though I didn’t ever see her much, there was a bit of a rapport, so I thought I’d inquire as to the specifics of the situation.

What I heard back was shocking and slightly appalling. I’ve been an observer to a couple of his relationships. They weren’t good ones, by any means, but I had attributed that to unsavory qualities in his exes. I still would. This was different. The more I spoke with her, the clearer things became. As noted, I understand where she’s coming from. I know her situation, her priorities, his problems. However, I was oblivious to the particular circumstances of their relationship. After a short period of time in the beginning, he wanted to tell her that he loved her. I told him it was a mistake; I told him that he’d freak her out, and she’d run (with good reason given the briefness of their involvement). I was right, and he elected not to tell me. As time went on, fights over trivial things began to occur. His obstinate refusal to compromise (or take care of himself in the most basic fashion) ended things more than once. These were not the reasons he told me (in fact, he never gave me reasons). Things came to a head because he didn’t think it was reasonable to sacrifice anything in his life in order to begin one with her. Things got fixed for a little while, but soon collapsed again.

Regardless, the point of this is not to go over his mistakes and where he went wrong. He hasn’t learned anything in years. I find that those I’ve kept in touch with the longest, by in large, are quintessentially the same as they were when I met them. There’s been no rise in maturity, no progress. They have not read a book since high school (sourcebooks do not count). Even then, they did very little other than what was required of them. Their interpersonal relationships are at the level mine were at when I was 19. We have essentially the same conversations we had back then, except we’re talking about new games or movies. It’s tragic. I love those guys to death, I just wonder how much longer we can keep going like this. It says something when the people who enjoy seeing the most are those who I reconnected with in the last year, and it’s not good.