Asleep on a Train

After four weeks of feeling upset and confused, but not showing it 'cos that is not how I do things, I feeling more positive about the future. The firm has shown me how much money I'll get when I leave, and it is enough to pay off a credit card that has drained us over the past four years. We should also be able to tuck away a few dollars for the planned overseas trips to NZ. Casey wants to go to New York on a school trip and then to Bali for schoolies but we may need to toss a coin on those items. The reason for my optimism is due to an approach from a consulting firm to bring me on board. I'm keen but I'd like to see what money they have to offer. I hope to learn this in the next week Tomorrow is a holiday in Victoria so I guess I better do some laundry, for the rest of the week is pretty full with a networking luncheon in Melbourne on Tuesday, another one on Wednesday, then I'm up in Sydney to say goodbye to those guys, and attend a third networking luncheon on F...

Still reeling from the news, but extremely philosophical about the whole thing, I been making busy polishing up the resume and chatting to the recruiters and outplacement people. I've had the opportunity to attend a series of seminars about recruitment and now understand a lot more about what goes on behind the scenes. It certainly makes it easier to handle the rejection letters when they come in. My contact point at the out placement place is a no nonsense person, so is ideal to deal with my bullshit when I slide and want to crawl into a hole and pull the lid over it. I have a couple of irons in the fire and there seems to be plenty of work for me so I remain optimistic about finding a place to move on to in the near future.

My boss called me in to his office early Monday and told me that he'd thought about my position and the direction that the group was going, or the direction he felt that the group should be going in, and that I was not the right one to be leading the group. While he said there was no one fault or flaw in what I'd done to date, he wanted to change the leader of the group and I had a couple of months to sort myself out before leaving. I left his office in a bit of a daze and since then I've struggled to come to grips with it all. I spoke to my team one by one, saying that I'd been thinking about it (leaving) for a while, but now JDN had found someone else and it was time to get out. I will now begin a series of training tasks that are provided by an outplacement group, and maybe, just maybe I will write about them on this web log.

The Australian Open has finished, and while 100's and 1000's of people spend the past two weeks glued to the drama of the Open, I spent it dealing with on constant onslaught on life as I know it...and I'm tired. I mentioned that my boss took me and other people from his management team to the first night of the Open. It was fun, we had a nice meal at a Southbank restaurant, then took a water taxi to the Open. We saw a couple of famous tennis players, but I had to leave early (11pm ish ) to get my car out of the car park before it closed. Unfortunately, it closed at 10pm, so I learnt a lesson there. Rather then shell out $85 to get a guard out to open up, I took a train home, so I didn't get to bed until 1:30am. The next few days were busy at work as I've been recruiting for new staff to replace departing staff. I also had to let someone go as they were not right for the role, or the role was not right for them...either way, it was not going to work out good for eit...

I've been grumpy recently and about the only thing that stops me from being grumpy is to keep busy, so today I swept out the side patio and sanded down the outside table top and re-oiled it. They both look ten times better for my sweaty efforts Tomorrow I'm moving into my new office and the new year starts properly. Tomorrow night I'm off to the Australian Open Tennis (on a water taxi no less) with the boss shouting tea. Yippee!!