A Saturday in 1977: Freezer Food, Potato Chips, and Job Obsession

Last week at work was aggressively unpleasant again, more so toward the end as I dealt with my part of the work on a massive client as well as massive discussions about strategy; and I still felt tense and angry even while asleep after Friday.

In the morning I did half an hour or so of work, not reviewing stock this time, but trying to pull up figures for a strategic discussion because I knew on Monday I'd be too dumb and busy to handle it. PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Google spreadsheets, and enormous pressure from colleagues you usually get along well with, are really all you need to relax.

Anyway, uncle M. came for a visit, and we ate breakfast together. Croissants, orange marmalade, and baguette as always, this time with Ge.'s café au lait.

In honour of the year 1977, I wore a tall 1970s dress. And then I went on a wild housekeeping bender when T. visited and chatted with our youngest brothers about meal plans. I've figured out that a stale baguette slice is good for scouring the grease off of wood that's unfortunately near the frying pan oil splash zone.

Afterward T. and Ge. cycled off to the Drachenberg. I went on various errands. First, buying a pumpkin, broccoli, carrots, blueberries, and donations for charity, from a local organic store. Then fetching the New York Times (international edition) and two chocolate candy bars from the newspaper kiosk across the road. Then dropping off the donations at the parking lot at the former Tempelhofer Airport building.

It was busy at the adjoining intersection, as people who had been attending the Saturday marathon events were shepherded across a road by police officers who looked a little fed up. First they clustered on a traffic island in the centre of the street. Then they were let through to the other side. It all looked a little risky, like sheep stranded on a high boulder by floodwaters. Someone possibly in the blue-and-white police van had a megaphone and hollered instructions to the pedestrians in German-accented English. And one by one, a police officer waved through the cars who had selected this route.

At the airport building itself, a few donations had been stacked neatly against a fence beside the charity's van, but no one was there yet to receive them. So I walked down through the building complex, where it was a little creepy to think that this used to be an epicenter of the Nazis, until I reached the donation sorting and shipping hangar. There I offered to carry in the donations where they'd be better sheltered. There the lady who was coordinating let me in and said that a volunteer was on their way to take care of things already. Then I asked whether they needed more people to sort, and she said 'Always!'

Two volunteers were at the sorting table already: one a taller woman who almost looked like Melissa Gilbert, and the other a wiry smaller woman with her hair in a pixie cut. I sorted two bags of clothes, the first of which was exquisitely chosen — except for two German-language paperback books that were in good condition but questionably useful for people who live in Ukraine, and the second of which was all right. In the meantime a brisk sports game was going on in the part of the hangar that's fenced off for refugees and other Berliners: we heard a lively soundtrack of squeaking and running and shouting.

It did disturb me when I came across a men's jacket that had a pocket on the inside that was exactly the right size and shape to hold a Swiss army knife or something larger. [Update: My family has pointed out, to my relief, that this is likely just a coin pocket.] And I tried to clean off a puffer coat that looked warm and worth donating but had dark grey wear at the wrists, and a few specks of white, with a disinfectant wipe.

Other than that, a lot of baby diaper packages had come in, which was good — also a plastic pink potted orchid that was still in good condition, a decorated glass mug, and one or two other odds and ends.

On the way home I went off on side paths and looked at an old building monument, walked through allotment gardens, and finally entered the Mediterranean import store I'd been meaning to try for years too.

It prominently displays wine in the shop window and the bottles dominate a lot of aisles, and it's basically a supermarket in size. When I went in, I did have the sense that a stereotypically macho taste dominates the store: alcohol and meat.

But I was intrigued by the shelves and shelves of unfamiliar Spanish specialties and brands, from marmalades and nut spreads through potato chips; the jarred calamari and other shellfish; the huge shelf of dried pasta with gnocchi and manioc flour at the end (they also stocked Brazilian food, with pão de queijo in the deep freezer); sun-dried tomatoes, jars of capers, and lots of fresh pasta and olives.

Through a doorway with a sliding door it was possible to reach the fish counter.

The elaborate freezer section was timely for my 1970s experiment. I was fascinated by the grey prawns of all sizes, shrimps, crayfish, whole octopuses and octopus legs, frozen wild salmon fillets, slender sardines, mussels, Venus clams, battered calamari rings, etc. on one side. On the other side, frozen oranges filled with ice cream, tubs of ice cream, pão de queijo, tiramisù, and readymade pizzas. I didn't get a good look at the short legs of lamb etc. that were also there.

