Meredith: [opening voice-over] Any day where no one died is a good day. Someone said that once. Wait, it was me. I said it. Any day you wake up and your body is still moving is a good day. You can start over. You can forget your past mistakes. You can make a new start. Live everyday like it's your last. All that crap they put on pillows and car bumpers, it's all true. You're alive. Respect that. Not everybody is.
I just reread my last post and I can't believe how much has changed. True, it has been a little over four years, but still. I can't even recognise the person who wrote those texts anymore.
The current situation is that I live alone on the edge of Tallinn and work in a huge company as an analyst (that's my job title, but at the moment, there's not that much of analysing, as much as there's data entry (by making and managing work schedules for approx. 500 people)). :)
The current situation is that I live alone on the edge of Tallinn and work in a huge company as an analyst (that's my job title, but at the moment, there's not that much of analysing, as much as there's data entry (by making and managing work schedules for approx. 500 people)). :)
But let's do a little cap up of the past few years. :)
2012.
I think the most I'll remember from that year will be that we all swapped rooms that year and my room was now on the other side of the house.
We had our annual Mid Summers Eve get-together in Hiiumaa and I think somewhere in late autumn one of the roommates went for a six-month trip to New Zealand, so until then there were only two of us (until the remaining roommate got a cat on the 12th of December(/12) (2012) named Amanda who'll also be remembered).
Somewhere during that summer I applied for a course called Multimedia. Something to do with programming and design and things like that. The first year would give you a broader overview of them all and then on the next two years you'd dig deeper. The Admissions Entrance would be only in January next year and if chosen, classes would start from February.
2013.
After completing the written test and going through the Admissions Entrance, I found out that I wasn't selected, so what I'll remember most about this year is constant working. Long 12ish hour days in the office with most weekends (luckily the weekend days were mostly only about six to eight hour days). Which is also one of the reasons why my social life came to a zero that year. Thanks to looong days in the office (even though I didn't do anything physically exhausting in the office, it still wore me out after being there from 9:30 in the morning until 9:45ish in the evening) I stopped going out on Friday nights that often and kept more to myself in the evenings.
2014. / The year that changed the most
So the failure from last year didn't stop me from trying the school thing once more, so I applied again. After the written test and the verbal interview round I got an e-mail (on the 25th of January) saying that I have been accepted and that school starts on the 3rd of February.
2012.
I think the most I'll remember from that year will be that we all swapped rooms that year and my room was now on the other side of the house.
We had our annual Mid Summers Eve get-together in Hiiumaa and I think somewhere in late autumn one of the roommates went for a six-month trip to New Zealand, so until then there were only two of us (until the remaining roommate got a cat on the 12th of December(/12) (2012) named Amanda who'll also be remembered).
Somewhere during that summer I applied for a course called Multimedia. Something to do with programming and design and things like that. The first year would give you a broader overview of them all and then on the next two years you'd dig deeper. The Admissions Entrance would be only in January next year and if chosen, classes would start from February.
2013.
After completing the written test and going through the Admissions Entrance, I found out that I wasn't selected, so what I'll remember most about this year is constant working. Long 12ish hour days in the office with most weekends (luckily the weekend days were mostly only about six to eight hour days). Which is also one of the reasons why my social life came to a zero that year. Thanks to looong days in the office (even though I didn't do anything physically exhausting in the office, it still wore me out after being there from 9:30 in the morning until 9:45ish in the evening) I stopped going out on Friday nights that often and kept more to myself in the evenings.
2014. / The year that changed the most
So the failure from last year didn't stop me from trying the school thing once more, so I applied again. After the written test and the verbal interview round I got an e-mail (on the 25th of January) saying that I have been accepted and that school starts on the 3rd of February.
In the beginning of February, somewhere around when my school had already started, our bosses announced that our division is being transferred to the other side of the country (Valga!!!), so that they could cut the costs and put both Estonian and Latvian offices together near the border. Since I wasn't sure at first what to do, I just kept going to school at day time and to work in the evening.
