So This Is Christmas (Season)?

It's become obvious that there is almost no time where work is not stressful, so rather than proclaim that the sky is falling yet again, I want to describe some of my Saturday outings.

It was clear already that it would be difficult to reenact life in the year 1988. I have a long list of Christmas/New Year's tasks. One of them is to organize toys, because a Ukrainian colleague appealed to us on Friday to help with an initiative to brighten the lives of children in the Zaporizhzia region by preparing Christmas presents that a charity will ship there. So I went to a local drugstore and browsed the toy section to see what would 'spark joy' in any child.

After that I cycled to the former core of West Berlin in Charlottenburg, buying Christmas presents at a bookshop. Aside from the uncomfortable throngs of holiday shoppers, the Breitscheidplatz felt gruesome today. It's located where a major shopping street converges on the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a vast square occupied by a Christmas market. It was also the scene of a deadly mass attack a few years ago. So it has tall speed bumps all around, and the clusters of genuine evergreen trees and strings of Christmas light are only fig leaves to hide extensive safety barriers. It's a bit like the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, and it left me with the heebie-jeebies. When I was pushing my bicycle between the wooden stalls as I needed to reach the opposite corner of the square, a blue-vested security guard came up and told me in a kind tone to please take it along the opposite side of the street. So they are really not taking any chances.

It was more at Ernst-Reuter-Platz in the heart of the Technical University campus, where I began to feel 1980s vibes. The buildings were largely constructed in the 1950s through the 1970s, but the tech feel and the car-centric street planning and maybe a few other elements made me feel like this chimed in with my historical research.

But the shopping also had a bitter edge as I came across an information panel on a residential building, which listed the dozen or so Jewish neighbours who had been living here until they were shipped to concentration camps in the 1940s. Two 'Stolpersteine' were embedded in the pavement.

After that, I went to morally support the choir I've been trying out for, in their annual Christmas carol concert. As part of a last-minute drive to read more books before January 1st, I took along Sholem Aleichem's Menahem Mendel and progressed a bit.

Cycling back along the Straße des 17. Juni, basically a twin strip of motley parking lot which has gained a reputation for prostitution and drug drops, a hopefully less patronizing variant of 'Do they know it's Christmas?' came to mind. Singing 'Ding dong, merrily on high' seemed a little removed from reality.

It was dark after the concert. After getting a bite to eat once back at home, I first sat down to draw more handmade Christmas card motifs (using an old New York Times Style magazine issue for inspiration, and reading the articles while I was at it).

Then there's the long list of tasks I haven't tackled yet:

1. Reserve seats at a restaurant for teammates, making sure first that teammates who never check messages have a chance to complain about which day it's being booked on

2. Order gifts for teammates who cannot make the restaurant and verify what replacement gift to get for someone whose first pick has sold out. Keep in mind when they will be out-of-town for the holiday season and will thus be unable to receive a delivery.

3. Sort out the last details of a goodbye present for a departing human resources colleague, likely a card and then cycling to the office to finish the wrapping and hand it over to a current HR colleague.

4. ...

I don't want to suggest that I don't genuinely enjoy planning and implementing gifts etc. But in the past year I've felt like I'm working 5 times as hard to generate social rapport, without getting much energy in return. It's probably due to Covid and social distancing changing how we interact as colleagues. But combined with implementing a lot of things at work that I don't genuinely agree with, impostor syndrome whenever I get together with fellow team leads and it becomes clear yet again that I'm not a proper engineering manager and am only being granted special peewee league recognition, losing touch with a lot of colleagues whom I deeply trusted and enjoyed working with, and as usual finding that if I'm doing poorly other people are also doing poorly and it's good to spend a little time listening to them and finding the right things to say (or not say), it is draining the life out of me.

At least I've taken next Friday off. But it's likely another godforsaken surprise decision or important meeting will ruin that holiday too.

I've been researching the year 1989 in preparation for next Saturday. Inspired by Back in Time for Dinner, Back in Time for the Weekend, and Supersizers Eat ... The 1980s, I've just played Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pong, and Arkanoid (which was not new to me, thanks to the siblings), in an online free arcade. Besides, I've already listened to the top hits released that year: Aside from the Paula Abdul and Bette Midler singles that everyone knows, I took time for Natalie Cole's "Miss You Like Crazy" — and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" because it's the first song of theirs that has a nice rock edge.

***

'Work From Office'-Gate has been defused by our managing director, who encouraged us all to file exception requests. This came after I'd written a long request in which I did go into gory details, crossing a work-life Rubicon I'd rather not have crossed. Either way, I went to the office fairly voluntarily again on Friday. But after having delved (while writing my exception request) into memories of medical emergencies witnessed during the past, I was not in a great frame of mind for the commute. I felt myself having strong physical anxiety when a police car and ambulance crossed an intersection in front of me, breathing quickly and getting blurry vision, and thought 'This isn't so great.'

That said, it was nice to work opposite M.

I also met the Korean office cleaner again, who is really nice and who also inspires some faith in humanity because she doesn't have the battle worn air of other cleaners in the past. As she doesn't speak much German, let alone English, I'm hoping to ask her to teach me 'hello' and 'thank you' in Korean, and to learn something more on Duolingo.

I also met a German security guard. She mentioned that the office Christmas tree had to be set up without fairy lights this year, so she tried to make it as sparkly as possible; and she seemed pleased when I said that I'd never have been able to decorate it so neatly.