1. of may, international workers day, seems like a good date to publish this. in my heads i wrote and re-wrote the following text many times over, so please excuse if it now sounds clumsy.

i’ve been quiet on this blog these past few months. it’s because i have run out of steam. i received a horrible blow to my career plans and i have no idea what to do next with my life.

i am depressed - there, i said it.

a few months ago i was fired from my day job, a job, that i had been very happy about. i had worked as a web publisher for the web portal of a local newspaper with its three blogs. this job was ideal for me in so many ways; the work was interesting, it represented a good challenge, i saw it as an opportunity to learn many things, the pay was decent, it was a small and manageable commitment, 40%, that left me enough time to do my stuff on the side, yet secured a steady income to pay a big portion of my bills and - most important this - it seemed like the logical continuation of what i had been doing these past years.

there are not a whole lot of jobs like it around here. bern is a small city with two newspapers owned by the same media conglomerate.

i had never gotten any propper journalistic training and this was gonna be my entry point. this job was exactly what i had hoped to find these past few years, positioned exactly right where the so-called new and old media converge. i thought, it would be a way to get into what i wanted to do all along and actually get paid for doing so. i had very high hopes. i saw and still see this job as my big lucky break. and i failed …

to make things worse, they fired me in a really hard to understand and unfair manner. i got sacked without a warning, without being given a second chance. if this was football, i received the direct red card. no yellow card was ever shown. i did not receive a fair chance to change.

my boss was not very clear when giving his explanation of why he wanted to sack me, mumbling something about “interpersonal differences”. unfortunatly i never knew such interpersonal differences even existed. to this day i fail to really understand, what he was talking about. we did have a few differences, if under a stretch you could even call them conflicts, but these were regarding topical issues, more specifically the website we were working on, and they were never interpersonal.

during the first months, i had taken time to analyze the website regarding usability and organization as well as our workflow. and naturally i thought it was my duty to communicate the shortcomings i discovered. it is true, i can be edgy. and yes, i tend to have strong opinions and to speak my mind about them. but i usually do so in a direct, but, in my opinion, polite and respectful way. my boss, he must have seen this differently.

it is small consolation, that i understand that my boss is really struggling with his role as a superior. he is the type of boss who pretends to be your buddy until he turns into a total dictator within seconds flat. when he was in buddy mode, he would say stuff like “conflicts have their place in a work team”. and then the dictator turns around and sacks me.

at any rate, it feels to me like, i have been fired for being myself. these past months i have played and replayed all the scenes in my head and i simply don’t see a way how i could have been or acted any different. i was just the way i am. so i don’t get it. all i can think off is, my boss must have somehow hated me. or something.

was this the clash of new media with old media as one of my friends suggested? maybe. here was this classically trained journalist, who had somehow ended up responsible for his newspaper web-presence. and along comes some blogger and points out all that is wrong with the website he built? well, the truth hurts. the website is pretty awful and it was gonna take alot of work to make it more logical and useable. i had asked all the people i knew, what they thought about the website, if they found what they were looking for, if things were logically organized. i had asked people like my mum, my sister as well as some friends with various degree of techsavviness, and no one i asked understood the logic of the website. and these statements confirmed my own findings. is it not natural that i express these thoughts? but i guess i should have just shut up and webpublished click click click … oh well, i can’t.

so here it is: i give up. i retire. i don’t ever want to find another job, because the possibility of getting fired is simply too horrible. so what am i doing theses days? i am just numbing the pain, playing way too many video games, yeh those two, i actually played WoW so much, i got bored with it - that’s when GTA IV came along ^^. and i am working on our new vegetable garden. so today, for the first time in many years, i won’t go to the may 1. celebrations. since i am no longer a worker. since i am retired from the productive workforce.

what’s next?

Tags: pieceoBabbel //