Well... That lasted for about a month, because my supervisor asked me in March if I could basically cover her shifts during day time, which I gladly accepted, because I really needed the money (in that company we got paid for the amount of hours you worked on the previous month) and continued with my 12h work days until our division got closed. Can you believe it – one more month and I would have worked there for exactly 6 years!! Ugh. xD
Somewhere before closing I found an old job ad in the internet that was for an adult toy store salesperson, to which I of course applied to, because I've always wanted to work in one. They answered in a week or so, by which time I had actually already forgotten all about it. Since the shop was quite close to my office, then on one day I just popped by there to do a quick interview with the supervisor and I think I was out within the next 10 minutes or so. The supervisor there said that he normally doesn't hire men as salespeople in his stores, because generally people trust women more about these kinds of things or are likely to be more open with a woman or something. He was considering hiring me only because he wanted me to redo his homepage (which of course I had no idea of how I would have done it, but I couldn't tell that to him). All I said was that I can try and that I totally could have. I could have looked it up in the internet how to do this sh*t and just given it my best shot. “Luckily” enough I didn't even have to try. I got to spend only two weeks in that store, observing how to interact with people (like what can you say and what you can't) and familiarising myself with all of the inventory (all the toys and the movies and pills and lubes and stuff, y'know). At the end of the second week the supervisor called me when I was home and said that the woman I was supposed to replace had changed her mind and wasn't going to change jobs. So my services were no longer required. :(
By that time I had already missed two months of school and someone had told me once that if you go to day school, then the unemployment office won't give you any unemployment pension (which each unemployed Estonian should get from the government for about six months after becoming unemployed). Because if you get the pension, then it's based on an assumption that while you're at home you're actively looking for a new job. So that's why I wasn't in a such hurry to get to the unemployment office.
But once I basically got the boot from the shop, I went and signed myself up as an unemployed person right away to start getting the support, that I needed. And over there they told me that what I had heard about the pension was correct, but there was an exception – if a person has worked a certain amount of hours during the past or the current year (I honestly can't remember which one any more), then that person would be applicable for the pension.
Since by that time I had already missed so much of school, I decided not to continue with it and start concentrating on finding a new job, because the pension wasn't that big.
Somehow I still managed for six months. Once per month I'd visit the unemployment office for an appointment to tell them how hard I have looked and on how many job interviews I've gone to (when in reality generally I'd look at the job ads after leaving each meeting in the unemployment office for about a few hours).
I went only on one job interview (which I also got) – a salesperson in the Zara retail store. I survived there exactly one day and decided it was not for me and continued as an unemployed person throughout summer.
Up until September I had basically done almost absolutely nothing for the whole summer – I just laid around at home most of the time, watching something, smoking something, just being by myself and loving every moment of it.
Then in the beginning September my roommate forwarded me a job ad from the company he works for. The e-mail he forwarded me was an internal one, no public one was yet available. He was working on one of the projects in the company as an agent on the phone lines and they were looking for someone for the Resource Management team, someone to make and manage the work schedules for the agents and their supervisors.
(September was also the month where I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. Just like that, out of the blue (as is this statement), I decided I've had enough of interaction and closed it for a while.)
My first e-mail to the ad from my roommate had granted me no answer. A few weeks later I saw the same ad online and applied again. The second try got me an invitation for a test.
I went there and they gave me three exercises to do, all were supposed to show how good my excel skills are. I had used it in my previous company, but in a very basic way. So I just tried to think logically and hope that saves me.
And it did. It gave me a chance to attend two interview rounds and after that I begun with my first day on the 20th of October.
I went there and they gave me three exercises to do, all were supposed to show how good my excel skills are. I had used it in my previous company, but in a very basic way. So I just tried to think logically and hope that saves me.
And it did. It gave me a chance to attend two interview rounds and after that I begun with my first day on the 20th of October.
When I started working in the new company everyone called me by my real name (Roman), but this far all my life I had always been called by my nickname (Rommy) and at first it felt really strange, because people had previously rarely used my real name. It felt like I'm being called to the principals office or something. On a few occasions I didn't even respond to it. Only after the second or third try I'd realise that the shouts were for me.
I can't really remember how much notice my friend(/roommate/landlord) gave me (might have been either one, two or three months), but I had to move out.
I still remember it very clearly of how we sat on the balcony and he told me that it would be my time to start looking for a place, so I started looking.
