Don’t ask me for any link/transition there….So yeah, first couple of years or so at work went well. Then came the first ‘reorganisation’. I got to learn that’s one things companies do all the time, shuffling things around and pretending that it’s rational before they destroy it all over again. Or something. And with that I got given a little more responsibilities. In fact that short while was the only time I theoretically had people ‘under me’. I was responsible for (very) few people. Also had someone just above me who wasn’t the boss I had before, but that was helpful as I got on well with her and she helped and encouraged me. It wasn’t too bad, but among other things (though I’m looking back and depended on a few more circumstances too, namely that with the reorganisation/merge of several teams, I also came across other people I hadn’t worked with and had more naked ambitions…there was a notable pair, one I thought was actually OK (and he achieved high promotions later when I came across him again), and another who was a complete hypocritical slimey twat (not just my personal opinion apparently). Anyway, so I wasn’t cut for management, or not trained for it, and my biggest flaw in that I suspect is that…I hate to tell people if they are being shit etc. My disappointment will show on my face, but as I am pretty much a conflict-avoider, and can’t bring myself to tell people when they are so obviously wrong and can’t see it, or when they act too flippantly (yeah, the cheek of it considering my own sometimes flippancy, but you get the idea…I just can’t be tough, I just get disappointed by people), I think it meant I couldn’t really work well as a people manager. Still, there was a significant training course I followed for a few days, something called ‘how to manage your team’ (I think it was a little more than that), and it was quite interesting, but more remarkable for me was a little ‘roleplay’ game we had to perform during this course. We had to work in pairs, drawn, and one person was the employee one person was the manager (even though it was all for (kind of) aspiring managers), and for that I was the manager trying to encourage/help a poor colleague going through personal trouble. I can’t remember the ins and outs of the brief, if it was vague and we had to build around it, and how much of it was totally improvised, but at the end, everyone had to vote for the best/most convincing performance or something. And they all voted for us. But the perception was interesting and quite revelatory, and again I could see (and with distance I see it even more) the worst and best of me in that. So they all noticed I was convincing, could look the other guy straight in the eye and give him some sort of strength or faith in himself, etc. But the start wasn’t so good. As someone commented, at the start, they thought I was just reinforcing the other person’s despair and sending him to suicide or something. Not by putting him down of course, but by, as I see it now, having too much empathy and ability to completely identify with the situation. In short, I think I was perfectly able to articulate what they were feeling and their mental pathways. In the big scheme of things, it’s a helpful tool, but not quite a useful ability. What matters, always, is what comes after. But that’s the thing with me, I’m kind of laboured, I have to go through these states before seeing the light. And that’s not very good. Some people are good at only being positive. I’m not. But if/when I catch the right (s)train, then I can be light, I can lead, I can give a lot of faith and belief, and it kind of was that there. Practically though, and I think it’s always been a problem, I’ve never been properly coached, I’ve never be taught how to use my best abilities, and I think so far in life, I feel I’ve just underperformed as a human being given what I believe are my abilities. Also back to this training, you can’t deny that it being a ‘roleplay’ (and between engineers), it was not quite reality, and so maybe harder to transpose into real-life situation. Human beings, eh? That’s the other thing, I can be too fearful of bothering/hurting another human being, so more often in life I just let go. Maybe I could have been a good actor, excellent at reconstitution but absolutely useless at real-life (possibly a lot of delusion being fed in these last few paragraphs…). But yes, this little thing gave me a bit more belief in myself at least for a bit. But again reality called and crashed some of it. I was always playing football middays with some colleagues (might do a blog/post on my relation to sports and fitness at some point?) and sometimes there were conflicts. There were a pair of people (both good guys in their ways, but one definitely had some ‘issues’ you could say, with anger or something) arguing a lot and it became very heated. So I once decided to take charge and try to organise a meeting between both for conciliation (funny when I think of it now, that all so recently so nearly twenty years later, I found out about personalities and me being ‘INFP’, sometimes known as ‘the mediator’, again, might do a blog on personality types, how incredible it seemed, but how also limiting to 16/32 types, you must be aware that we are all in a spectrum and will never perfectly fit these cases). But I got a flat out ‘no, I don’t want to attend this or talk to that person now’ answer, and I felt very deflated.
