Slowly Settling In...

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Two weeks down the line and things are marginally more stable than at the last count - am still chronically overspending / overeating / overdrinking and smoking like a fucking chimney at the moment, but at least to a slightly lesser degree! At the moment I can still excuse it as a result of still living through the so-called “honeymoon period” (when you get to a new place and genuinely do need to socialize and meet people in the city), but eventually I am really going to have to start reining myself in - for the sake of my skin (gone to hell since I started smoking) and my bank balance if nothing else! Truth be told though I’ve still barely had time to get own house in order (in both literal and metaphorical senses), let alone reflect on the seemingly miraculous fact that I now find myself living and working in one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, with my feet firmly under the table of a big multinational corporation, a ready made social circle in my European housemates / friendly Czech colleagues and a gorgeous flat slap-bang in the middle of the Old Town to come home to every evening, so I figure I’m still permitted a little hedonism in my early days!

Social highlights on the last week or two include another couple of Thursday meals out with the Lazy Vinohrady crew, a long Sunday afternoon in the Irish Pub with a bunch of other English expats, and last but not least meeting the love of my life in the city the other day. His name is David, he’s 31, a translator, good-looking (but at the same time not unattainably so), and from the moment we met outside the National Theatre I just knew I’d met someone nice and was in for a good time that night. Ended up going to a cocktail bar, conversation flowed, found out we had the same background in languages (he’d also done German in the UK at university) and all was lovely - until the moment he mentioned he had a girlfriend that is. Shit. Obviously my heart is irreparably broken, but not having met the bitch yet at least I can still hold out hope that she is hideously fat and that after five years their relationship is starting to get stale by now, though from the way he was talking about her I somehow doubt it... And speaking of my love life (or rather the lack of it), funnily enough on the same day that I met Dave I also got an email from Jacques asking me to go back out to South Africa to join him in a joint writing / photographic venture round Africa (and presumably have a lot of sex while we were at it as well). Bloody men and their stupid fucking timing! If he’d asked six weeks ago when this subject was hanging in the air between us then I might well have said yes - as it is I’ve got a job / flat / furniture / friends (or at least people I’m starting to get to know) all keeping me here now, and I’m not just about to go chucking in my cushy job with a multinational company and the chance to finally get a career underway at last just to go gallivanting off round Africa and earning a pittance (if we even made that) travel writing and taking photographs instead. Despite all the loud-mouthed bravado about my global adventures and nomadic lifestyle, deep down I’m still that irredeemably sensible, Oxbridge educated, corporate wannabe I’ve tried and failed to leave behind, and while I’m prepared to take a chance in Prague with established companies all recruiting left right and centre round the city, swanning off to Africa on a wing and a prayer just to be with someone I wasn’t quite sure was Mr Right in the first place is a different matter altogether! And so to cut a long story short, one man in my life is firmly attached, the other’s several thousand miles away in Cape Town right now and the only other male on the horizon is an over enamored Kraut from Boeblingen who even now keeps calling and sending messages on my mobile phone - fucking hell mate take the fucking hint and stop bloody calling me!!!

Workwise things also continue to go well, if somewhat boring while I’m still in the training / work shadowing phase of the job, without my own cases to really get my teeth into. As it happens, I’m largely being trained by this really nice English girl called Becky, who is over in Prague to oversee the outsourcing transition period over the coming few weeks. I hadn’t realized that the department was so new nor that everyone else is only a few weeks ahead of me in terms of training and operations - they were all diligently work shadowing in the UK while I was still traveling around Africa in the summer, and only started taking calls themselves about six weeks before I showed up and completed the team (the guy who sat here before, Karel, was apparently sacked because his English wasn’t up to scratch - at least I won’t have that problem). The department as a whole must number about 50 or so, with 99%!o(MISSING)f my colleagues originally coming from the Czech Republic. I am one of only three native English speakers on the whole project (the other two are team leads of different sections who I know only by sight), which needless to say serves as a massive advantage when you are speaking to English / Scottish / Northern Irish Line Mangers all day long, and if I’m honest I suspect generates a little bit of envy among some of my less linguistically confident Czech counterparts. Having had the same problem speaking with German or even occasionally French customers all last year at HP, I know exactly how they feel, but that is not about to stop me profiting from this happy accident of birth all the same! Within my team the only other foreigners are our Team Lead, Julia, a half-Polish half-Canadian girl who shares my love of travel and seems to effortlessly illicit genuine warmth and respect among all the other members of the Underperformance team (myself included) and Nathalia, a Catalan girl and fellow team member who to me brings to mind a younger, quirkier version of Audrey Tautou. All the rest of the team are Czech but very friendly with it, and usually we all end up going for lunch together over at the shopping center over the road - either Beer Point for mediocre (and in my point of view rather too heavy for lunchtime) Czech food or the upstairs food court, where mercifully you can escape the pork and dumplings and grab a much needed sandwich or healthy salad for lunch instead!