A friend forwarded me an ad, where one girl wrote in her blog, that she has a room becoming available, so I went to look at it. I saw it on the 18th of October (my fathers birthday) and liked it. It was a small cute building that used to be a sauna house, but it was rebuilt and now it had a living room, kitchen, bathroom, shower and a sauna.
It was strange to move though. Lasnamägi and my two roommates had been home to me for the past four and a half years and then just up and move – not easy (but now looking back, a necessary move).
I still remember it very clearly of how we sat on the balcony and he told me that it would be my time to start looking for a place, so I started looking.
A friend forwarded me an ad, where one girl wrote in her blog, that she has a room becoming available, so I went to look at it. I saw it on the 18th of October (my fathers birthday) and liked it. It was a small cute building that used to be a sauna house, but it was rebuilt and now it had a living room, kitchen, bathroom, shower and a sauna.
It was strange to move though. Lasnamägi and my two roommates had been home to me for the past four and a half years and then just up and move – not easy (but now looking back, a necessary move).
On the 1st of November I woke up and started packing up. A friend helped me with her car and we had to make two trips to get everything to the new place, which was in Männiku (a part of Nõmme, the greenest suburb is Tallinn).
The first night completely alone was a little lonely, but it got easier and more enjoyable with each passing day.
The first night completely alone was a little lonely, but it got easier and more enjoyable with each passing day.
That made going to work longer though. From my previous home, getting to work took 15 minutes (which includes leaving the house, getting on a bus, driving a few stops and the walk to the office). Now it took me about 45 minutes and two public transports – first bus and then tram.
Even without that the beginning was very intense. First two weeks were just sitting in the meeting room, learning procedures and policies and legislation and stuff like that. I left each day with a headache – sooooo much information was crammed into my brain and so fast. In the evenings I would go through all the material a couple of times and then the next day would usually start with a test on the previous material and then continuing with the new topic.
The third week was half lessons, half participating in the work process (I basically just observed what others did).
The next two weeks were shifts that started from 7AM, which for me meant that I had to get up at 5:35 (to shower and start walking towards the bus stop). The 7AM shifts were nice, because at that time of day the office was almost completely empty (only maybe one or two night shift agents) and the earliest shift was mostly for compiling different reports. The first week I survived well, but the second week was horrible, because I'm not a morning person and I'm not used to waking up that early. Even if I go to sleep early, it's still not nice to wake up that early.
But somehow I survived.
The work itself was quite intense. Since we had offices in five countries, then I had to know and apply legislation for all of them all the time (except when we were putting together all sorts of analysis reports, then we just had to follow the manual). My job at first was to answer to e-mails. Agents, team leaders wrote to us about their schedules and I had to answer the e-mails and do the changes in their schedules. Like they said that the last call was so long that the agent had to stay 15 minutes longer at work or the team leader reporting who was absent on that day or someone requesting a holiday in an upcoming month or anything like that. Basically I had to know everything related to their work time.
And also the official language in the office was English, so everything had to be written in English.
In the beginning my team consisted of me, my two colleagues, my supervisor and our boss. The two colleagues were Russian and with them I could practice my Russian; my supervisor was from Canada, so with her we talked in English (though she had been living here for a number of years now and her Estonian was quite exceptional) and my boss was Estonian, so with him we could talk in Estonian.
Since the projects in our company mostly catered towards Scandinavian clients, then in the kitchen I often heard people speaking in Danish or Norwegian or Swedish. So yeah, I got pretty lucky with such an international company.
But as time went on, the more pressure I felt. Pressure to be perfect all the time (which I wasn't), because every tiny mistake for me means a big thing for the person I did this to. “With great power comes great responsibility (or something...).”
So I started feeling like this work wasn't for me from pretty early on (about four/five months in). Each day me and my former roommate went for a walk around the block every time he had a break. Sometimes I would listen to him vent and sometimes he would listen to me vent (though mostly I was the one who did the listening, because people on the phone can be often more irritating then people via e-mail). We even developed our own mantras during those walks: he's was “VTO” (Voluntary Time Off = you can leave work earlier and not work it back and it'll be deducted from your salary) and mine was “It's only for a year!” (which I repeated quite often). And that's because my initial plan was to survive there for a year, set aside enough money to go to Australia. Of course the money thing never happened, because I was still paying back my old debts even a long while after taking a job in the new company.
