... vs. My "Light" Side

... but life is worth so much more if you care.

My "Dark" Side...

Life is so much simpler if you don't care...

I had a nice training last week called Presenting and Motivating. The trainer’s methods sometimes were a bit um… alternative. Still, one of the very few trainings I’ve followed which I can say I really learned something while having a lot of fun at the same time.

Sonja, Bart (my colleagues) and I went to Rotterdam on Friday to visit Maurits (an ex-colleague). That night, we first went to the Level, which was a really nice cocktail bar. I wouldn't have minded staying there for more than one cocktail. After that we went to the Après Skihut, and to top it off, the Baja Beach Club. Haha, those were really terrible places, but despite (or maybe because) of that, we had a lot of fun.

We visited Koen, a manager in our department, in his apartment the next day. Nice apartment with a great view over the Erasmus-bridge. We met up with my cousins afterward to yamcha (literally drink tea in Cantonese, but actually means going for dim sum), where we ordered waaayyy too much. I then stayed at their place until Sunday before heading back home. All in all, a great weekend.

I'm extremely busy at work at the moment. I’ve taken on some new tasks due to the reorganization, while my existing tasks have not diminished at all. There were already more than enough to do in the past, but now I’m really struggling to structure and keep up with all the work I have. And it will only become even busier in the upcoming period now that the first people have announced that they are leaving the company soon due to the move to Amsterdam. Oh well, all part of the game I guess. Might even be a good learning experience. At least I hardly feel any stress at the whole situation, which somehow seems surprising and unsurprising to me at the same time. At most, I feel some annoyance at the increasing and increasingly pesky mails and requests. We’ll see how it all turns out; I'm sure I'll be fine.

My manager also officially announced last Friday that he’s leaving the department in June, though he will work in another function at Vodafone which allows him to stay in Maastricht. That’s really a huge loss; he’s definitely the best manager I’ve had in my still short career. In my opinion, whoever succeeds him can only be a downgrade, but I guess it’s not really fair to that person, so I should keep an open mind about it.

I spent a lot of time alone during the holiday period, except at work, and on New Year's Eve. It’s been a long time since I’ve been completely alone for more than a day, and I almost forgot how much I enjoy being cut off from the outside world. I was feeling pretty tired and uninspired for the last couple of months, and I think this definitely helped me to recharge my batteries.

Work was pretty fun during that period as well. Since most people are not in the office, that means there are also a lot fewer deadlines to stick to. This allowed me to let go of some of the more boring, standardized work I’ve been doing and just let my creative juices flow and rethink some of my existing reports. Because of time constraints, a lot of my reports are unstructured and inefficient, and I always feel that they are not great, just ok. I wished I had a couple of weeks more to work on my own projects without worrying about deadlines, but I still managed to have a good feeling about it.