Python Hug

So my senior team member quit on me this week. One year to the day from when he started. He's leaving to take a job at CoolCo, which I suppose is, by definition, cooler than CoolCo Sub. But there's no promotion and he's taking a pay cut. It seems like the only thing better about that job than the one he has now is the absence of, well, me.

I don't blame him, really. I haven't quite taken to this management thing. I may have an MBA from one of the best schools in the world but remain severely deficient in the management skills department. I am demanding, impatient, overly emotional - and I hate not being liked. All of which are combining to make me feel like a big fat failure.

And now I need to start hiring all over again. People are tripping over themselves to come work for CoolCo Sub - so much so that I wonder if they even read the job description. But all I want to do is take them by the shoulders and shake them, warn them against working for me, because I'm only going to make them miserable and desperate to leave. But I can't do that, obviously. Instead I have to lie. Tell them this is a great job and I'm a wonderful boss and that they will live happily ever after.

Groan.

The upside of all this is I get to troll job sites for work.  And once in a while, find an entertaining gem to share with my dear readers. These are my top 3 favourite job descriptions this week:

1. Senior email strategy specialist: I'm thinking man in a three piece suit, dark room without windows, clicking a black pen, scanning the faces of his team before pronouncing : "Alright. We're dropping the 'Dear'. And using Helvetica. Go."

2. Cyberlawyer: This job must be fun. Create your own avatar kind of fun. I want mine to wear Ally McBeal skirts and cat-eye glasses and pace Second Life courtrooms shouting "I want the truth!" And then be able to handle it.

3. Senior python developer: I swear to God I didn't make this one up. I couldn't have, trust me. Senior python developer? I was almost tempted to send an application in just for the fun (but then I found out what it really meant and the whole mental image was ruined.) But I won't spoil the fun for you, my darlings. Enjoy.

Bull's eye

Targeted advertising. It's all the rage now. But have you ever stopped and really looked at what ads are specifically aimed at you? And have you ever considered what that might mean about who you are as a person?

Of course you haven't. Because you probably have better things to do in your life, and I'm sure you have a nice, healthy self-esteem that doesn't rely on advertisers to define who you are.

But I have. Obviously.

The ads on facebook for me today are all in German and exhort me to a) buy new warm clothes for the winter; b) book a vacation to Thailand; and c) get some Botox.

So, according to the Big All-Knowing Brother of Targeted Advertising who watches my every move, I am freezing my buttocks in Switzerland (true), desperately in need of some r&r (true) and getting old (ummm, I guess that's true as well).

That sums it up pretty perfectly.

But, dear advertisers, you won't catch me that easily. I've just gone and layered on a nice anti-aging face mask, plugged in the electric hot water bottle and flicked open my guide to Bali.

So there.

Baby steps

You know how they say "old habits die hard"? Well, first of all, who actually said that? How do these so-called truisms come into being in the first place? Surely they can't all be the work of Benjamin Franklin? Has Bill Bryson not written a book about this yet?

Anyways, I digress. Old habits die hard. So say some people. I say, that's hogwash. (Speaking of hogwash, that is totally making my top-ten-favourite-words-of-all-time list.)

Old habits die like every plant I've ever owned. Instantaneously. And are even harder to resuscitate. Picking up an old habit is just like riding a bike. Ever gotten back on a bike after years off the saddle? It's uncomfortable. It's wobbly. And after five minutes in on-coming traffic you're going to wish you'd stuck to the subway.

Same thing goes for running. Eating vegetables. Doing sit-ups every morning. Sitting down face-to-face (finger-to-key?) with your keyboard and trying to blog about something. It may have been something you used to do without thinking, but come back to it after a long, lonely Siberian winter and it's going to feel like you never typed an interesting sentence in your life.

This week I spent my tram rides to and from work desperately trying to think of something to blog about. There had to be something. Anything. I can't fold after one week into the new year. Come on! Think! You know how to do this!

But it turns out I can't remember. So I will have to learn all over again. The same way I will have to re-learn how to be patient, how to show kindness, how to laugh when things go wrong, how to have a little faith.

Please bear with me. I'll do better next time.

What I really need

I broke my own rule and actually made New Year's resolutions this year. And not just one or two, but a long, detailed list of them, with KPIs and measurement tools... (apparently one year is enough to make you a consultant forever).

I'll spare you the oh-so-cliché resolutions about exercising more and eating less (I am a girl, after all). The important one for present purposes is that I did resolve to come back to blogging. And you, dear readers, are going to make me stick to it. (Should that even still be a plural? Could there possibly be more than one person that still checks these pages after all this time?)

So, to get us started, and to catch up on lost time, I'm going to attempt the traditional year in review. You'll have to bear with me if the memories are fuzzy, though - I seem to have repressed most of 2011.

January-February
I'm in Switzerland. I remember that much. It's cold. I'm miserable. I'm already starting to wonder what on earth I'm doing here, and I just got here. I've also just become a feudal lord. I mean, a boss. An actual boss, that hired people and now has to give them work and get them motivated and keep them from screwing up and give them feedback and take it very, very personally whenever they do something wrong or think I'm the world's biggest bitch. I think I may not be cut out for this.

March-April
Finally, a little sunshine in my life. In the form of Brazil with Houston Hottie, and sand and ocean and music and nice food and caipirinhas. Never mind that I've become so stressed and high-strung that I can't really enjoy it. Or that I've doubled in size in the past six months. After Brazil I head to Johannesburg for work and never make it out of the hotel. But at least I'm not in the office. This is a bad sign.