In the end I went home happy with this new experience, with two jars of pesto and two packages of pasta, a package of frozen tiramisù (not very 70s-themed), and a pack of aceto-balsamico-flavoured, salty potato chips. (The British television series Back in Time for Dinner suggests that flavoured potato chips were a big fad in the late 1970s, but rather the artificially flavoured kind.)

I laid in an interlude of typewriting. It was enjoyable in general. But imitating a # sign on a German typewriter that doesn't have it by typing the = sign, then backspacing, then typing a /, then grumbling to myself that it still doesn't look right ... at least 20 times, was not so fun.

For dinner I cooked pumpkin soup, roasted the pumpkin seeds for snacks, prepared grated fresh carrot, steamed a head of broccoli, and opened the package of tiramisù, while T. and Ge. played flute and cello duets with slightly adventurous intonation. And we had a nice family dinner.

I'm still stressed and even resentful about work despite these distractions. I have to keep telling myself to be kind to myself and to others; that I have been doing the right thing as far as possible so I haven't done anything I need to 'beat myself up' for — these times are just stressful; and that nothing that's happening in my job is as important as death or war.

Long and Winding Road: Team Event and Frantic Post-Layoff Activity

The past week was another circle of hell, except that I liked the fellow spirits in it.

*

On Monday the managing director of the part of the company I'm in had organized a company hike in an area on the outskirts of Berlin with which he is familiar. Generally quite dignified and not at first glance the practical sort, his careful attempts to venture beyond his usual scope of work were touching and well-received.

We gathered at an S-Bahn station, ready for the sortie, in good spirits — some of us hadn't seen each other in person for two years, and besides a whole contingent of American colleagues had arrived either the previous week or over the weekend.

It was a generously sunny day, in the most lavishly scaled part of old imperial Berlin, and the forests beyond were promisingly green.

Our principal challenge that day, aside from getting there, was that our managing director is a former amateur soccer player who I think made it into the second German national league. He still keeps up athletic habits and jogs considerable distances. His idea of exercise is, in short, somewhat heroic.

At any rate we walked along the streets, then a forest path, with good cheer; we survived a steep climb with zigzagging and rustic wooden stairs made of irregular logs and roots and sand, where colleagues kindly pitched in to help me carry my bicycle up an incline that seemed rather heart-attack-inducing; and at the end we reached the top of the hill and had a great view of Berlin, from the Television Tower and the Die Welt balloon, through the Olympia Stadium, through industrial buildings and a few fuming chimneys, to the matchstick-like white figures of windmills in rural Brandenburg all around. There was a great carpet of forest on the next hill we were scheduled to climb, but until then we took group photos of each other and of the skyline, chatted, etc., along with other sightseeing groups on the grassy dome.

The path down was bumpy, sandy soil interrupted by bricks and squiggles of what looked like rebar or stainless steel. As I maneuvered my bouncing bicycle down it, one of the teammates in the American branch and the managing director as well as other colleagues evidently expected to see me pitch head-first down the slope at any moment. But after that came tranquil level ground. The following uphill forest stretches I almost managed to tackle on my own before I finally gave up near the top of a slope. Four colleagues took over the portage of my bicycle (which was by then heavily embarrassing me), and then the managing director (whom I longed to relieve of my bicycle, but it was too awkward) pushed it the rest of the way.

We were just encircling the leafy crown of the hill along a narrow, trodden earth path at the crest of a slope that had the steepest incline yet, when a mountain cyclist who was extremely committed to his craft passed alongside us on an even narrower, outward path. We were all afraid he'd fall over before he finished passing all 40+ of us colleagues, but he clearly survived.

After that we scaled an asphalt-paved road and paid entrance to an old Cold War surveillance station at the top of the hill. The hill itself had been constructed by of the rubble of Berlin's buildings after the aerial bombings of World War II, although now it's knee-deep in trees and outwardly looks natural. The station is so glaringly obvious with its massive white spheres dominating the landscape, that colleagues could not stop wondering why it was considered an appropriate venue for covert espionage.

And then we had the run of the building complex, decrepit but tidied up, and draped in careful graffiti artworks, from political commentary on Israel and the US to a tribute to a young man who had died. On the roof we ate the lunches we had brought along, everything from cheese to granola bars, took photos, and chatted.

