As of today I have just under a week left in my job. Next weekend I'll be packing up all my stuff and doing the long drive back up Britain to the land of the haggis toastie and salt n' sauce.
I've only been living in England for five and a half months, and it's safe to say that, when I arrived in May, I was expecting to be staying a lot longer than this.
Having worked for large multinationals for most of the past seven years, it's been enlightening to see how vulnerable small businesses can be (although in the current climate, of course, large multinationals seem just as vulnerable). I guess what I had failed to realise was the extent to which most companies are built on a wing and a prayer, or a lot of hot air, to put it another way.
The experience of watching a business disintegrate has taught me quite a few things. If I ever go for another job interview, it won't be the training opportunities and the staff canteen arrangements I'll be asking about; I'll be requesting to see the balance sheets and to have a long chat with the company accountant. I'll be asking exactly how much guaranteed business is coming in in the next six months, what contingencies are in place in case a client drops out of the picture, whether there are savings to cover salary payments in the event of an emergency: all things I would never have considered it necessary to ask before.
Not that I'm likely to be looking for a job anytime soon. I seem to be much better at keeping myself gainfully employed than any boss I've ever had.
Despite my somewhat unclear living arrangements over the next few months (part of the time in the North, part of the time in Edinburgh, part of the time back in England) I am inundated with offers of work, which ought to be comforting, but is actually quite stressful, as they tend to cancel one another out. It's the old freelancer's dilemma of being scared to say 'no' to anything in case the offer is never repeated.
However, I've pretty much settled on the e-learning stuff, as I need a break from print, and I'm very keen to go back to Shanghai and see how things have progressed there in the past two years.
So October is likely to be a month of contrasts: drinking endless cups of tea, going on long country walks and breathing in bucketfuls of piercing Highland air for the first couple of weeks; then sipping expensive cocktails, sitting in taxis in gridlocked traffic and breathing in exhaust fumes and the stink of fried tofu towards the end.
The best thing about leaving England: no more bl**dy bell ringing!
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8 comments:
It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. And, of course, as a Discordian I'm suitably thrilled that it took a world economic collapse to get me the possibility of more precious Bureauista face-time. Even more thrilled simply at the possibility of Bureauista face-time tho. Praise be to The Goddess.
Ouch. If I needed more evidence of the economy collapsing, it would be the number of people I know who've lost their jobs in the last month or so.
The next few months sound like they'll be quite an adventure, though!
I'm attempting to cling to my full time job while conducting various freelance work (except mine has a lower likelihood of gaining me actual money). In some ways, the kick in the pants of losing my job would be good for my productivity. But there's no doubt it's a huge shock to the bank account, too.
Will be interested to hear about the next few months as they unroll, though!
>>If I ever go for another job interview, it won't be the training opportunities and the staff canteen arrangements I'll be asking about; I'll be requesting to see the balance sheets and to have a long chat with the company accountant. I'll be asking exactly how much guaranteed business is coming in in the next six months, what contingencies are in place in case a client drops out of the picture, whether there are savings to cover salary payments in the event of an emergency<<
All of this is immensely sensible - in the current climate, *anyone* going for a job anywhere should be asking these questions of a potential employer, and not just in a small business either. In fact, depending on their current circumstances (e.g. if they haven't borrowed any money, if they have cash in the bank etc.), small businesses may be better placed to weather the storm than many larger ones.
I'm here from Quinquireme, and I don't understand this talk of "guaranteed business". Now I may be thick, and I am definitely a Yank, but the only "guaranteed business" I ever heard of was the kind you get from your brother-in-law. For everyone else, there are no guarantees about the future whatsoever: there are contracts, but people break them all the time (and yes, you can go to court, but you probably do better not to, given the cost of doing so), and anyway, what if it's your business partners that are going under?
My employer is Google, a large and extremely profitable business: but if the world's firms turn against online advertising, or the queries stop flowing, we fold up and die. That doesn't make me refuse to work there; there's no getting away from permanent uncertainty.
"Which is greater, the mountain or the sea?"
hmm. I take your point up to a point, but there are degrees of uncertainty. When I say 'guaranteed business' I mean business where contracts have been exchanged, rather than tentatively agreed to. In the past, when outsourcing was the norm in my industry, tentative agreements would have been enough to convince me a particular employer was a viable option - not any more. Whether businesses are being squeezed or not, they are outsourcing less out of caution. For this reason, I would look for much stronger business relationships and contractual obligations before I'd throw my lot in with a company.
Meantime, while people try to get on with their lives, the financial crisis is going to be `fixed' by the astute actions of... the people who got us into this shit-storm in the first place...
With people around who believe in that I surely must be able to get a buyer for my castle.
I wish I had asked these questions back in January when I started with a dymanic small company...I was made redundant 7 months later due to their inability to pay my salary..
First sign of a failing publisher?
They make staff pay for items from the coffee machine.
(And/or these days, they stop stocking freshly ground Fair Trade product, and instead re-stock the machine by getting the MD's assistant to run round to Lidl to bulk-buy high-chicory instant stuff.)
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