extremely sobering thought just hit me (no, not the one about no-one reads this blog. Maybe they will if I die young in a terrible fireball?). That is that doing technical support for an 8 and 3 year old is terrifying stuff. I can do it all day every day at work, the chirp of the phone – the expectancy of the person on the other end that you know the answer to their problem off the top of your head. With kids it’s very different as they expect their parents to know everything. I suppose it’s a natural assumption, I was the same way. In much the same way as you think your parents will be there forever and never age, never get old.

I think the reason it’s so tough is that you can reason with adults, you can spin them a load of old bollocks should the need arise (not that I’m saying I do that a lot, I’d like to think I have a reputation for bare faced honesty) and you can also talk them through some quite complex problems. Kids don’t have that level of understanding, so it’s tough. Oh, and did I mention they want their fix in seconds, not minutes? Frustrating and very tiring, after a whole day arsing about with LVM and iSCSI on SLES10. Help me if you understand it!

Elsewhere, copious column inches and paper ink have been wasted on the current “terrorist” malarkey here in the UK. I’m most pissed off as I’m flying to London in a couple of weeks, and those who know me already know I despise flying at the best of times (I used to hate heights, now it’s just the loss of dignity and liberty as one goes through passport control and security check). Added to this now is all the faux security measures designed to strip away our layers of liberty, one piece at a time. From that perspective, the “terrorists” surely have the game won. The only way to win a battle of this nature is not to blink.