At first sight, the exterior staircases had felt like madness after all the other climbing we'd done. But as the other colleagues had made it, we followed suit. One American colleague who hadn't had anything to eat yet went rather beyond her strength; I heard her mutter to herself 'Don't look down; don't look down' as we scaled the metal stairs with no backing to the steps, and thin rails that didn't impede the view down the four stories. I joked to her and two or so other colleagues that we'd been signed up to a fitness boot camp without our knowledge, and they all were half-amused, half-felt that it was almost true.

The American colleague, looking very pale, was sitting with a sympathetic other American colleague underneath a tree below the building, when my sister and I walked back down from the rooftop. She had hailed an Uber, and soon a handful of us had walked the rest of the way to the entrance to the hilltop, and were waiting with her there beside a motley assemblage of fitness equipment. By coincidence two other walkers had hailed another white compact Toyota via Uber, so she thought her ride had already come; but the driver practically ignored her and then two tourists bustled past into that car.

I chatted with the colleagues there, also after the American colleague's Uber had arrived and she had absented herself with the plea, 'If the others ask, tell them I stayed strong!' Eventually the rest of the company arrived, we made group photos, and then we went on an endless-seeming walk back to the S-Bahn station. The endless-seeming walk was still nice; I think somehow we also all appreciated the time to talk with each other, the feeling of being in nature and not in front of our computers, and the way the managing director had planned for us an experience that was not about a fancy big budget or perks but just about the essentials of restfulness and 'togetherness.' After that, my sister and I cycled home together.

I had the afternoon off because I'd asked for the holiday, but a few other colleagues of course were working hard the rest of the day.

*

So that day was nice, but it was a lot of physical exercise. Then the pressure to go into the office was strong because my team was going to have an 'on-site meeting' with my sister's team on Tuesday. Which meant another 9 km of cycling in the morning, finding my bearings in the office, and having absolutely no time to work on the tasks I'd meant to do.

I did all of the cycling to and from the office, and survived the stress of having it be implied that I was exaggerating the susceptibility of my team to sudden changes during Black Friday season, because it suited me to do so.

Then I went to a team event. My team ordered considerably more food and drink than I'd expected, so I couldn't cover the cost on my own (even though I'd brought along 270 Euros, borrowing those 70 Euros from the household kitty even though I dislike doing so) and I had to ask a teammate to lend 80 Euros. We also exceeded the Berlin team budget considerably, although hopefully the American team still had money left over, so I'm not sure if my expense reimbursement request will be flagged as unreasonable. My bank limit for the week was nearly reached; so when I tried on Friday to withdraw the money to pay back the teammate, I ended up withdrawing 50 Euros only.

The team event itself was nice: we were all gathered in an outdoor restaurant garden except for my jet-lagged brother who understandably excused himself, the team put together a lovely birthday card for me, and we ate delicious Greek food.

On Wednesday evening I worked massive overtime again, but still made it almost to the tail end of a company event at a beach volleyball court. All the food had been cleared away, but alcoholic and non-alcoholic beer remained, a few colleagues were still playing foosball or table tennis, and quite a lot of people were chatting away at picnic tables underneath a wooden pavilion. I talked briefly with a fellow team lead and my direct manager, but then left again after a round of goodbyes with teammates current and former, and with the head of HR of our part of the company.

After tough weeks informing people not just from our part of the company but also the parent company, of the details of their layoff 'package,' or perhaps just physically exhausted from her volleyball games, this usually quite spry and ebullient amateur basketball player was slumped at a picnic table, cigarette in hand, looking tired. She's on holiday this next week.

On Thursday I was in a terrible meeting with my direct manager and two client-facing colleagues and my American manager teammate. Everyone except my teammate proposed that we would basically refuse service to many clients during Black Friday shopping season. This went strongly against my professional ethics. Besides I don't want to keep being stuck in strategic meetings when I could actually be handling our Black Friday season workload. And it made me worry that my relationship with colleagues might be souring.

I had a headache after that meeting. Besides I've been so shocked still by the lay-offs, so overburdened by work, worried about the effects on my looming performance review of my disagreements with my direct manager while at the same time angry about the positions I'm being put in, and so unable to sleep without dreaming about the job, that I was in no condition to make any decisions. But now that so many impulsive decisions were being proposed about fundamental aspects of my team's work, I felt that I was trapped into not being able to take holidays for the foreseeable future.