Anyway, I digress, the next reorganisation gave more powers to the pair of people mentioned above, and I found myself somehow downgraded and less motivated. That’s kind of when my ex-supervisor who was sympathising with the situation and could see that this department was slowly disappearing anyway, informed me that they were looking for people in validation just on the other side of the road (at the time, Alcatel had two sites distant from less than 5km). So I got an interview, took up the offer and………well it wasn’t all that simple because of other things. But a way forward, and having that to look forward to was one of the parameters that saved me. I’m not always sure what the link is between work problems and my mental health, it’s a little more complicated than that (and perhaps I will also write another post about my dealings with depression and other mental health issues, that could be quite long, there are a few hints in one of the ‘books’ section, but I have a little more distance a few months later now), but in short, I mentally collapsed just after Christmas 2001. Yet I was back at work and operational (though God knows how and how much I talked then) early January already, and just prepared my exit to the new job. Finishing the last few months there was actually quite good. I felt a lot of love and help from a few people, and workwise, I just finished the tasks I set myself to do (at that stage I had no idea what truly was expected or not, but as often….I set myself my own targets, this one was to entirely rewrite/reformat a document of test procedure), and it was fine. We had a big leaving do (three of us were leaving at the same time, I think), it was amazing really, I was feeling so good, and when came the time to leave the site for the last day, it was very emotional (so much so, that I wrote a whole song about it as you can see in the music section).
Also one of the things that touched me much was one guy telling me it was easy to work and communicate with me and so it had been a pleasure. Again, I was thrilled by that, as my own sometimes warped perception was that I was just an introvert hard to know and communicate with. But I guess it’s not entirely true, that I am more like an extroverted introvert, and that at least on the surface I am, at times, very easy to communicate with.
The new job (so mid-2002 start I think) was interesting, getting to work with hardware rather than just software and so it interested me. I always need to get physical, have something to handle, I’m kind of paradoxical at times, but when I think of the way I work, maybe it’s because I’m St Thomas-like but I’m very empirical. I’m not one for theories, and I do like to handle things. It’s weird because writing all of this is just words on paper (well black pixels on a screen, really…), but it’s allowing me to express myself without confiding into a journal (I stopped that earlier this year again, for now anyway), and allowing me to live my life outside these pages even better. Somehow I feel better balanced. I also do a lot of sports and………….yeah I digress, but I guess I aim to be more whole/complete now and feel able to, even if I might have wasted so many/too many years and so while my heart and spirit is a lot younger, some body parts definitely are 50 now! Yet I’m possibly fitter than ever and mentally better attuned…most of the time anyway.
So yeah, new job was good, new people I got on very well with, also thanks to one of my veteran colleagues big in running (I will forever be indebted to Bernard G), I got to work and improve on my running, he made a plan for me, and I had my first very athletic period, amazing myself in my Paris-Versailles 2003 performance (I’d started to regain fitness in the Pyrénées from 2002 after a bad ankle sprain (due to a fall that I was actually, when I think of it, lucky to come from alive and certainly lucky to come from with only an ankle sprain, however a serious one it was)). I did uphill running, altitude training, oh yeah, that’s for another page.