Even without that the beginning was very intense. First two weeks were just sitting in the meeting room, learning procedures and policies and legislation and stuff like that. I left each day with a headache – sooooo much information was crammed into my brain and so fast. In the evenings I would go through all the material a couple of times and then the next day would usually start with a test on the previous material and then continuing with the new topic.
The third week was half lessons, half participating in the work process (I basically just observed what others did).
The next two weeks were shifts that started from 7AM, which for me meant that I had to get up at 5:35 (to shower and start walking towards the bus stop). The 7AM shifts were nice, because at that time of day the office was almost completely empty (only maybe one or two night shift agents) and the earliest shift was mostly for compiling different reports. The first week I survived well, but the second week was horrible, because I'm not a morning person and I'm not used to waking up that early. Even if I go to sleep early, it's still not nice to wake up that early.
But somehow I survived.
The work itself was quite intense. Since we had offices in five countries, then I had to know and apply legislation for all of them all the time (except when we were putting together all sorts of analysis reports, then we just had to follow the manual). My job at first was to answer to e-mails. Agents, team leaders wrote to us about their schedules and I had to answer the e-mails and do the changes in their schedules. Like they said that the last call was so long that the agent had to stay 15 minutes longer at work or the team leader reporting who was absent on that day or someone requesting a holiday in an upcoming month or anything like that. Basically I had to know everything related to their work time.
And also the official language in the office was English, so everything had to be written in English.
In the beginning my team consisted of me, my two colleagues, my supervisor and our boss. The two colleagues were Russian and with them I could practice my Russian; my supervisor was from Canada, so with her we talked in English (though she had been living here for a number of years now and her Estonian was quite exceptional) and my boss was Estonian, so with him we could talk in Estonian.
Since the projects in our company mostly catered towards Scandinavian clients, then in the kitchen I often heard people speaking in Danish or Norwegian or Swedish. So yeah, I got pretty lucky with such an international company.
But as time went on, the more pressure I felt. Pressure to be perfect all the time (which I wasn't), because every tiny mistake for me means a big thing for the person I did this to. “With great power comes great responsibility (or something...).”
So I started feeling like this work wasn't for me from pretty early on (about four/five months in). Each day me and my former roommate went for a walk around the block every time he had a break. Sometimes I would listen to him vent and sometimes he would listen to me vent (though mostly I was the one who did the listening, because people on the phone can be often more irritating then people via e-mail). We even developed our own mantras during those walks: he's was “VTO” (Voluntary Time Off = you can leave work earlier and not work it back and it'll be deducted from your salary) and mine was “It's only for a year!” (which I repeated quite often). And that's because my initial plan was to survive there for a year, set aside enough money to go to Australia. Of course the money thing never happened, because I was still paying back my old debts even a long while after taking a job in the new company.
Somehow we've ended up already in 2015.
There are a lot of memories from that year, but I think one of the funniest ones I won't forget for a while, would be the crush I had on one of our workers.
It was a bit sad really, because I knew he wasn't playing for my team, but just seeing him brightened up my day. It was one of those crushes, that when you see the person, your heart rate elevates a little bit and you feel like your cheeks are on fire. I sincerely hope that every time I looked into his eyes I was actually able to maintain a neutral look on my face (and not only in my head) and answer without gushing like a teenager (because that's what the voice inside my head was doing). Even though he was just looking at me as a normal person would when in conversation, I felt like he was looking deep into my soul and every time he was near, I had to sit down, because there was always a fear that my legs will simply give in.
In the beginning of winter we hired an awesome addition to our team: A mother of two and a total rock star in my eyes. Plus I think after I activated my Facebook account in March, she was the first person I added as a friend. That's quite a big thing for me, because usually I never send requests to be friends. People send them to me and then I decide if I accept them or not. It's not this way because I'm a picky person, it's this way, because I'm afraid to seem pushy. I know a lot of people who do things just because you've asked them to do it, even though they didn't really want to do it, but they didn't want to say “no” and now they're pissed at you, because they felt like they had to do it. Stupid, I know, but a reality nevertheless. :)
There are a lot of memories from that year, but I think one of the funniest ones I won't forget for a while, would be the crush I had on one of our workers.
