I am
...getting rained on in Tokyo.
...old enough to drink alcohol but not old enough to know when to stop.
...blogging since 02/22/03.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Ch...ch...ch...choices Apparently, I go on and on about how I cannot make up my mind on the job situation like a broken record until their Pawlow reaction to my opening my mouth is glazed over eyes. In my nightmares HR laughs and tell me that they would have offered me a higher salary if I had only asked for more. So I tried today. The luxury of having three job offers is that if you piss off one HR lady, there are two other ones that are willing to take me. Let's see how this game plays. I predict an end to glazed eyes of my conversation partners by end of this week.
Lucky dip I don't know exactly how it happened but I got three internal job offers with Company X. In the next couple of days I need to take a decision on where I want to work permanently: London, Brussels, or Berlin. Which to pick? I have been brooding over this for a while but cannot come to no conclusion. The problem is that I would be delirious about each of the jobs if it was the only one offered to me. However, as they come as a set of three none of them seem to be the correct choice as they all tick different boxes of my wish list of "the perfect job":
London
I don't have to move
I love my flatmate S
Attractive salary
Brussels
Fun team and manager
Lots of friends working for Company X
Yummy food and beer
Berlin
Great city
Good work-life balance
Friends from high school
My mother's advice is to write the cities on pieces of paper and try my luck but, gentle reader, what is your take on this?
Loo sweet loo After coming back from Germany, the first question that I have for my flatmate shouldn't be "Where are the two packs of toilet paper we bought a couple of weeks ago?". Especially when she's not home.
Staying home and watcing TV for the rest of my life Back in London I finally removed my contact lenses that I had slept in for three weeks and am finally in posession of two less than bright red eyes again. Vision restored but still not seeing clearly (especially not career wise). Tired as a dog and not motivated to do anthing more challenging than dipping a nacho chip into guacamole. Berlin has charmed me like a date offering me a spiked drink: I liked Berlin but then it got me dizzy and I woke up in a bed without remembering how I got in there. It didn't help that room service regularly tried to clean my room while I was still convincing my body to drag itself into the shower. Other bizarre events included meeting an old high school crush who let his hair grow long and dancing with a guy nicknamed like the woman parts in the Kama Sutra.
Please do the crossin' for me! After spending a most relaxing weekend in Berlin with lots of talking, walking, cooking and eating, I'm sitting in the office in Berlin. It's actually my day off but I have a good reason for not enjoying my free day in bed with the TV: I had a job interview for an permanent position in the German office via video conference. For the whole weekend I have agonized over the interview and had nightmares about the interviewers asking about me net present value or cash flows but in the end it was just three Germans talking bad English (one of them me). In two weeks I will know if they will invite me for a face-to-face meeting. I would keep my fingers crossed but then it would be so very difficult to hold all of the wine and beer glasses that I intent to empty tonight in celebration of having escaped a life in a box under a drafty bridge.
