The grass is always greener on the other side

In mid-June I’ve traveled to Helsinki through Riga to participate in this rather boring internal health and safety training. Well, if I’m completely honest with all of you out there, the training in itself wasn’t all that boring, and presenters did their best to make this training good, but… There is a huge ‘but’ – even though I know in my mind that HSE is important, and it helps save lives, health and all, I still find everything related to the subject yawn-worthy and extremely boring. Well, that’s just my luck as it seems. In almost every single job I ever had somehow I always end up being in one or another way responsible for the subject and matters of HSE. More so, when I was interviewing for my current position (which is not so great as I’ve learned by now, and not just because of the boring and unwanted HSE part), I was clearly told by the manager that the company has HSE matters fully covered, and that they won’t require me to be involved in the subject but for a few translations now and then to make group policies and other materials available in local language.
Alas here I am – not the sole responsible person for the HSE in the company, but still involved more than I’d like to be, and that pisses me off greatly. Damn.
During my career I’ve seen plenty of corporate meetings and training sessions, but this one was different from the very start. First of all, none of the participants were given an agenda for the event prior to its start. Strange and unusual though it seemed, the goal of the organizers, as it was revealed eventually, was to prevent participants from coming ‘too prepared’. And it sort of worked pretty as none of participants knew what the training was going to be about in more detail and thus none could happily just to daydream or drowse to the end.
So I’ve spent a day and a half in this hotel conference room learning things I did not really want to learn, and was almost literary killed by the fact that the agenda of the said training was so tight there was literary no time between training session and compulsory evening/lunch parts to get out for a half an hour of fresh air. Ah, if only I’d have known that this was just the top of an iceberg!
The first clue to what was yet to come was the fact that on the second day the training session was wrapped up quite early in the afternoon, like around 2 p.m., and we – me and my manager with whom I came to the training – came to realize that there was way too much time to kill until the flight Helsinki-Riga would take us homeward bound. If I were on my own, I would have used those extra 3.5 hours for some shopping or sightseeing, but being in tow with the manager, I sort of had no choice but to follow the lead and ended up spending hours and hours at the airport with no book to read and only a smartphone and a free Wi-Fi access at the airport to keep me from shooting myself with a loose door handle out of sheer boredom.

that's pretty much most of what I've seen of the Finland

After long hours of waiting finally the time for boarding has come and we hurried to the gate only to learn that our flight was delayed by half an hour. This would not have been much of a problem if it were a direct flight, but since we had to transfer to another one at Riga airport and the layover between flights was that of half an hour, this made for an ‘oh, no’ moment. The crew of the plane really did their best to catch up for the lost time, but as soon as we landed in Riga bad news became even worse. Our connecting flight to Vilnius has not yet departed and those who were fast to the gate could still see the plane attached to the boarding gate, alas we were denied access to the plane since we were to the gate like 5 minutes past the time for ‘gate closing’, and the lot of twenty something passengers could do nothing but watch the plane leave without us on board.
By the time everyone gathered at the AirBaltic ticket counter, tensions grew and people were getting real angry. Judging from the comments of some other unlucky fellow passengers from Helsinki flight, I’ve learned that it’s not so uncommon for AirBaltic not to wait on their own delayed flight even if for not all that much of a delay, and that some of people already have tasted more than once during their travels that buying a plane ticket not necessarily means one is going to actually fly. Seems that coming on time sometimes is an issue with them, but they never fail to provide a bus on such cases, and our bus was like ready at the moment we’ve reached the airport AirBaltic ticket counter, as if they were pretty confident Helsinki-Riga flight was to be delayed for much longer time, either they were never even intending on waiting on us in the first place, or whatever.
While some of the left-behind passengers seemed eager to fight for their rights, and willing to dig their heel deep and stand their ground to the very end, all I wished was to get moving, get to that damn bus and start rolling home.

finally on the move and homeward bound

It was almost 9 p.m. when the lot of us has finally departed from Riga to Vilnius on the bus. Instead of a relatively short flight Riga-Vilnius, I was now facing a more than 4 hours long bus trip to Vilnius, and having sat doing like nothing for the greater half of the day, I did not feel very happy about being robbed of these extra hours of my time. But at least with every turn of the wheels I was getting closer to my destination.
I love Latvia. I love its many castles and so similar yet a bit different nature from that of Lithuania. I like people of Latvia, even those surly and unsmiling, since it’s just like being at home there and yet not. I even am already planning to visit a couple of spots in Latvia this very summer. But on that never ending day I really could not wait but to get out of Latvia as soon as possible, and signs marking the Latvian-Lithuanian border were like the best thing I saw that day and inwardly I cheered and punched the air. Looks like home, smells like home, it must be home, even if the actual home was yet hours away.
There is a saying that thy neighbor’s grass is always greener, but like for once I could not disagree more. The grass is always greener on the other side, only this time I thought it was greener on the ‘right’ side of the border.

Tuesday's roller coaster

My kind of a roller coaster day:
* start a day with some unsettling news at work (as if we’d heard anything good of lately)
* finally sell that trouser’s I’ve bought on-line a while ago which did not fit at a good price
* unsuccessfully step on your feet and hurt your feet so you can barely walk while taking stairs
* receive a call offering a job (Yay!)
* go to a clinic for an X-ray and sigh in relief it’s just some strained ligaments and nothing’s broken
* get ready to stay put for a week with the feet held high and trying not to step on it much – doctor’s orders
Summarizing life’s a zebra – there’s white stripe, then there's black one, then again white one. Until you get to the a**. So cheer up

And we go down

So the stalling period is over now, and we are all literary setting sails to… well, someplace, some other future.

After like more than month of hesitation our new sole shareholder finally showed up and we got to meet his new appointed Managing Director the other week. Not much use of that, just this change of MDs from good to like the worst IMO. We still do not know what plans are made regarding our company’s future as our new MD and neither shareholder are willing to share them, like we’re just considered irrelevant and some sort of nuisance. Might be that both guesses are right.
After a year long period of being under constant change and on sale, throughout this times we’ve managed to keep all of our tightly knit team intact . More so, even blue collar workers stayed all but few, though high turnover among blue collar workers is almost a canon in our field of business. But who cares about that? So now for a week already we’ve been ‘enjoying’ the company of our new MD, and what can i tell? Change, and selling process, and uncertainty hasn’t killed us up to this day, but this man is going to. If his goals are to make people leave, so that the new owners could cut cost on compensation, etc., he’s gonna get it. He asks a question, you answer in full detail. then like five secs later same question again and again and again. It’s simply impossible even to try to regard him as something else than a joke thrust upon us. Yes, you might think it’s understandable that he does not know the business yet, and in normal situation I would agree. But he at least SHOULD try to learn it, and ask all the important business related question, instead of the ones regarding who has what model of company’s mobile phone. Hello, the last time we’ve got new phones for employees was like 2 years ago and they did not cost us a dime, but were given free to us by our mobile service provider. And that is just the top of an iceberg. The best part is that he does not make any decision of his own. If there’s a problem, he ask for opinion from our responsible team member, then goes out of the office for ‘some tea’ to consult with some secret puppeteer of this freakish show and then comes back with mostly incomprehensible decision made. ‘Our clients must be served,’ he says, but how, if all these decisions already make an impact on our capability to serve them in the first place, I ask.
It took just a week, but I’ve already started looking for a new job, and so does every single one on our team. A dog barks, caravan goes, and this ship is sinking fast. Shit happens, but this time it also hit a fan. If work was about feeling good about what I do, now it’s more of ‘Isn’t it 5 P.M. yet?’ kind.