My mother had gone shopping earlier that day, and had kindly offered that I could have some of the chocolate that she usually buys for guests. Seeing how deeply stressed I was by the end of the day, she amended that to, 'All right, never mind — take all the chocolate you want!' My sister came over to visit and we had a vigorous debate until midnight or thereabouts, and then chatted as a family until after 1 a.m.

On Friday I went into work again because I wanted to repay the teammate (partly), help out with work for a difficult client, and see someone in person who'd wanted to see me in person. The 9 km commute with my heavy laptop was exhausting again, and I barely got any work done again, but it was nice being in the office with the team and my sister. Besides I had a good, air-clearing conversation with my direct manager, who also feels that too much is going on considering that we're still supposed to be given time to recover from the layoffs.

At the end of the day, when almost everyone had left except for M., who was busily clearing up the dirty dishes from a massive cake eating event, I put leftover cake into a doughnut carton to take home, and then T. and I cycled off together. (Another 12 km, but it was enjoyable until the last hill or two.)

In short, even though there were many good bits to the week, I think there was a lot of what I'd qualify as low-level psychological tormenting. Also, a lot of colleagues were out sick and 'out sick' (i.e. sick from stress, I imagine) once more. I'm beginning to be in the mood for crusading wildly for the rights of us workers again.

Postage Stamps and Travellers (and 1975)

It's been a good weekend, where I'm picking up more of my hobbies again.

The macramé bag I was trying to make to celebrate the 70s in my historical experiment has ended in disaster, as I find that two strings that are needed for the next step are missing. Now I need to undo the knots and figure out what caused it.

Yesterday evening I tidied up my old stamp collection. I'd worked with it intensively as a 13- or 14-year old but not much since. Although my grandfather Opa before he died, my uncle M., my Greek teammate, and my sister's and my French teacher have all contributed stamps at various times. There's a big gap in my stamp albums roughly between New Zealand and Sweden, which means that the two Spanish stamps and one Portuguese stamp are in limbo until I make or buy another album. The Canadian postage stamps are beautiful, so it was a pleasure sorting through the loose ones I haven't put into any book yet. It was funny to get back into practice; certain tricks of how to slip stamps back into the album folds, and memories of the motifs on the stamps, came back to me immediately. I was also surprised how many countries were represented: Ireland, Liechtenstein, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe amongst them.

It was also bittersweet sorting through the British penny stamps with their portraits of Queen Elizabeth II. I've been trying to think how best to pay tribute to her while making clear I didn't know the lady personally. I guess that throughout my Canadian schooling she was a grandmotherly figure of sorts. Besides I've appreciated that she rarely expressed opinions in public, being equally polite to visitors whose politics and personal conduct she liked, and those whose politics and personal conduct she abhorred. If she had been amoral or indifferent, it would have had no merit; but as it is, I think that this neutrality was one of her biggest sacrifices to her role. It is part of the ethos of public service to which former heads of state like David Cameron, Kevin Rudd and others have paid tribute.

Aside from reading another half page or so of Teilhard de Chardin, I barely marked the year 1975 of my historical experiment very much. It feels a little disrespectful to do too much playacting right after the layoffs and I guess I've simply been too exhausted. But next week I intend to pick it up again more fully, as it really should be beneficial for my mental health.

Lately I've also played the piano more than usual: bits of Tchaikovsky's concerto, waltzes and other ragtime by Scott Joplin, an arrangement of 'La vie en rose,' a Rachmaninoff prelude, and even the entirety of the Bach-Busoni chaconne. As usual, going through a harrowing experience lends some richness and depth to musical interpretation, which is one of those uncomfortable artistic trade-offs.

Today my eldest and youngest brothers came back from a journey to our old hometown in Canada. They had gone hiking on hills and through forests, eaten fish and chips, bought cream-of-tartar and gummy worms for me, wandered through an exhibition about the ill-treatment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II, passed a horrible night due to a malfunctioning smoke detector in their hotel, seen a lizard and a 'beware of bear' sign and a rabbit, and so on and so forth. And this morning they landed back at Schönefeld Airport, where Ge. picked them up and ferried them to the family apartment. They looked sunburned and had clearly enjoyed their time.

