As of today, and after five and a half years, I no longer work for CETel. The reasons for my leaving are manifold, and most of them are not for public discussion – it just gets too personal too quickly. Let’s just say that the negative side effects of my employment had turned me into an insufferable person that even I myself no longer wanted to be around anymore, and I should have done something radical about this deteriorating situation a long time ago.
I want to feel my true self again, and I really would love to be the man again that my wife had chosen to live with so long ago. Before I left CETel, I hardly recognized myself and even today I sometimes can still barely remember the person that I once was. I’ve been on a doctor-prescribed sick leave for the last few weeks, and the distance to my old work place has brought back some of my former self, but it will take a while to fully restore myself. I have hopes that I have turned around the boat before it had passed the point of no return – but the point of no return was already very, very close.
Finding employment that is not just more of the same isn’t easy, and it took me very long to find an alternative with a real perspective. My new job carries the title “Manager IT” and my work place is in the South of Germany, several hundred kilometers away from where we live. It was not a feasible option for us to relocate, so I am going to spend several hours per week on the ICE to commute between my new work place and home. Actually, the current plan is that I will be gone for three days and will work from my home office for the rest of the week. While the commute at a first glimpse might seem nightmarish for some, I think it will actually be a good cure for a lot of the damage that the old work environment has caused.
My new employer is a multinational company with people from all over the globe. The environment feels almost as international and multicultural as the United Nations and this is just one of the many things that I have been missing for so long. My nationality and identity might be German, but I feel much more at home in a multicultural work place than in an office where almost everybody has the same nationality and where only the foreign customers bring a colorful touch to the mix. Being back in an international work space alone is going to be an interesting and welcome change, and the good news is that my new company has many other great things going for itself that I might write about later in one way or another.
I hope that all of the things to come will be the change that my family and I need so badly at this point.
So here’s to a new start and a change of scenery!