The only other person worthy of note in our department is of course the big boss, namely the fireball of a Romanian woman who first interviewed me the other week and inspires a certain awestruck curiosity in all who meet her - I for one am still trying to figure out whether she is to be considered friend or foe. On the one hand she is a real fighter for her team (makes a welcome change from lackluster HP management that’s for sure!) and seems about as determined to defend both her pet project and junior team members as a mother fox is to protect her new-born cubs, which does admittedly inspire a certain loyalty and admiration for all who work under her (myself included). On the other, this is definitely not a lady I would like to cross (she’d eat me for breakfast!) and besides, no one who takes work quite so obsessively seriously should ever be completely trusted in my opinion… Still, it’s nice to feel like you are in good hands for once after having lived through the full-scale managerial debâcle that was the GCSC, though if anything I’m already starting to miss the endless rounds of gossip, intrigue and drama that went with the territory over there - here it’s all just too damn friendly and harmonious for my liking (but then bloody Iraq still would be in comparison to the seething, conspiratorial environment of the bitchy and back-stabbing GDC). Not quite a case of “come back Julien all is forgiven” just yet, but at the same time part of me would just kill for a bit of a fight or drama or something here just to liven up the decidedly dull and tediously long working day…

Actually it speaks volumes for just how bored I’ve been this week that I actually welcomed the chance to escape the office for two days this week in order to attend a compulsory Induction Training session at the company’s other building on the other side of the city. Had I known then what mental torture lay ahead in these two days, I probably would have done everything in my power (which admittedly isn’t all that much) to get out of it - as it was I left myself exposed to a full-blown 18 hour onslaught of corporate bullshite at its most patronizing worst, and to be honest I’m still not quite over the trauma now. Why oh why do big corporations feel the need to patronize their newly recruited employees in this manner - after all, if they really were that braindead that they needed this kind of remedial catch-up treatment in order to do their job, then what was the company doing bloody hiring them in the first place??? From start to end it was sheer and utter torture, but undoubtedly the worst part was having to sit through the two three-hour long seminars on customer care (“be polite to the customer”, “don’t use bad language with the customer”, “don’t slag off the company to the customer” and other such common sense banalities) and the importance of cultural awareness in an international work environment. Why the powers that be thought they ever had to cover this one is a complete mystery to me - of the twenty or thirty or so of us in that room pretty much everyone there was a foreigner, and I’m guessing that all of us there were completely au fait with speaking other languages and experiencing different cultures already - otherwise why the hell would we all have applied for jobs in the bloody Czech Republic in the first place? I personally found it more insulting that anything else - after all, I grew up in Asia, speak four languages, travelled the world at an early age, live and work in Prague and share a flat with a Spanish girl and a Belarussian - why the bloody hell are you talking to me about fucking cultural awareness??? Talk about preaching to the fucking converted… No wonder I skived off early on day two (figured if I was going to be treated like a child, then I might as well act like one) in order to go home and scrub myself clean again under a scalding hot shower - cynic that I am it’s rare that I ever allow myself to be sullied in such an undignified manner by such condescending, patronizing corporate bullshit, and here I was submitting to this unrelenting bollocks all for the sake of holding on to my pitifully paid, G grade job as an HR related corporate drone. No wonder I feel dirty and unclean as a result - I’ve just been psychologically raped by the ruthless, unrelenting corporate machine…

And it doesn’t stop there either. To my disgust, this week corporate Big Brother has also had me wee in a cup, undergo various blood tests, have my criminal record checked for past misdemeanors and practically perform a full-blown strip tease in front of the company nurse as part of the corporate initiation ritual - I’m just surprised no one wanted to stick their finger up my arse or worse while they were at it too… Ah the degradations we fledgling careerists allow ourselves to undergo just for the dubious privilege of remaining a corporate slave… I must admit that already there’s a big part of me that wouldn’t like to chuck it all in and bugger off to South Africa after all - at least it’s warm there, and to be honest I’m beginning to think there’s not all that much difference between doing the whole 9 - 6 office drudgery thing here or back home in the UK instead. It’s still soul-destroyingly boring and underpaid at the best of times, only real difference being that here you simply have a prettier cage…

On the upside, it is undeniably nice to join a company on the up for a change, as opposed to a Hewlett Packard very much on the downward slide. Currently the company is expanding from 700 to 1500 in the space of just a few years and the mood of youthful optimism is tangible as a result - makes a welcome change from the dark shadow of redundancy and ever present threat of Bangalore which used to hang over us all at HP that’s for sure! Guess outsourcing is something of a double-edged sword really - it can put countless people out of work at home, but if you’ve got the freedom, mobility and inclination to follow the jobs out of the country, then you can end up making a pretty nice life for yourself abroad after all. Five years ago a foreigner could only teach English in this city, but now that the Czech Republic has joined the EU all the multinationals (Accenture, Dell, Sony, DHL etc) are coming over en masse and opening up outsourced service centers here, with opportunities galore for anyone with enough savvy to identify the trend and simply apply for a position. After all, Prague is one of the few boom towns within an increasingly flagging European economy, and I for one just can’t work out why given the demand for foreign speakers there are not more people coming over here and taking advantage of the fact. Oh well, all the more jobs for me then, especially considering the fact that so many educated Czechs are leaving the country to work in the UK now too - it’s like we’re doing some kind of a population swap or something, and all I can say is hoorah for the EU for creating this gap in the market for people like me to fill. And the irony is that anyone could do the same as I have, if only they had a little bit of imagination. Everyone at home always seems to put it down to bravery on my part, but I for one just consider it a calculated risk and not very much of one at that - I knew the jobs were there and so I went after them, and in the event the ease with which I walked into my job on day one only goes to prove me right on that score. And if there was one good thing about the whole torturous training ordeal, then it was the feeling of sitting in this room with twenty or thirty other young people from all over Europe, who like me had dared to embrace a trend, took a chance and now found themselves at the start of their careers with a major multinational corporation and a whole world of opportunity stretched out there in front of them. And without wanting to sound up myself here, it just felt so right that I should be sitting there among them, that I’d truly found my niche and could hold my head high as a fellow European too. Yes, of course I’ll have to do my time at the bottom, but give it a year or two and I’ll hopefully be storming my way up the company ranks, whether it be in Prague or maybe even further afield? Believe me, I know what a great opportunity this could potentially work out to be, so for once in my life plan to stick this one out and see where it takes me. No pissing off after three months to go traveling again for me now, this one is for the long haul - unless the company for some reason sees fit to fire me in the meantime that is… Will just have to make sure I’m on my best behaviour for once in my life so they don’t get in there first!

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