A few hours later, my American teammate came over with her friend, and my siblings and I had an afternoon tea of sorts in our living room with them. It was lovely to see her in person again, and to chat at length, and to drink coffee and tea and eat pastries and potato chips together. She had brought along a print of Bulgarian folk dancers as a birthday present, which was very thoughtful!

When the guests had left, the siblings ordered in burgers, fries, and ribs, and we ate dinner together.

In the evening I also revisited the allotment gardens, which is where I still go to draw strength. They were very quiet. Apples were piled like green and red balls in a few baskets, and I took along some of them; the plums from yesterday had vanished. It is definitely growing dark earlier these days, brown plane and linden and maple (or sycamore) leaves were drifting along a bridge overpass, and a sense I guess of annual autumn 'saudade' has seized me these past two weeks.

To end on a more frivolous note, I finally tried a slice of the pickles I'd made from three cucumbers last week. Oversalted and a little sour, but altogether I thought they were better than expected!

Of the Modern Persuasion

This evening my sister and I sat down at my computer, window ajar and early autumn breeze filtering in, after a long workday and nightfall, to watch the newest adaptation of Persuasion on Netflix.

During my late teens I was fond of the book Persuasion, because it spoke to my feeling of being 'on the shelf' because of unattractiveness, not having many perspectives or options in life given that my school grades weren't always great and I didn't feel convinced I was going to be able to go to university, and of trying to develop fine qualities in obscurity. But the romance with Captain Wentworth was never really my favourite part of it; he seems like an immature character compared to the heroine, a bit superficial, and pretty arrogant. And I guess I've always liked Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley best of all Jane Austen's heroes. (Although when I was twelve, I did like Edmund in Mansfield Park. It sounded so nice to be cared for by someone through childhood into adult years; now of course he just comes across as a little morally inconsistent and not entirely the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to reading character.)

Since then I've temporarily gained a more cheerful outlook on life. I read Jane Austen's books so often as a child and teenager that for a while I could almost quote Pride and Prejudice passage for passage, so it's a little difficult to re-read them now without feeling a threadbare familiarity. But based on recollections of the book at least, I sympathize more with the Elizabeth Bennet mindset again: I'll enjoy friends and family and books and music all I like, stay single if there's no good alternative, and thumb my nose at social expectations and self-serving prudence. [Edit: So I don't feel embarrassed about writing that paragraph when rereading it in a few years: 1. No, I don't think I'm like a fictional character; and 2. 'no good alternative' is not a withering indictment of what humanity has to offer. It's just a statement that it feels worthwhile to hold out for an especially good relationship (not just any relationship).]

The Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is far removed from the spirit of Jane Austen's book. Anne Elliot is made over into the sort of college-educated, literature-loving, self-admiring, self-proclaimed sophisticate who finds hardship icky and generally ends up living quite happily off her parents and then the fruits of a university education into which she has slid thanks to the momentum of well-financed primary schooling. Of course women did not attend university in the early 1800s, so this analogy is artistic license. The loss of Captain Wentworth, when she is persuaded as a younger woman not to marry him, carries all the emotional depth of forgetting a pair of sunglasses in a car's glove compartment.

Captain Wentworth, in the book, knows when Elizabeth Elliot is being snobby, when Mary is being selfish, and so on and so forth; and it's not his most lovable quality that instead of feeling sorry for them, he seems to despise them. But in the film, Anne takes over this role and more; she telegraphs with every arched eyebrow at the viewer how much better she feels than her family. In the book, they are all she has left after the death of her mother, and through the rural isolation and shyness that leave her few friends; and she would never behave rudely toward them.

It has been written elsewhere, and is totally true in my opinion as well, that in Netflix's adaptation Louisa and Captain Wentworth, Anne and Mr. Elliot, have far better chemistry with each other, than with their putative true love interests. It's a daring choice that Anne Elliot and Mr. Elliot are kept as cousins in the film when any romantic tendency there is now widely considered squicky, but the film also I think uses it to play up Mr. Elliot's streak of moral perversion.

Having Anne caress a big speckled white bunny rabbit as what I presume is a heavy symbolic hint that despite the early 19th century setting and her virgin status, she was far from uninterested in sex, was a little unsubtle. It also made me feel bad for the rabbit.

