California, 2007

Haven’t posted anything in a couple of months. Maybe because nothing much is happening, but probably because I’m realizing this blog is turning into a really long complain-a-thon.

So. Like I said. Nothing happening. Still working at this Silicon Valley startup, still not getting any raises or bonuses or overtime pay.

Overworked and underpaid. Not getting nowhere, not getting laid…

Losing what little free time I used to have, now that I’m on the phones 24/7, and people seem to prefer to call the 1-800 number at nine AM on a Sunday morning. Or eleven PM Saturday night.

Ah, well. Travel the world, experience interesting cultures, and attempt to decipher various exotic accents as customers scream at you for technical support.

Or having to wait to make a call until twelve midnight, waiting until offices open in Moscow, because you need a license key from the developers, and you need it now, because the new domain must be online by 8 AM tomorrow, no excuses, no allowances for DNS propagation time.

Ah well. I did know the hours I was prepared to put in. I did read the contract twice before signing it. I knew how much I was going to get paid. I knew that the first job I was going to take would suck.

I did think that I wouldn’t last six months before I’d be forced to quit and find another job, though.

Now I’m here, a year and a half in. Didn’t think I’d last this long, but hey. Wonders never cease.

Still, I haven’t fully adjusted to this life yet.

I think the term they use is "insufficiently socialized". Saying "I don’t get out much" is an understatement - I have been outside the apartment exactly three times in the past month.

Oh, I guess I can keep it up. As long as the checks keep coming in the mail, as long as I can pay rent and utilities, as long as I can put food on the table. As long as I draw breath, as long as I can keep sane.

All my life I’ve been looking for something I can keep doing for the rest of my life. A safe little rut I could get stuck in, and never leave.

For over a decade I thought that rut was in the university, teaching. Staying within my comfort zone (and that was extremely comfortable) just puttering around, pretending I was making a difference.

But hey. I was never a very good teacher (there were times when my lectures bored ME to death) and over the years I came to realize that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a researcher. I wasn’t an expert in the cutting edge of computer science theory. I was in systems.

Systems adminstrators are the janitors and plumbers of the Internet. We keep the pipes clean and the data flowing, and if we do our job right, nobody notices. And management believes that the stuff we do can be done by any high school graduate. Janitors and plumbers.

And that used to be all right with me. I’d spent months working on this insanely complicated multi-level web cache system, trying to optimize web traffic, making sure the scant bandwidth the university had wasn’t saturated by any single user. Building filters, routers, traffic shapers. Network monitors and automatic fallback routes. Multiple mail servers, active spam traps. 2 AM Sunday morning in the network room, fighting off a rootkit penetration attempt from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Hacking together an ARP-proxied firewall, so that the Windows viruses from the Devcom PCs wouldn’t infect the ones in Engineering. Setting up Samba to tunnel CIFS traffic between three separate physical subnets, across two buildings.

And after each little accomplishment, each little victory, there was nobody to talk to. Nobody I could brag to about how I finally got the hit ratio up to forty percent, or that the web failover successfully kicked in when we lost the UP Diliman link yet again. Or that I’d successfully installed Slackware (Splack) on an old Sparc 10, with my MP3 collection running on a SCSI RAID cluster cobbled together from discarded six-year-old drives.

Which was fine, again. I didn’t really crave recognition. I did stuff for my own amusement, and sometimes it was a happy coincidence that the stuff I did was useful for someone else.

And I guess it was time I gave that up. Oh, I guess the things I do now isn’t that much different, except that now, I don’t really choose which projects I do, and most of the time major engineering decisions are driven by marketing considerations. Sure, I can do this, but will it sell?

So. The hours I spend on my job haven’t changed that much, but the amount of time I spend working on the machines as opposed to sitting in meetings has decreased.

And I’ve always liked working with machines more than I liked talking to people. Machines are nice and deterministic - there’s always a specific cause and effect, nice and logical. Human relationships, on the other hand, have always given me more than a bit of trouble.

I’ve always had trouble picking up hints when talking with people. It’s that "insufficiently socialized" problem again. All these questions with no clear answers. "Why is she still talking to me?"  "Does she want something?" "Why is she pissed?" "What did I do wrong again?"

"Why is she pointing that knife at me?"

Ah well. Some questions I choose to leave unanswered. Especially when I know I’m not going to like what the answer will probably be.