A new boss was in for me at some point, and while I didn’t particularly get on badly with him, I think professionally it was a little more difficult. Perhaps because he was a little more demanding and less indulgent with me. Which I don’t think was particularly harsh, but maybe didn’t quite work for me. To be fair, I might have needed people who were more demanding with me in my life, to help me improve, push me up and forward or drag me there if need be. In a way, I think that’s where N much later really really helped me move forward, in spite of her MH problems that nearly destroyed me. I was not particularly asking or looking to leave at that point, but there happened to be a little opportunity with a new team starting on the same site in a different building. Couple of colleagues from my team were moving there, and I got invited to join. There started what were probably the most demanding but also most interesting and enriching years of my life. The team was called TEC (Technical Excellence Centre) and was mostly meant to be third level support, but also delivering TAT(Technical Acceptance Tests) and POC (Proof of Concept) to customers. Sometimes customers would come to us, sometimes we would go to them. A few years down the line, a new product appeared, and I was the main person tasked to work on it. So I did a few firsts with this, and at some point, the guys in the US actually acknowledged that I was probably one of the most if not the most skilled person on that product. Quite a compliment (yes I’m not big on compliment sometimes I think I don’t deserve them, but on that, I think I did and it was very gratifying). I travelled the world (not just Europe but the Gulf, US, India, Australia), met lots of people, different cultures, so many great encounters and learnt a lot about the job and work, and etc. My boss was sometimes tough but he liked me and he was also a fantastic boss defending his team. On occasions again, I learnt that when pushed to it, I could be a good ‘leader’. Just that first trip to Australia, I was given a fair bit of responsibility, as the boss wanted me to ‘take the lead’, and I was surprised by the locals (including the technical project manager) actually deferring to me for decisions and plans. And I did that well, so I was proud again.
The first Madrid trip was an incredibly intense and stressful experience (that was before Australia and also before another stressful experience in our labs when Orange came around), but I made friends for life there. Crazy hours, and even from the customer side, there’s a few people I sometimes see in the context of ‘events’ in my current job, and we are always happy to see each other, and in the end a huge contract was awarded. Also in another one of these ‘look in the eyes and give some belief moments’, while we were struggling (the product was brand new, we had an army of US and Canadian guys moving to Madrid to make things work), one of the customers asked me ‘Do you believe in this product?’. And I looked him in the eyse and said ‘yes’. From all the shit we were going through, believe me, it took some faith. I was maybe just doing my job (which was to sell the product somehow…), but I wasn’t lying. The thing is, I believed in it because I wanted to believe in it (something that sadly does not always make things happen as I learnt later, but again, maybe that’s me being a potentially good actor, except in my mind I never pretend, I acquire the belief), but also it made sense, it was just a new product and I believed in the people who were developing it having the ability to fix it and make it work. Which they did. And there’s another reflection sometimes about my work vs other people’s work. I thought I might mention it later, but I might as well say it now: I am/have always been impressed by the developers. My own work/skills/competence always have seemed very limited to me. As far as I am concerned, I have gone through all these years at work using pretty much only common sense. I don’t feel particularly technically competent (oh sure I know a fair amount of things), but I find solutions to problems, ways to work around things, and, even more so now, I have learnt to rely on other people when I am out of ideas. I have always been lucky to have some extremely competent people around me. Yeah, I think I’m touching now more on what I wanted to write at the end, so I might vaguely come back to it later. But the truth is, the real creators, I’ve always been impressed with. Sure I did a little coding when I needed too (and at school), but always felt it was too much effort. Again, my inner laziness I guess. And whatever creativity I have has always seemed to be based on other people’s original creations, I’m maybe good at improving things, not creating them.
