Personal Dork Assistant

Altitude 35,000ft, airspeed 605mph heading east along the TPE-SFO great circle, north of Hawaii

Heading back to the States after a month in Taiwan. Felt like the time went by awfully fast, but it also feels as if it was much more than just one month. Got a job, got a girlfriend, both kind of by default, although it did require that I'm relocating halfway around the world, so it wasn't totally trivial. Although when it came to the fork in the road, I do feel as if I'm taking the road more travelled by.

Yes, nepotism is good, as I kept alive my lifelong streak of not ever honestly looking for a job. Uncle initially suggested that I not be on the payroll, so I wouldn't have to punch the clock and come and go as I like. Perhaps he was skeptical as to whether I could keep up witht he 8am to 5:30pm workday, especially with the one-hour one-way commute from home. Anyway, mom told uncle that it's a dumb idea, and I stuck to the schedule, so after a week, the personnel lady came by with my employee ID and I was officially on the clock. I even got my company jacket, which was nice to have because they jack up the AC pretty good at the office. Of course, it wasn't really my work ethic or anything, but because I had to be officially employed to get a National Health Insurance card, not to mention the bank account, credit card, and cell phone. Thankfully the company people helped me set up all these trivial but vital living details that I hate dealing with, especially now that I'm functionally illiterate. The managers are all old hands so they know mom and know my relations. The regular peons don't know that I'm related to the boss. I've just told them that I came back from the US to take a job. Some might've noticed the special treatment, though, like how I'm not doing all that much work, and how the accounting lady handed me $20K in travelers checks to take home to mom (I held on to my bag with a death-grip on the way home that day).

So what am I doing to earn my keep? Darned if I know. Uncle was forcefully vague in what he wanted me to do, so the manager couldn't really order me around. So all I got was an endless stream of email to wade through as uncle made the Foreign Sales team CC me on all their communications. This made things awkward on the US end for uncle WS as his salespeople are suddenly CC'ing all their sensitive intra-company talk to this random spud in Taiwan who doesn't say anything. He wasn't inclined to tell them about the family relations, either, so he made up some excuse or another. Most of the emails are mundane inquiries for pricing, customer contacts, or product specs. More serious are the backorders. Seemed quite serious to me (more than 400?), but apparently it's actually gotten better, as strong demand coupled with a bungling Oracle ERP rollout really screwed the pooch for a few months. Thankfully uncle had ordered new machinery last winter in expectation for next year's workload, but now each machine is being pressed into service as soon as it arrives at the factory.

The Rube Goldberg-esque dance between US sales, Taiwan HQ, and China factory works most of the time, but the communication breaks down when there's a product failure. The customer demands a Failure Analysis Report, US forwards the failed samples and customer description to the factory, who does the labwork and sends HQ a report in Chinese. Taiwan checks the report and translates it to English before sending it to US who then passes it on to the customer. It's not surprising that details are lost in this big game of Telephone, so customer gets annoyed when we don't address their conern (that was never passed to the factory), or asks for info that they already provided. Sometimes the factory just gives plain weak answers (reminiscent of my days in Physics Lab), and HQ personnel don't have the technical expertise to recognize the BS and crack the whip (plus they're being hassled by US to hurry the hell up). It's especially bad when the customer hands us a technical analysis of their own. The US and Taiwan people don't want to translate a long technical document, so they dump it all on teh factory, who promptly ignores it and write their usual boilerplate report. Then the customer chews out the US salespeople when our answers are useless. One case was on the second go-round of reports, and we were in danger of losing a $500K account because we couldn't be bothered to respond to their points outlined in a 20-page document (complete with a dozen graphs, Monte Carlo simulations of failure rates, and even their own suggested solutions). The case was being escalated to the uncles, so I wrote up a memo emphasizing the issues in the customer's report and some suggested responses. Took me way to long to pinyin it out in Chinese, but I sent it out before the factory came back with another useless report. Hopefully it'll do some good, but I'm not expecting much. Still, I need to make myself get off my ass and be proactive, more like The Apprentice than Dilbert. Oh, I also corrected some typos in another document going out to a customer. It'd be fucking embarrassing if a semiconductor-related company didn't know the difference between silicon and silicone.