We may question the modern paraffin candles and machine-smooth wine bottles, the acting, the terrifying lack of chemistry, the mid-19th century table grapes. I may be disgusted by the synthetic emotions of the 'romances' and think that anyone above the age of fifteen who's experienced heartbreak stronger than that of breaking a nail or losing a smartphone off the side of a boat has already psychologically outgrown the film.

But the scenes of Lyme were beautifully filmed. Kellynch Hall and Uppercross were lovely even if the choice to write the place names across the screen in modern font to signal when we were switching settings made me think that the director should go back to film school or stick to filming tourism videos.

Even the weird choice of Edwardian shirtwaist outfit for Anne symbolized the way her family was treating her like a maid, so I didn't dislike the costume design as others did despite acknowledging the anachronisms. I still have no explanation for the outfit where she wears a French beret, however.

Besides I did like Richard E. Grant's performance, amongst others. Thanks to these and other elements, the film had energy and élan.

Still I guess it's depressing that it is so easy to take the real-life plight of many fine-minded, quiet and disadvantaged people also in the world today — and make out of it a film that celebrates wallowing in moral superiority and shallow intellectual snobbery.

A Helter-skelter Birthday, and more Lay-offs Aftermath

In the end my birthday was quite good. I feel pretty fragile after the last weeks; and not having experienced lay-offs in a company I've worked in before, the different impacts it's having are especially new, strange and painful.

But the messages from colleagues warmed me, also private messages in chats.

It was still a little bittersweet. There was a thread of tension throughout the day as I didn't get any birthday message from my manager. It wasn't clear if he was angry at me or not. (This morning, a message was waiting for me and I was relieved.)

And I used to look forward to seeing which birthday and work anniversary presents a colleague would send to me on behalf of the company (she chose customized ones). Because she quietly sourced ideas from teammates and in my case family members, I'd also enjoy guessing which person she'd asked. Now that colleague has been laid off.

But even teammates who were out sick or travelling sent affectionate messages, one of them had given me a bottle of limoncello on the way back from Italy.

That said, I have been so full of anxiety about not living up to what everyone expects or needs from me, that it was hard to accept the kindness.

It was a relief to log off at 4:45 p.m. T. had already arrived and Uncle Pu had just rung the doorbell ten minutes earlier. Ge. had, the day before, bought gummy bears, wine gums, After Eights and fizzy gummy strips for my birthday, and I had begun to eat them.

Then we went to a Chinese restaurant in the neighbourhood, where we met Uncle M. and had a family meal of sweet-and-sour pork, chicken with peanuts, aubergines, spicy shredded potato, and cabbage with mushroom. We had two pots of jasmine tea, and of course rice to go with the meal.

Afterward we returned home for conversation, a round of limoncello, the candy as well as mochi ice cream balls that Ge. had also bought because he knows I like them (they were also a tribute to D., in a way, as he first introduced us to them on Hawaii).

All of this made me much more cheerful and 'balanced,' I guess one can say.

The evening also took a more dystopian bent, however, as we all listened to the news of Queen Elizabeth II's death.

*

Today was quite hard, though better because of the mini-reconciliation with my manager.

I've become so uncomfortable about client-facing colleagues and the management level feeling that they don't know what I'm doing when they'd like me to do something for them, that yesterday and today I've constantly been detailing in my Slack statuses what client I'm working on, or if I'm in a meeting, etc.

Today I was supposed to receive my performance review from my manager. But after the disagreements we've had over the past week I was worried that he would feel obliged to re-write it and make it a lot less positive for accuracy's sake. It was a risk I've knowingly incurred all week, but it was really hard.

In the end we just mutually agreed to discuss the more urgent topic of reorganizing my team's workflow. What made it even more awkward, however, was that I was six minutes late to our video call; I had looked at the calendar and somehow seen a blank after the lunch hour instead of a scheduled meeting, so he had to write me a reminder about our meeting. It was, to the unprejudiced mind that did not experience the same brain misfire that I did, an incredibly shady thing for me to do.

That said, my manager seemed a bit more grieved than angry about my requesting vacation on the grounds that my limits were being ignored. As I'd half-suspected, he worried that he'd gone too far earlier this week, and seemed inclined to blame himself — when I'm not sure if I behaved totally correctly. Because he is shouldering so many tasks and burdens, I feel remorse about faulting him for maybe going further than he needs to.

In our meeting I did try to repeat my opinion that it was a natural reaction to the layoffs to overdo; it is just that colleagues like me have had the opposite reaction and have become less responsive — a matter of different styles, not one approach being intentional or correct compared to the other.