So not much to add, 2006 to 2012 were brilliant. Helped also with the social life. 2006 was the new Arsenal stadium and I got to so many games, met a lot of amazing people and had a brilliant time not just at work. But back to work, politics got in the way sadly, and despite all the efforts, our team (only a small entity technically part of R&D in France, where we were the only ones) eventually got dismantled. Not for lack of competence, but you know, that old chestnut: ‘costs’. Suitably, my last trip was to Madrid, when I went at the same time as an American colleague. At this stage, I knew it was politics, and basically the guy was more or less be part of the team who would replace us. Stilll, I did the job to the best of my ability and even that guy was very impressed (by my competence, heh, so yeah, what I said above, temper that, but what is competence? I guess the ability to do your job, it doesn’t have to be about technical skills, I guess I used my own qualities well most of the time and at the time, mind you I DID feel competent, more than at any other time in my professional life). Also has to be noted as it was our old friendly customers (those from the first tests in Madrid), they had in fact specifically asked to have me around, they wanted only me (ah, sweet love :-D, nah, just the trust that existed there). But after that, that was it, time to find a new job. There were offers here and there, there were kind of plans/agreements with the Mobile division. Some still went to the maintenance team in Submarine networks (as the job was closer-ish to what we had been doing), but I went to the mobile division, thinking it would be interesting to learn completely new things, different topics, technologies (oh yeah, amusingly, I’m sure I’ve not mentioned above that I was working in Optics….so some of the firsts were first 100G DWDM product, first ‘real network 100G introduction in APAC (in Melbourne)’, first Barcelona-Madrid combined IP+Optics link). New boss was good and kind, new colleagues were mostly fine too, but while I thought it would test my adaptation capabilities, and I did learn plenty of things (and once was even pleased that I’d correctly identified -not part of the job!- the reason for a very public big outage that just happened on the network of one of the French operators, based partly on what I had just learned about the technology, but also on intuition aka random guess maybe!). But I think it felt too ‘complicated’ for me. Got placed on different projects, had a nearly three-months trip to Qatar in summer 2013 which was an interesting experience, but job-wise, I’m not sure I was either performing or enjoying myself. Outside of work, things reached a kind of high in Spring 2013 when I got to most Arsenal matches home AND away for a couple of months. Magic times. But then something, someone happen in my personal life and things would never be the same. Strange times, strange days. Had a nice trip to Canada, but at the same time, it didn’t go the way it would/should have normally been. Both good and bad. Next assignment was meant to be in Saudi Arabia, but I kind of stopped at that and looked for a new job. The guys in maintenance at Submarine Network had been trying to recruit me so I finally took that opportunity. Didn’t feel so happy to tell the boss I was leaving, but no grudges were held, he was a good guy, and we enjoyed occasionally chatting when bumping into each other at work occasionally (I wasn’t moving sites). I kept in touch with a few colleagues from the team too.
The job at ASN (Alcatel Submarine Networks) was probably the one that went the worst for me in my life so far. Forget other factors (that did still affect my demeanour at times, but I think I was trying to juggle between personal and social life clumsily), the colleagues were great, I’m still in touch with most and I had some fantastic times with them, a lot of good fun! But the work itself wasn’t really for me. Too many products I wasn’t familiar with and didn’t really manage to learn, low motivation, just handling tickets, being occasionally on-call, and so many times I felt I was really doing absolutely fuck-all. And yet, every week you had to put the number of hours you spent supporting each project. I think I mostly estimated things roughly, but my real efficient work time was extremely low. Once more the ‘mental’ catastrophe happened, so again at a low-time at work, but mostly unrelated, and unlike the first crisis, this felt partly externally induced rather than just internally triggered. Still my own self and defences got shattered and I had to rebuild. I got back at work, but after three or four months this time, but the work was the same, I couldn’t just find the motivation or excitement for it. Fortunately, as Optics Central NPI (New Products Introduction) had been looking for people at some point and I’d been approached though I’d turned that down at the time, I went to ask a few months later, if there were still opportunities there. And yes there were and so with barely any interview I got accepted. My time at ASN had not even lasted two years, and in December 2015, I found myself starting a new job that is still my current one. Which means in fact, it’s the longest job I have held so far! So it’s going well. Essentially, it isn’t too far from what I was doing with TEC, with maybe a little less support (and never being on-call, though some people in the team are, for historical