I just ordered a mobile phone. I chose the HTC Desire. The telephone ordering system in Austria is so simple. You go online. You choose your handset and price plan. You enter your address. You enter your passport details. You enter a credit card number for paying for the phone and for the monthly billing. Hey presto, your phone is ordered. The price plans are pretty impressive here too. The huzband encouraged me to order this phone, cos I think he’d like one himself, and with the 1000 free texts and the 1 GB data volume included in the price plan each month, I am sure he’ll be using it at weekends. In fact, I think it will be our phone from friday evening to monday morning, rather than my phone.
I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this shiny new toy.
Last year, i had to spend seven weeks travelling over and back to Newbury, through Heathrow, probably the most unpleasant airport in the world. Dublin is the second most unpleasant airport in the world after Heathrow. It was one of the most stressful periods of my life. Ever. For a whole multitude of reasons. I agreed to go there because my alternative was Nigeria. As things panned out, I was lucky I choose the UK, it meant I got home in time for my mother’s departure from this world. I could have been on a plane to Lagos. Luckily, I was an hour down the road from Heathrow. Anyway, life goes in circles. Here I am again, thirteen months later, with the same choices. The UK, Nigeria or Madagascar. Wonderful choices the week or two after you shell out on marina fees and have your boat back in the water.
Irony likes to slap you in the face. It likes to laugh at you. It likes to say, Ha ha SUCKER! Last year, you thought you had it bad, what with hotels and twice weekly runs through Heathrow, 0400hrs starts on a Monday morning, rental cars that gave you freedom to get the hell out of Shitsbury Newbury, Berkshire. This year, there’s a RECESSION! Recession don’t you know. Recession that means it’s totally OK (according to your dillusional manager) for your employer to expect you to do the following. Firstly, they want you to sign up to working more hours every week for the same pay! But hey, that’s not a pay cut, we’re just asking you to work more hours. Secondly, they want you to move to the UK. AGAIN. Didn’t I do this last year? “No other work, batten down the hatches, take what we’re given.” Bad and all as hotels and weekly flights were, at least we got home. This year the plan (acceptable to my employer, outrageous to me) is that I will agree to the following. Put my life on hold for six months minimum. Move to some shithole in Hertfordshire (I’m sorry, but everywhere in England is a complete shithole unless you are actually in ZONE ONE of LONDON (or on a romantic mini-break in the English countryside with your beau) in my book. You ask what your accomodation budget is in the PO that buys my robotic body. My robot self that doesn’t have a husband, or a father, or a home in Dublin, or a boat, or a west cork house to worry about and look after. You get told the accommodation budget. Cool, you think, that budget buys me ZONE ONE in London. I can live there, and take the 30 minute train journey to the shithole in Hertfordshire. Your manager says that the people over there, in our sister office in the UK won’t agree to Zone one. You tell your manager that they can’t dictate where we choose to live surely, if our accomodation comes in WITHIN BUDGET. You hope your manager has a spine and agrees. He doesn’t. He tells you if we don’t agree to their terms and conditions, (shared accomodation in Hertfordshit, no flights home) they will get the Croatians to do the job and we’ll have no work and the Irish operation will be SHUT DOWN! You think that’s an over reaction. Then, you talk to your colleague already over there. You hear her tales of woe. Tales of being told she can’t rent a car. Tales of being told they want to get apartments for us in the Hertfordshit town. Told we must share the cheap apartments. You begin to panic. WTF? I like my colleagues, but I don’t want to live with them. I am not a student in a college dorm. You ask about weekend flights home. No flights, one every three months. You think they must be joking.
You make your list of demands.
1) Zone 1 apartment, under PO budget, employer to sign lease for this (perfectly attainable, 3, 6 month leases and weekly rents are soooooooooooooooo common in London).
2) Zone 1 studio, if necessary, I’m not going back to flat sharing, I live with my husband or on my own, have done for five years, not about to change that.
3) Weekly flight home if it costs less than £100. (Luton, Stansted nearby to Hertfordshit work location, cheaper flights than Heathrow)
They don’t seem like unreasonable demands. You think they should be met. You contemplate handing in your notice and the DOLE QUEUE if they are not met. I can’t buy my life back. I can on the other hand keep my life even if it means the banks repossess my home cos I had to give up my job beause my manager thought it reasonable to ask me to live in Hertfordshit for at least six months in shared accommodation with NO FLIGHTS home.
How did my life get to this point?
Hot on the heels of Dell’s announcement re cutting jobs in Limerick comes Nortel’s Chapter 11 filing in the USA. This surely will play out as a further blow to the west of Ireland as there are 300 Nortel jobs in Galway that are now likely to disappear. Worse though is the 1200 jobs in Belfast. I have a particular interest in the Belfast jobs given that I attended a careers fair in Belfast last summer to hustle for graduates. My employer is a major telecoms player. One with a pretty healthy balance sheet at the moment. Of course, that can all change in a couple of quarters, but right now, they are profitable. When we were at the careers fair in Belfast, we were directly opposite the Nortel stand. We were offering better salaries than Nortel and overall our package had a slight edge for graduates. Problem was, the graduates were not interested in coming to Dublin. They wanted to stay in Belfast. Worse still, they seemed to know very little about our company which quite frankly I found baffling, considering that a huge percentage of the fixed and mobile telephony goes through my employers switches. In sporting parlance, we gave the grads that visited our stand after visiting Nortel’s stand the full court press. But, these grads were basing their decision on favoured prospective employer purely around location. I am sure had I asked them had they been monitoring recent stock market reports and filings and share price as part of their decision making they would have looked at me as though I was bonkers. However, being a veteran of one layoff I know how important this is. You have to look at the news reports on perspective employers relationship with the stock market, its share price and its recent quarterly announcment. If the information is available (and it is in the case of publically quoted companies) then use it! I’m wondering now, how many of these graduates who chose Nortel and not my company are kicking themselves?
