I’ve gotten myself 2 new jobs while I was busy with chemistry in Aachen. I will be working at the University’s helpdesk and I will do the customer service for UniDSL, a freelance DSL project for students. Both are jobs to dream of, free distribution of time, shifts, workload, just perfect and they even harmonize with each other.
Problem: I have to cancel my work at Mercedes, where I spent the last 3 years working and hating the job. Now that it finally happened and I can get myself a better job (where I actually CAN help people and don’t have to use phrases someone else wrote) I am afraid. Afraid of what? Since 6 months I stress Anna that I want another job. Since one year I am bored by working for the arrogant Mercedes-customers.. and yet, it feels like I am betraying them, Am I already that deep inside? Am I that attached to them? Or am I just getting old and afraid of the changes?
If Anna gets her fulltime contract in Amsterdam I will move to Aachen anyway so why the hesitation?
Well, living in Holland and working in Aachen is not easy anyway, the taxes and laws for border-people are even worse than the ones for the average German guy (and they are already hard to understand)
I will have to fill in hundreds of papers (ok, dozens, but it’s a LOT) and when I move over I will have to fill them in again.. how I HATE bureaucracy!
Well, all this thinking about how to get it done in germany (feels weird now after having lived for 4 years in NL) made me think what I actually have that I like in the Netherlands…
Lets see: I like the easy, straightforward style the people approach you. I like the multicultural suciety and the fact that not everything is translated (like in germany) you can watch a cool movie and it is the way it should be, not a silly lip-synchronisation (remember the ketchup-joke in pulp-fiction)
what about Germany? A nation full of unsatisfied and grumpy people, nothing to achieve there and only disappointments. When you walk on the street you have to be afraid that someone punches you in the face. Well, that’s my feeling in germany that’s why I avoid it. The university is similar, everyone complains, noone does anything.
Hmm, I really have no problem finding hundreds of things that I don’t like here but hey: By complaining, am I not EXACTLY the same as them? Is it really that german never to be satisfied and always to complain? Am I one of them? Will I one day walk the streed and make others feel afraid I might go for their neck?
Gives me shivers…
I’ve been to the center of Maastricht today with these thoughts in mind and all I saw was the cleanliness, the style and the effect that lots of money have on a city. But do I like it? almost everyone is wearing sunglasses and some crazy (ugly?) clothes to be “in”, “hip” or whatever is the word at the moment, a perfect world created from TV and glossy magazines. The topping is the cameras everywhere to make the “brave new world” image perfect.
Now I feel confused, which of the two is better? The beautiful but fake world or the world of complaints and unhappiness?
damn… one should really have a job that hard that thinking is not possible anymore afterwards.. I only confuse myself more and more trying to understand.
Is that the price for happiness? Fake luxury? A false utopia? Damn.. I can’t concentrate! And reading 1984 does not help either ;)