Last Friday, the uncertainty was at last over, as the final announcements were made about who had to leave the company. In the end, there was little impact on our department, so that was good news. I knew the chance that I would get laid off was very small, but I was still afraid what it would mean for the people I know, and how the decision will impact our situation at work.

The atmosphere in the last two weeks was definitely very strange. Everyone talked about the coming layoffs, of course, but not excessively so. There were even some jokes made about the whole situation. All in all, things at work almost seemed entirely normal on the surface. However, I don't think anyone really felt in a normal way, and you could constantly feel that tension hanging in the air.

And now it's official, I'm not sure what to think or how to feel. Do I feel relieved? Do I feel guilty for feeling relieved? Am I angry? Am I sad? Do I disagree with the whole situation, or am I able to rationalize the decisions to a certain degree? I don't know, in the end I feel all of these things, and yet I feel none of them at the same time. I don't know if that makes sense at all, but that's the closest description I can come up with. It also feels like an anti-climax. For 2 weeks, this has been a large part of the lives of myself and people around me, and now the moment has come and gone, what does it really mean? On Monday, the world will just keep going on again, like it has always done, almost as if nothing had happened at all.

At least I had time this weekend to clear my mind. Strangely, I feel less tired at the moment than before. I admit I haven't thought much about work this weekend, and barely even touched my laptop at all, so that helps. For some reason, this weekend also seemed longer than usual, even though we lost an hour today due to daylight savings. I guess it's just another sign that I should stop thinking about work so much.

However, that feeling of tiredness seems to have been replaced by a feeling of melancholy. For the last 2 years, I thought I had my life almost figured out. Even though I never really have a life plan, I thought I would be fine as long as I stayed in the current path. But now my inner doubts are starting to creep to the surface again. Is this really what I want? I worked so hard during the last few years, but can I seriously say I feel like I achieved anything? Am I actually happy with my life and where it is headed? I'm not sure, but answering 'no' to these questions don't feel as improbable as it would have seemed a year ago…

P.S. I realize it sounded petty when I mentioned in my last post that I was angry that my salary has been frozen, and reading back, I don't think I put my comments in the right context. It's more the combination of things that got me pissed: even though the company made a lot of profit last year, we still had to cut people AND freeze salaries? If they were to freeze salaries so we could keep more people, I would have understood (of course, management said that we would have to cut even more people if salaries were not frozen…). I can understand cutting costs in the face of the economic crisis, but I felt and still feel these measures were too extreme.

Damn, I'm tired. I know I complained before about being tired, but that was never anything like I've felt in the last couple of weeks. At times I feel like I could drop into my bed and sleep for 3 days straight. And at other times, I just feel like snapping at other people for no reason at all. So far, I've still been able to keep these urges relatively under control, but I really feel that I need to take care that I don't fall too deep. I think this is illustrated very well by how I felt when I had 2 days off a few weeks ago. I was actually stressed during those 2 days than I would have been at work. I just kept thinking about all the work I still have to do at the office.

What makes me feel this way is that I feel the control is slipping further away from me every minute. When I moved to Amsterdam with Vodafone, I was determined to improve a lot of things, and I was convinced that we could achieve that if we all put our minds to it. But then you realize that due to all the short term pressure, you can never really work on the long term issues, which then puts even more pressure on the short term. On top of that, it seems like we are having more and more issues with our systems. A lot of my time now goes into checking stuff and chasing our IT and datawarehouse support instead of actually making reports and analyses, which is just very frustrating.

Just when I thought there was no way for my motivation to go but up, it turned out that the economic crisis has now also hit our company. Last Thursday, we all got a mail that they are going to sack people, which will be announced on March 25^th. On top of that, they are also going to freeze the salaries. You can imagine that it doesn't really boost morale on the workfloor, especially not if we've been hearing that we've done such a good job and has been so profitable year in the previous year. Okay, I understand and agree that we definitely need to cut some costs, but the measures imposed just seem to be too extreme. To me, it also doesn't make economic sense in the long term. By cutting away more than we should, the revenues will probably go down in a higher ratio. The thing is, we won't necessarily feel the impact in the coming year, but more realistically in the years after that. By then, no one will link the downgrade in revenues back to the layoffs. It'll just be explained as bad performance by the workforce. Of course, these measures are imposed by HQ in the UK, so perhaps I can't really blame the managers here. It's not like they really had much of a choice. The timing is also bad of course, because of the move to Amsterdam. One part of the people made a conscious decision to move to Amsterdam, whereas the other part made a conscious decision to leave their current jobs and join Vodafone (a not insignificant part of those people were hired from abroad) 6 to 12 months ago.

Personally, I don't think that I'll be one of the people who have to go, although stranger things have definitely happened before (It will actually be the second time that I'm sacked by Vodafone if it happens). But still, if my feeling turns out to be true, that means the pressure will become even greater, since we have to achieve much higher targets than previous years with less people, and all that during a recession. I'm also disappointed that the salaries will be frozen. I've been working extremely hard for the past year, and now I just feel they snatched away the reward that I rightly deserve just before the deadline. I know it sounds petty when compared to people who actually lost their jobs, but that doesn't make me feel any better.

Maybe I said more in this post than I should have (you never know), but I'm just disappointed, angry and tired right now, so I don't really care…

I finally did some touristic stuff in Amsterdam when my brothers visited me earlier in the week. We went to Artis (the zoo) on Monday, which was pretty cool. The Dappermarkt was a little disappointing; I guess once you’ve been to markets in Hong Kong and Turkey, your expectations tend to be a bit high. And we took a stroll in the famous Red Light District. There are talks of ‘cleaning up’ the district in recent years, so I guess we should see it before it’s too late. The van Gogh museum on Tuesday was also nice. It is fascinating how his art progressed from a sober, realistic style (e.g. the Potato Eaters) to a much more vivid and colorful style (e.g. Starry Night). And I saw pictures of the Smoking Skeleton many times before, but I never realized it was painted by van Gogh as well. Finally we went to the P.C. Hooftstraat (the shopping street), but just like the Dappermarkt, it was a bit disappointing. The Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona was definitely cooler, even if I don’t like shopping that much.

On Saturday I went to a Chinese bookstore, which I knew was there but never visited before. I was totally geeked out when I stepped inside, they had a lot more than I dared to hope. Of course, I’m not actually able to read those books yet, but it’s a great incentive for me to brush up on my Chinese. I particularly liked the books containing the Chinese classics in both Chinese and English text. These classics include the “Journey to the West” (featuring the famous and beloved Monkey King) and “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. I must admit the little I know of these stories is mainly from movies and tv, which of course might not be very accurate, so I was excited about reading the original novels. I was disappointed that you could only buy these novels in its entire set. The Journey to the West set, for example, contains six (huge) books and costs €149, which is just too much at once. I also thought about buying the one-volume books with the teachings of Confucius or Mencius. I ended up buying a Chinese translation of Jane Eyre instead. With the help of a dictionary and the English version of Jane Eyre I own, I hope it will help me to dramatically improve my vocabulary.