I sit upstairs with the IT guys, so I overhear the joys of running the ERP. Talk about a boondoggle. Uncle doesn't worry about the tech stuff, so the IT manager has free rein, and he might just have enough rope to hang himself with it. He's promising lots of cool business intelligence reports, etc., but right now it's just a big, sucking hole. Right now everyone has to use the painfully convoluted Oracle interface (all in Java!) to enter the data, but there's no useful results coming out yet. So everyone is doing twice as much work for no apparent benefit. Meanwhile, IT is flying by the seat of their pants, as they have to keep the production environment running even as they try to cut down and customize the endless (and mostly useless) features of the do-everything package so it actually fits our business. Oh, they have to translate the interface to Chinese, too. They're so busy ticking off implemented features that usability has totally gone to hell. To import a simple text file of purchase orders requires two FTP sessions, two imports, five parsing attempts, three printouts of raw Oracle error logs (after each parse attempt fails), and even then all the items might not import correctly because some new widgets might not have product numbers (i.e. primary key in the database) yet. Can't entirely blame IT, though. Took a peek at the manuals, and holy crap is PL/SQL the worst language ever. It's some unholy marriage of Pascal and SQL. No wonder they can't get shit done. And IT does have things set up so my PowerBook interoperates pretty well with the corp network, so they're not all bad. Humping the 15" PB to and from work every day is starting to get tiresome (literally!), though. I do have to log into the Linux server and use X11 and console programs to get my IM on, which is inconvenient but necessary. As Sam said, "That's some hardcore slacking."

And what of the girlfriend? Well, she's smart enough, she's pretty enough, and damn it I like her, even though I hate to let mom and Aunt Dai have their way so easily. She's nice without being overly sweet, practical without being dull, likes kids, and gets along with her (extended family. Even she admitted that she wouldn't stand out in a crowd, and I wouldn't be chasing after her if we passed by on the street. On the other hand, once one gets to know her ( and the moms made sure we had plenty of chances), she's perfectly likable. In fact, you'd have to be a real big meanie to dislike her, unless bust size is a dealbreaker for you. And if that were the case you probably fall into the Big Meanie category anyway. The reql question, I suppose, is why she'd bother with me, considering that in Taiwan, I have the vocabulary of an articulate 3rd grader, with even less of a life than I do in the States. Oh, and just as I was about to ask her true feelings I broke out with a bunch of hideously huge zits, including one right on the tip of my nose. Nevertheless we both managed to stammer out that we both kinda liked each other and let's give this thing a shot. Maybe it's just that we're both at the stage where we're both ready to settle, and it's so much easier not to have to worry about family approval, etc. Heck, she wouldn't even have to change her name if we get married, can't get easier than that. We're both a little skeptical that the other is going along just because of family pressure, and we're probably both right. Still, surely it's a good sign that I can be with her and feel the euphoria of new love without the insidious fears that turn me into the usual (and very unattractive) nervous wreck.

Went to a performance of the Bach violin concertos as our first official date. Sure's a lot easier to stay awake through the adagios when someone's there to hold your hand. Unlike the poor kid next to us who couldn't sit still when I told him that Game 3 of the NBA Finals was on TV at the same as the concert. Even after I told him it's a rerun and the Lakers already lost the game by 20 points. Love Bach, and I know the violin concertos about as well as I know any piece of classical music. Nevertheless, the best part of the night was just going to a coffee shop afterwards to just sit together and chat until closing time.

Well, that's as far as I got at landing time. Got home, opened up the computer and was on the Net, turn on the TV just in time to catch the last inning of the Giants game on TV (we won). The dog took a sniff, recognized the familiar scent, and it was as if I never left. Boy was Laika glad to have us home. More people to play with, more people to feed him treats. I'm still having a bitch of a time getting over jet lag, though. I get too lazy at home and crash for a nap in the afternoon instead of struggling through like I should, so I never quite get back on phase. Maybe I should look into serotonin.