It was a bit sad really, because I knew he wasn't playing for my team, but just seeing him brightened up my day. It was one of those crushes, that when you see the person, your heart rate elevates a little bit and you feel like your cheeks are on fire. I sincerely hope that every time I looked into his eyes I was actually able to maintain a neutral look on my face (and not only in my head) and answer without gushing like a teenager (because that's what the voice inside my head was doing). Even though he was just looking at me as a normal person would when in conversation, I felt like he was looking deep into my soul and every time he was near, I had to sit down, because there was always a fear that my legs will simply give in.
In the beginning of winter we hired an awesome addition to our team: A mother of two and a total rock star in my eyes. Plus I think after I activated my Facebook account in March, she was the first person I added as a friend. That's quite a big thing for me, because usually I never send requests to be friends. People send them to me and then I decide if I accept them or not. It's not this way because I'm a picky person, it's this way, because I'm afraid to seem pushy. I know a lot of people who do things just because you've asked them to do it, even though they didn't really want to do it, but they didn't want to say “no” and now they're pissed at you, because they felt like they had to do it. Stupid, I know, but a reality nevertheless. :)
Also in 2015 I changed homes.
My landlord back then was a young guy who was living in the main building (which was in the same yard as my home) with his girlfriend, their daughter and their mother-in-law and he said that they plan to give the sauna house to their mother-in-law, so I had to move on.
I searched all summer. I wanted to stay in the same area and I was keeping an eye out for an ad for one particular 9-story building, but it never came. In the end I settled with a nice one bedroom apartment on the 4th floor, with quite a good view. Though it's biggest minus was that the walls were paper-thin, at nights I could sometimes hear one of my neighbours snoring.
My landlord back then was a young guy who was living in the main building (which was in the same yard as my home) with his girlfriend, their daughter and their mother-in-law and he said that they plan to give the sauna house to their mother-in-law, so I had to move on.
I searched all summer. I wanted to stay in the same area and I was keeping an eye out for an ad for one particular 9-story building, but it never came. In the end I settled with a nice one bedroom apartment on the 4th floor, with quite a good view. Though it's biggest minus was that the walls were paper-thin, at nights I could sometimes hear one of my neighbours snoring.
By then my circle of closest friends (read: people I interacted the most, excluding the ones I got from work) was down to three: the two ex-roommates and one other good friend. They mostly came to my place (which come to think of it, has actually always been the case, people always tend to come to me).
From that year I'll also remember the long walks me and one of the ex-roommates took near the forest that is not far from our homes. After he moved away from Lasnamägi, he found an apartment quite close to me, so our walks sometimes would be on every other evening.
2016
Somewhere at the end of last year I had started talking to one of my colleagues from Spain. A little more than once a day. We were typing in Whatsapp all the time and in January he desired to come to visit me. We spent a few days together and it was really nice. We both knew that we can be friends only, because I was not looking for a relationship at that time and I still had a plan to go to Australia at some close point.
And when one friendship blossomed – another one died. Me and my former roommate (the one who moved close to me) stopped talking somewhere in the beginning of February. There was some snapping in a group chat in Viber and silence followed. That brought my little circle of friends down to two. On the previous year we had met almost every other day, taken long walks together or being at each others place, talking or playing cards and now it was over. Just poof and gone... Oh well, I guess all good things must eventually come to their end. :(
From that year I'll also remember the long walks me and one of the ex-roommates took near the forest that is not far from our homes. After he moved away from Lasnamägi, he found an apartment quite close to me, so our walks sometimes would be on every other evening.
2016
Somewhere at the end of last year I had started talking to one of my colleagues from Spain. A little more than once a day. We were typing in Whatsapp all the time and in January he desired to come to visit me. We spent a few days together and it was really nice. We both knew that we can be friends only, because I was not looking for a relationship at that time and I still had a plan to go to Australia at some close point.