May-June
Things start looking up for a bit. First of all, because summer comes to Switzerland in May (before promptly disappearing, never to be seen again). Because I start building a very small group of girlfriends with whom I can enjoy drinks by the lake on balmy evenings. Because I have the crazy idea that one of these days I'm going to get a handle on all this people management stuff. Ignorance is bliss.

July-August
The beginning of a very ugly downward spiral. I start fighting with everyone at work, in particular my boss. Thank goodness for my one work ally (and very first real friend in Switzerland). I start emptying jars of Nutella. I stop enjoying anything.

September-October
The one week break by myself in the South of France doesn't help. Things are only getting worse. After the boss, I now start doing battle with one, then both members of my team. And I hire someone else, as if it's a good idea to subject yet another person to my foul moods and bad temper. The wider politics at work keep poisoning everything. And I am completely incapable of handling any of it, much less myself. I run away to New York to try to remember what sane me was like.

November-December
So this is how rock bottom feels. God, it hurts. And not just me, but everyone around me. I feel sick. And pathetic. And angry. But you know what, I think it really does work like they say. Once your feet touch the bottom, you can kick your sad, quivering, suddenly overweight, insomniac self back up.

So here's what I want to say: Screw you, 2011. Bring on round two.

One year yodel

I was having a bad day today. Nothing serious. Just grey skies. The weight of an up-coming birthday. A friend's recent break-up making me feel both sorry for her and for myself (because I really am that selfish). And a one-season-old pair of Kate Spade suede boots having to go in the trash because of a nasty tear. All this on my one-year-in-Switzerland anniversary.

So I bought a couple books (for the small price of half a kidney) and that made me feel better. I would have also bought a couple pairs of shoes but I can't afford it and, besides, it's Sunday so all the shops are closed (except, thank god, the book store at the train station).

Happy Switzerversary to me.

Occupy this

I could talk about the rugby. I could tell you about the 50-something lady in a tailored suit cheering for France at the top of her lungs in an Irish pub at 10am. I could. But if you watched the game, you'll know there is nothing to gloat about. Go Wales, I say.

Anyhoo, instead I will tell you about my walk away from the Irish pub towards the restaurant where I was meeting INSEADers for lunch. A walk in below-freezing temperatures (I think it's already Christmas in Switzerland, those damn cuckoo clocks must be fast). A walk that took me past the banking square in the banking capital of the banking nation of the world.

Where I found this.

Granted, the tourists and media probably outnumbered the protesters 2 to 1. And even with the add-ons that only made a total of about 50 people. And apparently I was the only one who spotted the irony of me walking around an "Occupy" protest taking pictures with my Blackberry. But well done, Switzerland, for somehow coming up with a left wing out of nowhere. I honestly didn't think you had it in you.

Of course, 5 minutes later the world was back to normal and I was having lunch surrounded by Credit Suisse bankers who were very much unfazed. Looks like the Bentleys are safe, for now.

Timid wave

Don't get too excited. I don't know if I'm back yet. But I had a small, silent urge to write and I thought I better seize the moment before it passed. So here I am. Writing. A little.

Today is Day 5 of my Ultimate Relaxation Holiday. No, I'm not at a spa. Or an ashram. I'm all by my lonesome down in my happy place in the South of France. That's right. I took one week off work to be by myself. Does that make me a freak? Maybe. But God it's so nice to not have to care about what anyone else thinks, wants, says, needs... No one else matters this week but me. And that is true luxury. That, and my iPad.

So here I am. I drove down from my little corner of Switzerland, winding my way past lakes and mountains, then through Italy (ah, Italy, how I have come to love you this year..) and across into France along the Côte d'Azur. It's an absolutely terrible drive to do if you get easily distracted by beautiful scenery (like me), dislike spending 20 minutes covered by a million tonnes of mountain as you go through the Gotthard Pass (like me), get easily annoyed by crazy Italian drivers (like me) and have a car that is less than comfortable with windy-hilly-pseudo-highways and has no AC (like me). But gosh it's stunning. Anyways, I made it in one piece, and have since been doing mostly nothing at all. Some running (trying to avoid the major roadside accidents of last year), some time at the pool, some time at the beach, some serious fall collection shopping in St Tropez. Heaven. Except that I have been bitten by so many mosquitos it looks like someone tried to write on me in braille. I'm thinking a sonnet.

I did have big plans to get cracking on the second book this week. Back around Christmas time I got incredibly inspired and started four different chapters of an idea I thought would revolutionize the concept of the American Novel. Or the French-Wannabee-American Novel anyways. And now... Well, now I hate it. I am so thoroughly bored by the idea it puts me to sleep just thinking about it. But there is one little nugget of something I like in one of the chapters. I wonder if there's somewhere I can go with it - maybe a short story. We'll have to see.

As for the first novel, well, like me, it is making it's lonely scary way in the world, trying its very best. Both the Kindle and the paperback versions have sold a few copies, and now I'm debating whether or not to try another round of agents. Especially after my recent run of disappointing reads that have left me thinking that if THEY found a publisher, then surely... We'll see. First, there are so many other things to sort out. Finding a new rental arrangement for my perfect little Parisian flat. Finding a new place in Switzerland (the flatmate and I are parting ways, amicably, and it's time for me to strike out on my own). Getting to grips with the job which is about to hit that difficult second year, where the novelty is gone and you have to work past all the annoyances and grievances and frustrations to make it something exciting again. And hey, maybe I'll even manage to get back to writing this blog...