The wheel turns, and people change
Sep. 7th, 2016 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaApparently there is a Thing going round. I hadn't seen it, but then I saw ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wildeabandon's answer and requested a year. He kindly furnished 2011, so here we go:
Age then: 34-35, depending on when in 2011 you asked.
Age now: 39-40.
Relationship status then (and now): monogamous relationship with ChrisC.
Living then (and now): in the flat ChrisC and I co-purchased, in West London.
I've rolled these two together, because they're quite inter-related.
ChrisC and I have been together for well over ten years now. We bought a book as a shared purchase, and that seemed to go all right, so we bought a tent between us. That went OK too, so in 2009 we bought a flat together, and have been living in it ever since. (The tent still goes to festivals with us.)
In 2011 we were settled into the routine of living together (living with a partner rather than housemates was new to both of us), and getting slowly used to the idea that we were homeowners. If we wanted to paint the walls an alarming shade of purple and put up crazy shelves, no one could stop us.
As it happens, we haven't done anything of the sort. In 2011 we were probably still ahead of the game with our plan to decorate one room in the flat per year. We are now sadly behind on that idea, having done the easy ones and then got stuck on the hard questions like rewiring. The line of soft-focus black and white photographs of semi-nude males in the hall, which we inherited from the previous occupant and vowed to replace with something more "us", remains in place. It has, we are informed by friends, become an instituion that we can't possibly change.
We were, and still are, delighted with our flat and we love it dearly.
When we moved in together, we made the decision that a mortgage was quite enough commitment, thanks, and we weren't going to go the whole hog and merge our CD collections as well. As a sop to practicality (and space), I extracted the duplicates from mine and put them in cardboard boxes. The cardboard boxes stood in the living room until, I think, the end of 2013. At which point I decided I felt secure enough to get rid of them. The collections, however, remain resolutely unmerged :)
This year has, of course, been rather over-shadowed by me busting my knees in February. At various stages I have been unable to carry anything, unable to make myself meals, unable to get in or out of the bath without assistance; when I was first injured I couldn't even get into or out of bed without help. Which, yes, did mean I had to wake ChrisC up in the night if I wanted to go to the loo. He has looked after me, been the sensible one, pushed me about in a wheelchair, and done all the things I couldn't. He is still ferrying me about the place, running errands, and doing most of the household stuff and shopping. Plus, of course, politely not mentioning when I get grumpy because I am unsettled by the general lack of the independence and solitude I am used to. This is the kind of thing that could easily derail relationships, I think, and I remain faintly boggled by, and incredibly grateful for, how kind and generous he's been about the whole thing.
One of ChrisC's oldest friends once heard an anecdote about the two of us. It had a slightly elaborate set-up, and the punchline was me playing a Supergrass track from another room. The friend shook his head, and just said "you two deserve each other". We find the same ridiculous things funny, and we laugh a lot.
Occupation then: employed full-time as a computer programmer, by a small company in Reading.
Occupation now: employed full-time as a computer programmer, by a slightly larger company in central London.
On the face of it, my job hasn't changed. I still go to work and write code every day in exchange for money. However, with that in mind almost everything that could have changed has.
The most obvious difference is, of course, the "in exchange for money" part. OldCompany was the longest-running start-up in history, and was frequently afflicted with cashflow problems. It wasn't always able to pay its staff, and there was an ever-present threat of redundancy or general meltdown.
Looking back at my bank statements, the beginning of 2011 was still in the weird communist phase. With limited finances, the company had proposed a deal where all staff (from CEO to admin) would be paid the same wages. As one of the lower-paid staff, this affected me less badly than it did many, but it was still a noticeable paycut. It did, however, foster a strangely egalitarian spirit. I remember someone once fighting with a tax return, and a colleague saying "I don't know what you earn, but... wait, I do know exactly what you earn." At which point they went through the whole process with real numbers, making it much easier.
By February, one of the endless rounds of "this will save us all" funding was in place, and it looks like I'd been put back to a higher salary, but the whole situation remained stressful and uncertain.
At NewCompany, my salary simply arrives in my bank account each month without fuss. Apparently this is how normal companies work :) It's a lot less stressful. I don't feel a strong sense of impending doom if I see the senior management huddled together. Company presentations include words like "revenue" and "profit", and even actual numbers.
