Future

[shermarama]

In other news, I've got an email here from an enthusiastic recruiter wanting to know some more specifics about my experience, for a job at a company making lithography machines. It sounds like an interesting company and the sort of thing I can do but the email's been sitting around for days unanswered because, well, basically because winter. I was having a good day the day I went and met that agent in person, the sort of day where I reckon I can deal with it with proper use of the daylight lamp and lots of exercise and maybe taking all the year's holidays in December and January, but it's been getting worse since. (I don't know exactly why, but perhaps because Marseille was sunny but thoroughly cold, and also isolating, more so than here, when there on a temporary basis anyway.) So never mind what happens next winter, I don't have the energy / brain-power to tackle that job *now*. Or do anything about getting a job anywhere, which leaves me stuck here in the cold and dark, unable to get up before about 10am and finding it quite difficult to not cry about stupid stuff when I do. Still, hey, it snowed here overnight, and I need to get some food in, so I can go out and walk in it and that'll be a useful *and* effective way to spend another hour ignoring the bigger questions that have needed tackling for months.

(No, okay, somebody I know linked to this SMBC comic, which talks about having several lifetimes in one life, the transitions between phases where we're doing different things. Makes a lot of sense to me, and I could point to the technician years as one lifetime, and the studying / PhD years as another, but then I can't tell where I am right now, and neither can anyone else, it seems. I thought this was going to be the engineering phase, but I'm still getting job rejections that say things like "I'm looking for someone who is really into the business with a mechanical background in the machinery. In my opinion you have more research experience (maybe even over-educated) than the right working experience for this company" and I have no idea how to counter that; I already use terms like 'hands-on' and 'practical' in my CV, and it doesn't seem helpful to pretend I haven't got the qualifications I've got. And anyway, even apart from that, I'm also getting agents sounding sniffy at me for talking in terms of interesting projects and not super-stable jobs-for-life wow-much-settledness; maybe I'm just not Dutch enough. I have had a bit of a wonder about contracting but apparently I'd need to set up my own company for it, which seems a bit drastic, and a bit like it's not going to work if no-one thinks I'm actually an engineer. The obvious thing to do, the thing it's been obvious to do for months, is to see about getting this CEng certification, but hello winter and absence of brain to write the professional review report with (and also deal with Lely HR / my ex-boss about it) and aaargh what happens if I don't get it? What happens if even they don't think I'm an engineer? Because beyond that my options really start shrinking. So, hey, food shopping, right?)

Comments

[kake]

That comic's great; thanks for linking it.

Would it help if I offered you up to four hours of free (professional-standard) copyediting for your professional review report? (No worries if not.)

[shermarama.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer, but I'm having more of a problem with working out what to say than how to say it. I need to demonstrate that I meet a bunch of criteria while not breaching commercial confidentiality on the projects I did. The logical place to ask for help with that would be my former employers but they know nothing of this sort of certification, and can be tremendously paranoid about IP and NDAs and suchlike, and also their HR people are pretty useless (at the moment I'm still trying to get them to give me any sort of records of the professional development activities I did while working for them) so I reckon I'll just have to write something myself and then see if my ex-boss is okay with it. He himself is very likely to be, and will make useful suggestions if not, but that still leaves me having to find a line first to be able to write it.

[kake]

I see, makes sense!

[shermarama.livejournal.com]

(No, stupid brain, the options don't start shrinking, the options only remain exactly as they are now; the other options you think you have are conditional on getting this anyway. So if you don't try at all the options remain shrunk. So, go on then.)
(This comment brought to you by an unexpected and really cheerful and geeky evening in the pub with Justus. Man, I missed Justus. Keeping that operational would be a useful thing in itself.)

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

Hi
*waves*
(nothing more constructive/specific to add at this time)

[shermarama.livejournal.com]

Hello!
(You know what I'm lacking in Rotterdam at the moment? Someone else who's into interesting beer to go to the interesting beer bars with. There are a couple of people who have some interest, who I can drag along now and then, but no-one who will look at a list of 150 bottles as an opportunity to try and enthuse about new things, you know?)

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well I don't think I'm into interesting beers. I'm casually into beer, but I couldn't discuss them, or really differentiate between them in articulate enough a way for them to stick in my memory. I'm more into interesting bars, though, so if the 150 bottle list makes it an interesting bar (which it often does) then you certainly wouldn't have to drag me.
(Assuming an inferred connection, there)

[shermarama.livejournal.com]

Yep - the missing link in the inferred connection is that I was just clearing the text messages off an old phone before donating it, and there were some from you, in 2008/2009 or so, where pubs and beer were definitely part of the conversation, so that brought it to mind.

The 150-bottle thing doesn't seem to necessarily suggest anything about the other properties of a bar round here, in the way it might in the UK. I think there's only one place in Rotterdam that's conspicuously a Belgian beer bar, showing off about its bottle selection and good Belgian food, but I know of two others that have at least as many beers, from possibly more wide-ranging origins, but don't make it their core USP at all. One presents as a tourist-trap terrace, all sans-serif menus full of balsamic-drenched salads, and the other is mainly a noisy student hang-out; just also one that stocks, for example Little Valley beers from Hebden Bridge. I don't know where I'd get those in the UK, but I can get them at a place in Rotterdam where crowds of Dutch students go to spill cheap lager on a Wednesday night... It does make for interesting bars, just not necessarily in the expected direction.