The Hidden Depths of Harry the Tech Guy

"Harry, I can't print, can  you help me?"

...

"Wait one moment."

"Harry, why is my email not sending to external addresses?"

...

"Wait one moment."

"Harry, can you explain to me why the projector in the conference room is project different colors than the ones I have in my Powerpoint presentation?

...

"Wait one moment."

"Harry, 我靠， 操你妈, 我电脑完全坏了，快点修复吧!"

...

"Wait one moment."

Sue Harrison, the lovely nurse at my elementary school, had one response to students who came into her office, regardless of whether they came in for a sprained ankle or the flu: "here, have a Saltine."  You can imagine how unhelpful a Saltine was after scraping my knee during gym class.  But there it was -- a Saltine, no matter the ailment.  The same appears to be true for our tech support guy at work.  No matter what the problem is, Harry will respond the same way: "wait one moment."  Several hours later, you're lucky if the problem has even been considered, let alone fixed.  New hires frequently have to wait days to even receive a computer, because Harry's busy jiggering it to meet company security standards.

To be fair to Harry, if the the Shanghai branch of J.D. Power & Associates has one area of real need, it's IT Support.  Harry's on an island by himself, with no support, and a horde of colleagues breathing down his neck for tech support that he's often not well trained enough to provide.  One or two days a week, he's not even in the office, because he's sent to another one of McGraw-Hill's segment offices in Shanghai to serve as their only source of technical support.  So it would be unfair to blame Harry and Harry alone for all of the offices technology issues.  Especially when you consider that at least some of the issues facing the staff could be avoided if employees simply read the mass emails that Harry frequently sends out to avoid having to speak to everyone individually.  I read those emails, or at least try to, and so I often avoid problems.

That said, I would be lying if I said that I hadn't always just associated Harry with the bumbling comedy of errors that he frequently is.  IT Support is, probably, the most thankless position in any office, but Harry's level of inefficiency often makes my experience at Paul, Weiss seem flawless from an IT standpoint.  So I always, perhaps unfairly, wrote Harry off as the somewhat incompetent tech guy I thought he was.

That is, until I received the following email from him a few weeks ago:

Hi Joshua,

Have you read Peter Hessler, a former New Yorker journalist’s 3 Novels called China Trilogy? Separately, they are <River Town: Two years on the Yangtze>, <Oracle Bones: A journey through time in China> and <Country driving: A Journey from China from farm to factory>. If you want to know China better, you cannot miss these 3 fantastic books!

This piqued my interest, more about Harry than about the books themselves.  Not only is he a reader, but he apparently reads books in English, and perhaps even the New Yorker?  I had to find out more.  Yesterday, I got the opportunity.  Harry and I happened to leave the office together, and during our short walk to the office I found out that there's far more to Harry the tech guy than meets the eye.  He's a smart, insightful guy, who loves to read, and loves to talk about reading.  Here are some of the things I learned about him last night:

• He studied law and history in college (why he ended up a tech guy is beyond me).
• On history, he says: "I like studying history because it's fun to see how often we repeat the same mistakes over and over again."
• One of his favorite novels is Orwell's 1984, because it reminds him of the Chinese autocracy.  He's not your typical stick-to-the-party-line Chinese citizen.  Picture a quiet revolutionary, sitting in a sparsely-decorated apartment, reading up on the "real world" while his countrymen are being fed misinformation.  Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic, but that's the image I got last night.
• After I mentioned that I studied modern Chinese history for my thesis in college, he said, "Ah, you probably know way more about Chinese history than most Chinese people, since the information we are provided with is all propaganda and Party promotion."
• We started talking about classic Western writers, and I mentioned that James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake had been recently translated into Chinese, which I found appalling considering how impossible it is to understand in English.  His response: "Oh, yeah, there's also this guy...Thomas Pynchon...who wrote "The Rainbows of Gravity."  That one is hard too." The fact that he's heard of, let alone read part of Gravity's Rainbow is amazing to me.  Calling it "the Rainbows of Gravity" just is icing on the cake (that's how possessives are translated in Chinese, not unlike Spanish and other romance languages).
• This morning he came by my desk to recommend another book -- Robert Harris's Fatherland, about a world in which the Nazis had prevailed in World War II -- and to ask if I watched "Desparate-ly Housewives."  According to Harry, he was "really sad" when he saw the last episode.  "All those hours watching them.  And then it was over."  Tears were shed.

So, yeah, there's no question who the most interesting guy in the office is.