OldCompany was a techie outfit: the engineering department was the vast majority of the employees. NewCompany is largely full of people whose strengths lie in marketing, or understanding consumer behaviour, or a peculiar beast called "digital strategy". The dev team is less than 5% of the total company, and half of it works offsite. I have gone from being the comparatively normal person in a geeky, scruffy team of engineers to the geeky weirdo in a smartly-dressed office full of media types.
I am no longer the baby of the department, but one of the oldest employees. I have finally failed to duck management responsibility, and so spend some of my time not doing what I think of as real work, but writing objectives and appraisals, and considering other people's career development. Which is hilarious, given that I have never, ever had the least idea how to manage my own career development. Fundamentally, I am happy if someone will give me a living wage in exchange for coding, and I don't require very much more than that. Perhaps I lack ambition. I certainly lack goals. Perhaps one day I will figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
People often asked why I stayed at OldCompany, with its rather haphazard pay roll record. The work was fun, and there was always the vague prospect that the company would make it big, but the short reason was for the people. By the time the fourth or fifth crisis hit, those who were still there were a very tight-knit team. My colleagues at NewCompany are nice people: they're pleasant to work with, we get on fine, we go to the pub after work sometimes. But I'm not sure I'd count any of them as friends (notably excepting the people who were friends before I started there ;). I've never met a NewColleague socially, but in June this year when I was (briefly) reasonably mobile I made it a priority to get over to Reading to meet up with OldColleagues.
The one thing that hasn't changed and which I expected to change, is the grumbling about commuting. I used to spend ~3 hours a day on the train and on my bike going to Reading. I thought once I started working in London I'd have bags of time. Sadly, it doesn't turn out that way. My commute (a short walk, a longish tube ride, and a very short walk) takes way less than 90 minutes each way. But it can take getting on for an hour, and time on the tube is dead time. On the train I used to check email, sleep, write letters, catch up with work, read books. On the tube, reading books may be an option, but everything else is right out. Weirdly, it took me a long time to work out that this was why I felt constantly short of time. I still don't feel I've got properly back on top of email, and NewJob is now almost three years old.
Was I happy then: Yes, I was. Apparently I am fundamentally quite boring and suburban at heart, and found great pleasure in a stable relationship, a pleasant place to live, and the opportunity to wear a nice, comfortable rut up to the local shopping street on a Saturday morning.
Am I happy now: Yes, for all the same reasons. I also feel more settled, on account of the financial security that a non-exploding employer brings. Having changed jobs once, I feel much more up to the idea of changing again should I want or need to. NewCompany is providing me with new challenges, and various opportunities to try out new stuff. I am slowly beginning to consider that perhaps I should have goals, and perhaps I can work out what they are.
Plus, in the last five years, the West London friends' nexus has pulled in a few more people, I'm in the unusual (for London) situation of having visitable friends 10-15 minutes walk away.
The general lack of actual walking this year has been something of an embuggerance, and has put a (temporary, I hope) stop to various plans I had. But I don't think it has really made me significantly less happy in the grand scheme of things.
I am actually slightly surprised at how little of the non-work stuff has changed in the past five years.lathany, chrestomancy and I formed ourselves into a writers' triangle, which has forced me to do more writing and (I hope!) made me a better writer. Possibly even a better reader, though they might disagree on that one ;) We've had a lot of good nights drinking wine and gently poking fun at each others' literary howlers. My rapper team is doing well and has enough members for the first time in ages (modulo a recent spate of injuries). But I am low on blockbuster news for the last half-decade. And I'm OK with that.
Kids then and now: I have no children (and didn't have any in 2011, either). Even from being a small girl with dolls, I have never felt any inclination towards having children. (In fact, I rarely played with the dolls, I was much more of a Lego and Matchbox kind of girl.)
I try to be supportive to friends bringing up children, and can be trusted with childminding when required. I try to step up at birthdays and Christmas for various honourary nephews and nieces. I used to say that I didn't know if my feelings about children would change as I got older. As I'm now 40, I suppose I ought to be updating that to hoping that they don't ;)
Comment if you'd like a year of your own to nostalge about!
wildeabandon's answer and requested a year. He kindly furnished 2011, so here we go:Age then: 34-35, depending on when in 2011 you asked.
Age now: 39-40.
Relationship status then (and now): monogamous relationship with ChrisC.
Living then (and now): in the flat ChrisC and I co-purchased, in West London.
I've rolled these two together, because they're quite inter-related.
ChrisC and I have been together for well over ten years now. We bought a book as a shared purchase, and that seemed to go all right, so we bought a tent between us. That went OK too, so in 2009 we bought a flat together, and have been living in it ever since. (The tent still goes to festivals with us.)
