New Zealand Weekly Update #86

10th of June to 16th of June 2024

Approximate reading time: 5 minutes

Lets get it started

What a week fellas. I am busted. I am off for three days in a row now and most of the time I used to sleep, to rest and to relax. Work is exhausting. Mostly for our mind, there is a lot of pressure on our shoulders. Usually I would not talk a lot about work since this is confidential and not the most important part of my life. But right now, it is drowning. We had a lot of change going on the last couple of months. A lot of people leaving, less people coming. Same financial goals, same customers. And mroe and more pressure on less and less shoulders. Without any hope that something might change. And I can tell since the day our manager Shingie has left that pressure is on us now two of us. Sometimes people might think working in retail is not a lot of work. You do your dispenses and when there is no customer in the shop, you shill around and play on your phone. Well, this is not the reality. You follow up on admin stuff, answer the phone, manage the bookings, change the bookings, deal with complaints, troubleshoots, refunds, orders, E-Mails, stock replenishments, stocktakes, sales reps coming in, cleaning, technical issues and heaps of requests from other shops, customers and companies. So well, retail sounds easy, but is not easy. And in between you try to match your financial goals and still try to serve the customers as best as possible. Sometimes I feel like a circus artist trying to juggle 10 balls at the same time. And someone is throwing more balls on me while my ground gets less and less stable. And someone tries to push me off the ball I am standing on while juggeling. And there is some weird music in the background and the light goes on and off all the time. Happy days fellas 🙂

Open book

Being with the company now for almost 13 months, and being in New Zealand for almost20 months, I kind of feel like life has become a little more settled. A little more day to day. And still, I am not used to this life in New Zealand. I still would feel like being in a dream. There are not many adventures at the moment as I had a year ago. Not so many hikes out in nature. And there are reasons for this. Mostly because I save all my money for my second residency. My car is not the best anymore. And I am very tired after work from time to time. Still trying to keep up with some training, mostly swimming at the moment. And I want to get back on running as well. But there is this lack of motivation from time to time, you might know this as well. The inner pigdog, as we used to say in Germany. Pigdog, such a funny word 🙂
And after being here for so many months, I have realized, that even though I love to share my stories, my thoughts and emotions, that sometimes it might be better to keep tings low. To not tell everyone everything. To keep things more secret. To think about what to tell to who. Because even though it is my nature to trust everyone from the very beginning on (since I would love to have it the same way around), there are people outside, who you should not trust with everything. there are people out there, who will use all the information you give them against you. If you like it or not. The more you tell them, the more vulnerable you are. The more information they have about you, the more pressure they can put on you. So what I am about to learn and to embrace is to not share all my private life stories with everyone, especially at work. I have learned, that some of your collegues are not your friends. They are your collegues, no more and no less. And if it comes down to the showdown, they would let you down. So the less you reveal from yourself, the better. The less they know, the better.
I am not talking about not trusting people at all anymore, but to keep more attention on what to tell and what not to tell. Because in the end, working comes down to four short steps.
Go to work. Do your job. Get paid. Go home.

What else to say?

As most of you know, I am an open book. I mean, literally. I wrote a book about some of my deep thoughts and emotions. A checklist on how to deal and not to deal with Felix so to say. I opened up a lot with this book, I revealed a lot of struggles, trauma and sad things about myself. Not in order to get sympathy.. But to share. To show that it is okay to feel like shit, to be upset. To be helpless. And still trying to move on. Even if you do not have a fucking idea how. Or where to go. Or what to do. But to just keep going, step by step. And by opening up that much I give people trust in advance. Trust that they treat those information in the right way. That they treat me in the right way. That they do not abuse those information. I trust people, so they can trust me. And they way around.
But in the end, the gap between trust and being naive is sometimes very, very small. And ususally this gap is filled by our guts. Our experience. Our boundaries. And also by all those lessons, we still have to learn.

PS: I recently discovered how easy it is to make crumble and how amazing it can be to just cook some vegetables with some chicken. And how satisfying this whole process is without thinking about hundred things at the same time. Fellas, crumble in the jungle! And that pumpkin! Awesome shit!

Your DingyInternational
Felix