reason mostly, I think) and more POCs/tests with customers. Back to travelling (I didn’t travel with ASN, weirdly), though mostly in Europe now (although in the early days I got to travel to Abu Dhabi, and also South Africa, my first visit to that continent in fact), first assignment was in Munich for a new product. Can’t say I was immediately feeling great or confident, but I was being trusted (again, I think my boss is mostly great, though I still believe he mostly overrates me from a technical point of view). There’s been ups and downs (due to my life outside work to a certain extent), but again, a fantastic team of good people who work hard most of the times and help and support each other. I got to work partly on the old product I was an expert of in my TEC days, but it had moved on so much (I left it in R3.6.5, found it back in R8 or R9 or something?), and as ever with me, I’m good at starting things up, but when they become too complicated, I am starting to struggle. Paradoxically, having always worked for a huge company (even if the names changed and across the divisions, from Alcatel AAR to Nokia, via Alcatel CIT, Alcatel-Lucent and Alcatel Submarine Networks), I wonder if I wouldn’t have been much more suited to always working in start-ups with my sort of mindset. The thing is, I think I have been mostly lucky, sometimes purely by circumstances, with my bosses and my work. See the individualism/anarchism blogs, but I’m not big on hierarchy etc, in some ways I am a maverick (but without the talent and self-confidence), enjoying operating out of systems. So yeah, weekly reports? That creeps up sometimes, but I’ve never managed to send any in a sustained way. It’s not something I am proud or ashamed of, but it’s just that in my own way, I feel I have weeks when I can be super busy and do two weeks’ worth of work in one, and others when I feel I do nothing and could not possibly justify a weekly report (in some ways I feel I’m someone who is able to sustain a crazy effort for a length of time, and then do nothing for another, I’m more a sometimes 10/10, mostly 8 or 9, sometimes 0 or 1 or 2 type of person, rather than a solid reliable 6 or 7/10). I’m sure it doesn’t stop some, but you know, I’m fairly uncomfortable lying or talking shit (not that I am unable, just uncomfortable, lately I have found I have a lot of abilities, not always know how to use them, but some I don’t fancy employing….which is why I don’t like sarcasm (I don’t get people who pride themselves in loving sarcasm), putting people down, etc. I could be quite scathing (I am at times), but I don’t see the point in hurting people, I don’t want to, though I could, and yeah I have had to stop myself from doing it at times.
I think we’re reaching the end, been a lot of meanderings there. Don’t know what the future holds work-wise. We are recruiting younger people (our team is on average quite old), but a few people are going to have to retire in the coming years, people who are both fantastic human beings and incredibly skilled and helpful. People I can fully rely on, people who on so many occasions have made up for the technical skills/knowledge I lack. And I don’t think these people can truly be replaced, and so I don’t know how long our team can last. Add to that the awkward situation that we are an extremely sucessful business/industry, and yet, every change of direction cuts people and the changing of the work sites and some of the teleworking is confusing. When I started working, there were three big Alcatel sites South of Paris. Then only two. And then only one, with the big selling point being that we’d have a unique place with everything, includind a hairdresser, concierge, etc. etc. But then only a few years later, oh it’s too expensive. We’re moving to a new site. Except…..some stuff we can’t move. So I’m staying on the same site (but now greatly reduced in both people and size), most of the people are moving to Massy (in a new building), but the whole of ASN is moving to nearby Les Ulis. So, erm, yeah, back to three sites and complicated logistics. Anyway, I’m sure there’s a few ideas I had in my mind when I first imagined this piece, that I forgot to mention, but nothing really matters here, it became a completely different beast. At the end of the day, you’ll have a clearer idea of my relation to work. And why to some extent I find it incredible to have been in uninterrupted employment for so long, and generally considered very professional and competent. From the start when I thought I’d never get a job because I didn’t have the right mentality, until now when sometimes I still feel I am not technically proficient enough (but have finally accepted that I have other qualities that maybe make me fairly good at my current job), it’s been an uneven journey. And yet, work in itself still feels like a ‘minor’ part of my life (emotionally, not time-wise). But the people I work with and have worked with, on the other hand, they are the ones who matter to me. I’ve never hdr career goals and aims, I possibly shouldn’t have been an engineer (if I had to redo it all over again, of course I’d do something different….if only because I do like to experiment, even if in lots of ways you can say I’ve always looked for comfort), but here I am, it’s the only life I have, and it’s been fairly kind to me in so many ways so far. By current standards, I probably have at least another 15 years to work, so we’ll see what happens!