In 2011 we were settled into the routine of living together (living with a partner rather than housemates was new to both of us), and getting slowly used to the idea that we were homeowners. If we wanted to paint the walls an alarming shade of purple and put up crazy shelves, no one could stop us.
As it happens, we haven't done anything of the sort. In 2011 we were probably still ahead of the game with our plan to decorate one room in the flat per year. We are now sadly behind on that idea, having done the easy ones and then got stuck on the hard questions like rewiring. The line of soft-focus black and white photographs of semi-nude males in the hall, which we inherited from the previous occupant and vowed to replace with something more "us", remains in place. It has, we are informed by friends, become an instituion that we can't possibly change.
We were, and still are, delighted with our flat and we love it dearly.
When we moved in together, we made the decision that a mortgage was quite enough commitment, thanks, and we weren't going to go the whole hog and merge our CD collections as well. As a sop to practicality (and space), I extracted the duplicates from mine and put them in cardboard boxes. The cardboard boxes stood in the living room until, I think, the end of 2013. At which point I decided I felt secure enough to get rid of them. The collections, however, remain resolutely unmerged :)
This year has, of course, been rather over-shadowed by me busting my knees in February. At various stages I have been unable to carry anything, unable to make myself meals, unable to get in or out of the bath without assistance; when I was first injured I couldn't even get into or out of bed without help. Which, yes, did mean I had to wake ChrisC up in the night if I wanted to go to the loo. He has looked after me, been the sensible one, pushed me about in a wheelchair, and done all the things I couldn't. He is still ferrying me about the place, running errands, and doing most of the household stuff and shopping. Plus, of course, politely not mentioning when I get grumpy because I am unsettled by the general lack of the independence and solitude I am used to. This is the kind of thing that could easily derail relationships, I think, and I remain faintly boggled by, and incredibly grateful for, how kind and generous he's been about the whole thing.
One of ChrisC's oldest friends once heard an anecdote about the two of us. It had a slightly elaborate set-up, and the punchline was me playing a Supergrass track from another room. The friend shook his head, and just said "you two deserve each other". We find the same ridiculous things funny, and we laugh a lot.
Occupation then: employed full-time as a computer programmer, by a small company in Reading.
Occupation now: employed full-time as a computer programmer, by a slightly larger company in central London.
On the face of it, my job hasn't changed. I still go to work and write code every day in exchange for money. However, with that in mind almost everything that could have changed has.
The most obvious difference is, of course, the "in exchange for money" part. OldCompany was the longest-running start-up in history, and was frequently afflicted with cashflow problems. It wasn't always able to pay its staff, and there was an ever-present threat of redundancy or general meltdown.
Looking back at my bank statements, the beginning of 2011 was still in the weird communist phase. With limited finances, the company had proposed a deal where all staff (from CEO to admin) would be paid the same wages. As one of the lower-paid staff, this affected me less badly than it did many, but it was still a noticeable paycut. It did, however, foster a strangely egalitarian spirit. I remember someone once fighting with a tax return, and a colleague saying "I don't know what you earn, but... wait, I do know exactly what you earn." At which point they went through the whole process with real numbers, making it much easier.
By February, one of the endless rounds of "this will save us all" funding was in place, and it looks like I'd been put back to a higher salary, but the whole situation remained stressful and uncertain.
At NewCompany, my salary simply arrives in my bank account each month without fuss. Apparently this is how normal companies work :) It's a lot less stressful. I don't feel a strong sense of impending doom if I see the senior management huddled together. Company presentations include words like "revenue" and "profit", and even actual numbers.
OldCompany was a techie outfit: the engineering department was the vast majority of the employees. NewCompany is largely full of people whose strengths lie in marketing, or understanding consumer behaviour, or a peculiar beast called "digital strategy". The dev team is less than 5% of the total company, and half of it works offsite. I have gone from being the comparatively normal person in a geeky, scruffy team of engineers to the geeky weirdo in a smartly-dressed office full of media types.
