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…