Then I attended a meeting, of the team leads of my corner of the company, that intensely dove into two topics that don't touch on my work at all. The management level above mine almost seemed to shout at each other — totally unusual. I wrote to my manager afterward telling him my impression, saying that it wasn't my business to know the details of what's going on with his peers (and that he'd seemed calmer than they did) but that I hoped things were OK, and that I apologized for potentially adding to any chaos. He said that he was taking responsibility for it and would try to improve the next meeting. But while I think he can probably exert a good influence, I also didn't think it was his fault.

*

Anyway, I'm going into a whole lot of detail here. But it does fascinate me how much harm strategic glitches and the decision to fire so many people in a large organization can do to the fabric of a company, even aside from the massive effect on the people who were fired.

Paving with Good Intentions

It's now been enough time for the dust to settle at work.

From what I can tell, over 10 colleagues were laid off from my part of the company, including two whom I'd consider friends and another whom I got along with really well.

An official email was sent around about one of them. So the rest I figured out through devious ways, in consultation with one or two other colleagues who were also worried for friends in other teams. I sent messages to two of them, one of whom answered so I'm especially anxious about the other one.

Last Friday the top management of my part of the company emphasized that we should take our time to digest things, etc. This week, there's a flurry of energy in the office and online.

I've felt guilty for feeling too exhausted and depressed by the past two weeks to go out to extended family events, let alone to the office.

New projects 'to make my team's life easier' are being generated from three different teams (besides my own) and my manager. As my team is in the throes of Fall/Winter-Black Friday season, I suggested that maybe we could coordinate between our four teams and agree on a set of projects per 2 weeks, to give me more time to focus on our regular Black Friday season tasks. But I think this suggestion was misunderstood, so now instead my team has been asked to work in 2-week sprints. I also felt pressured to soothe the feelings of colleagues by affirming that, yes, their projects are being made in a helpful spirit — which is fine, but is also exhausting because it requires me to set aside my own needs further for someone else's benefit.

A few clients have had major glitches: one requires a special feature that keeps malfunctioning and I've devoted a great deal of time to it, one has taken ages to finish working with and the teammate who was working on it directly was too stressed to communicate very well what was going on and where he was at (driving our client-facing colleague absolutely up the wall, so I put some energy into diplomatic efforts), and another has been sending us the same products as duplicates so that I have spent hours reviewing up to 9 times the exact same shoe. A few teammates were feeling sickish.

I'd admitted in an engineering manager meeting that I was overwhelmed and that I felt that I could no longer take holidays because of all the improvement projects for my team etc. I'd asked for support by letting me concentrate a bit on my team and on regular tasks. — But my embarrassing myself in this way was just seen as a rationale for more interference from outside the team.

I asked for a vacation day on Monday, in the end. In the request I wrote that I'd tried to 'set healthy boundaries' for myself and for the team; that I wasn't getting my point across; that this was all right because I understand that after the lay-offs people are stressed and want to get a lot done; so that I'd try just being 'offline' for a day. It was written, I hope, in a spirit of kindness. But I don't know if the explanation will be accepted.

I've also felt as if the campaign to get all colleagues to go to the office regularly is reviving.

I've kept saying I don't feel comfortable with it, but it is still assumed that I don't know what I want. It's not enough to say that I've had bad experiences in the past (maybe I need to go into the gory details e.g. the passenger who tried to attack me with his fists because I didn't open a train door quickly enough? ...). Or to not want Covid to spread further.

—Speaking of which, I generally do not understand why Germans and a few colleagues seem careless about the prospect of another heavy wave of Covid (I'm imagining transit and other functions disrupted because of weeks of sick leave, viral mutations, effects on the elderly and immune-deficient, etc.). I think it will worsen the economic problems that will already mark this fall and winter due to the high fuel prices and the rise of the cost of living.—

There was a period for maybe 3 days last week where top managers emphasized in lay-offs-related meetings that it was really our choice to go into the office ... then this week a massive relapse.

In general I've been under so much stress this Wednesday (also worrying that asking for space will also affect my half-yearly job performance review on Friday, or even more massive interference and pressure by colleagues who will start wanting to take over my job), that I went to sleep unusually early with a stomach-ache, waking up again at 3 a.m..

Thursday is my birthday, but so far it's not exactly happy.