I am no longer the baby of the department, but one of the oldest employees. I have finally failed to duck management responsibility, and so spend some of my time not doing what I think of as real work, but writing objectives and appraisals, and considering other people's career development. Which is hilarious, given that I have never, ever had the least idea how to manage my own career development. Fundamentally, I am happy if someone will give me a living wage in exchange for coding, and I don't require very much more than that. Perhaps I lack ambition. I certainly lack goals. Perhaps one day I will figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
People often asked why I stayed at OldCompany, with its rather haphazard pay roll record. The work was fun, and there was always the vague prospect that the company would make it big, but the short reason was for the people. By the time the fourth or fifth crisis hit, those who were still there were a very tight-knit team. My colleagues at NewCompany are nice people: they're pleasant to work with, we get on fine, we go to the pub after work sometimes. But I'm not sure I'd count any of them as friends (notably excepting the people who were friends before I started there ;). I've never met a NewColleague socially, but in June this year when I was (briefly) reasonably mobile I made it a priority to get over to Reading to meet up with OldColleagues.
The one thing that hasn't changed and which I expected to change, is the grumbling about commuting. I used to spend ~3 hours a day on the train and on my bike going to Reading. I thought once I started working in London I'd have bags of time. Sadly, it doesn't turn out that way. My commute (a short walk, a longish tube ride, and a very short walk) takes way less than 90 minutes each way. But it can take getting on for an hour, and time on the tube is dead time. On the train I used to check email, sleep, write letters, catch up with work, read books. On the tube, reading books may be an option, but everything else is right out. Weirdly, it took me a long time to work out that this was why I felt constantly short of time. I still don't feel I've got properly back on top of email, and NewJob is now almost three years old.
Was I happy then: Yes, I was. Apparently I am fundamentally quite boring and suburban at heart, and found great pleasure in a stable relationship, a pleasant place to live, and the opportunity to wear a nice, comfortable rut up to the local shopping street on a Saturday morning.
Am I happy now: Yes, for all the same reasons. I also feel more settled, on account of the financial security that a non-exploding employer brings. Having changed jobs once, I feel much more up to the idea of changing again should I want or need to. NewCompany is providing me with new challenges, and various opportunities to try out new stuff. I am slowly beginning to consider that perhaps I should have goals, and perhaps I can work out what they are.
Plus, in the last five years, the West London friends' nexus has pulled in a few more people, I'm in the unusual (for London) situation of having visitable friends 10-15 minutes walk away.
The general lack of actual walking this year has been something of an embuggerance, and has put a (temporary, I hope) stop to various plans I had. But I don't think it has really made me significantly less happy in the grand scheme of things.
I am actually slightly surprised at how little of the non-work stuff has changed in the past five years.
lathany, chrestomancy and I formed ourselves into a writers' triangle, which has forced me to do more writing and (I hope!) made me a better writer. Possibly even a better reader, though they might disagree on that one ;) We've had a lot of good nights drinking wine and gently poking fun at each others' literary howlers. My rapper team is doing well and has enough members for the first time in ages (modulo a recent spate of injuries). But I am low on blockbuster news for the last half-decade. And I'm OK with that.Kids then and now: I have no children (and didn't have any in 2011, either). Even from being a small girl with dolls, I have never felt any inclination towards having children. (In fact, I rarely played with the dolls, I was much more of a Lego and Matchbox kind of girl.)
I try to be supportive to friends bringing up children, and can be trusted with childminding when required. I try to step up at birthdays and Christmas for various honourary nephews and nieces. I used to say that I didn't know if my feelings about children would change as I got older. As I'm now 40, I suppose I ought to be updating that to hoping that they don't ;)
Comment if you'd like a year of your own to nostalge about!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-09-07 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-07 03:05 pm (UTC)Thank you :)
I realised while writing it that I'm very un-analytical about my relationship, mostly because it's very comfortable and friendly and feels like it doesn't require analysing!
no subject
Date: 2016-09-07 09:09 pm (UTC)On the relationship side - yes, that. I get (perhaps unfairly) irritated by people who say that their relationship is going well "because the good times are great". And... no, a good relationship is where you survive and support each other through the bad times, the good times really should be going great as a minimum (and if they aren't then it's really, really bad).
Oh, and I really enjoy writers' triangle.
Can I have a year?
no subject
Date: 2016-09-08 08:45 am (UTC)I'm glad you like triangle-ing too :)
For a year, I don't know whether I should pick one ages ago (on account of v. long-term relationship) or a near one for examining small changes. Let's say a half way house of 2005.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-08 08:50 am (UTC)Apropos of nothing very much, a browse through old LJ posts reckons 2011 is also the year I started making Bento boxes to take to work for lunch. I still do that, although like many things it's been lightly in abeyance this year due to circumstances.
(Today, paté and lettuce sandwiches, and some crudités. Not very Bento at all :)
no subject
Date: 2016-09-12 04:47 pm (UTC)