Thursday April 21, 2005

Blog 2 : Super Support Girl Vs Fibre Channel Offline Error

Today's been very quiet. Not much of Australia appears to be broken, which is good of course. My only customer isn't answering the phone, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to write.

I have eagerly awaited the new Coldplay album, though somewhat guiltily. Poor Chris Martin must be feeling so stressed out, and I don't want to cause him any further headaches. How can he possibly beat Rush of Blood to the Head? The new single sounds good, so it seems he had nothing to worry about. I did notice a significant similarity to Clocks, though. But I feel too worried for the guy to judge.

I imagine he feels similar to me, upon writing this entry. My first entry was a hit, and it was written straight from the heart, as all good blogs should be. But having such high level critics respond to me already may leave me tainted by the industry. How can I compete with that? What if all this attention has changed me? Should I ignore it and try to carry on with some false projection of innocence, or do I acknowledge it, inciting the wrath of my fellow blog artists who have never had any recognition and are plotting to throw eggs at me when I leave tonight? How can one cope with such pressure?

Write the damn entry and get on with it, stupid. Ok, sorry.

I've found after a year I finally understand the dynamics of the support team here. It really does take a while to settle, at least on the APAC team, because every country has different processes and varying 'customs', if you will. I find I talk to them in different ways. I don't think it's a kind of prejudice, more that I am trying to adapt to their ways and make them feel more comfortable. I have found my interest in the rest of the world has certainly increased now I speak to people from here there and everywhere. I no longer feel I'm caged in on this tiny island. I am aware of other cultures and languages other than European ones. I still find it amusing that India has to call the UK for their Sun support though.

The shift patterns changed me as a person in a major way. There is no such thing as breakfast and lunch to me anymore. There's not really any such thing as a day... instead I see time as a constant stream of 9am starts across the globe. I will shamefully admit, the Tsunami disaster at Christmas would not have been overly important to me had it happened a couple of years ago. But now I support that part of the world, and talk to people who live there every day, I realise these places aren't made up fiction I see on the news that might as well be on another planet. There are real people there, just like us, having problems with their backups and their RAID mirrors and now, unfortunately, their everyday lives.

I guess I see Sun in the same light. I sit here in this room, in a relatively unimportant geographical location, and make phone calls. I never see anyone else from Sun, don't really know what's going on at Sun, and can't see how it affects me in the grand scheme of things anyway. It's this huge entity I can't really contemplate. Or so it was until yesterday, when I saw blogs from all different types of people, about their weddings, Open Source, Java, Blogging, Sesame Street... Sun is full of actual real life people. Wow. I guess that was the point they were trying to make when they started up this blogging thing.