And when one friendship blossomed – another one died. Me and my former roommate (the one who moved close to me) stopped talking somewhere in the beginning of February. There was some snapping in a group chat in Viber and silence followed. That brought my little circle of friends down to two. On the previous year we had met almost every other day, taken long walks together or being at each others place, talking or playing cards and now it was over. Just poof and gone... Oh well, I guess all good things must eventually come to their end. :(
Me and my colleague from Spain kept contact and he invited me over there too and within a few months I had organised everything so that I had the change to spend a whole month over there.
I had arranged everything in a way that the first week was my holiday week, which would be the getting-there-week and visiting the office (which I did once during that week), then the next two weeks I'd spend working from our local office and then my last week would also be a holiday week, where I'd travel to another city in Spain to our second office over there, to meet the people I've been writing with for quite a while.
During my stay in Spain one of my colleagues handed in his resignation and left a short while after I got back. The second colleague became sort of a project managers assistant or something like that and started spending most of his time on the fourth floor. One girl was hired to replace the colleague who quit and two people were hired for the summer period (with the idea of keeping one of them after the summer ends).
The more time went on, the more popular I became among the people I made schedules for (and to those, to whose e-mails I just answered to). During the company summer days I won the “best worker” nomination in our department. Turned out a lot of people in our office had the change to vote for one or two people in their projects and one from administration or us (R.M.) (but our voting slips said that we can only vote for R.M. or administration) and a lot of agents and supervisors had voted for me. Our HR girl had been counting the votes one day and came to me in the kitchen to comment on the fact that on the voting slips a lot of people had written a lot of nice things about me, so I had a feeling that victory might be mine (though I was also dreading it, because accepting it means stepping into the spotlight for a second, which terrifies the heck out of me) and therefore I taught my friend how to use snapchat to record the moment if I win (which I did and it also got beautifully recorded). :D
But being so liked and so helpful all the time had it's down sides. Thanks to almost always agreeing to help someone else out with their thing, I extended my workday by a lot. On some occasions I started from around 9:30 and finish about 12h later. When in my previous occupation it wasn't a big thing, because it was much less tense, then 12h days in the new company were quite a killer.
The lesson I take from all of this was that I did it to myself. :) Thinking back I could have been much better, if going in I would have gone for a longer period, than "only for a year".
The closer we came to summer, the more it became clear that one of the people in our department must go, because there were two people hired for the summer period, but only one could stay. But the boss decided to ask if perhaps anyone wants to go, because the two new hires were actually pretty good at what they do now.
So I happily volunteered and they accepted.
In August I signed a resignation – last working day 20th of October. A few weeks later I got a visa to enter and work on Australian ground for one year. A week (or two) later I got tickets, would take me to Melbourne from Frankfurt in the beginning of November.
Also: on the 17th of September I finally got myself a tattoo. :) I had been wanting one for a looooong time and I knew exactly what symbol I want (I wanted a “triquetra”) and finally I got it done. :)
But being so liked and so helpful all the time had it's down sides. Thanks to almost always agreeing to help someone else out with their thing, I extended my workday by a lot. On some occasions I started from around 9:30 and finish about 12h later. When in my previous occupation it wasn't a big thing, because it was much less tense, then 12h days in the new company were quite a killer.
The lesson I take from all of this was that I did it to myself. :) Thinking back I could have been much better, if going in I would have gone for a longer period, than "only for a year".
The closer we came to summer, the more it became clear that one of the people in our department must go, because there were two people hired for the summer period, but only one could stay. But the boss decided to ask if perhaps anyone wants to go, because the two new hires were actually pretty good at what they do now.
So I happily volunteered and they accepted.
In August I signed a resignation – last working day 20th of October. A few weeks later I got a visa to enter and work on Australian ground for one year. A week (or two) later I got tickets, would take me to Melbourne from Frankfurt in the beginning of November.
Also: on the 17th of September I finally got myself a tattoo. :) I had been wanting one for a looooong time and I knew exactly what symbol I want (I wanted a “triquetra”) and finally I got it done. :)
Meredith: [closing voice-over] We can start over. Every day, we get second chances to become who we always wanted to be. We can leave our past behind or we can learn from it and honor it. We can decide. It's never too late to change. [Cut to the classroom, where Meredith is teaching the interns] These people don't have that chance. They left it to you. They let you learn from them, so let's say thank you and not screw it up.
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