grad auf flickr ein paar kommentare zu meinem jobwechsel beantwortet. auf englisch, aber das könnt ihr ja alle. aber darum fällt mir das so schwer:
in one of two ways, it is sad, indeed. it's been an era of eight years of messengering in ten years (two years of another job). i've been in something like a relatoinship with that job. i loved it. and i still do. and i started to hate it, though. we had lots of argues, so to speak. it's become a love-hate relationship, lately. might sound like i am insane, speaking like that of a job, but that
is how it felt. the freedom you have as a freelancer, the fun you have in passing car drivers at red lights, the thrill you have crossing multiple-lane intersections because you can simply read the traffic lights und you perfectly understand to prcisely estimate the timeframes you have at your disposal between one direction getting red and the other not having green yet.. those games had been my kind of extreme sports. the radio brabbling all the time. jokes being made. music being played when there were no jobs to dispose for a minute or two. the people i met, all those behind-the-scene views i got: photoshoots, hospitals, advertising, tv news suppliers (videos from events half an hour ago which were supposed to be on television in 18 minutes - only still being 4kilometers away), magazines, newspapers,
huge building sites (click!!) where i had to walk trough to deliver huge rolls of paper to the responsible architect. i learned so terribly much about so terribly different industries. i got the chance to peek into so many branches that need stuff immediately delivered some place. i was sporting all day long. at least until ~18 months ago when i slowly got fed up with the job. i learned so terribly much about my city. historically. geographically. photographically. i knew the names of at least 500 streets or maybe many more. when people asked me how they get here or thre, i always knew the way and the distance. i could often precisely estimate the minutes i'd be going to need, even if it was 9 kilometers. and mostly, i was exactly right. more than half of my wardrobe consists of bike messenger clothes. my furniture provides me space to store my bag, recharge my radio battrery, hang up my lockbelt, pile up my tail light, camera, wallet, mp3-player for the next day of work, hang up my clothes to air and/or dry them for the next day. my whole life had been adjusted to that job.
i will be crying my eyes out with my last delivery on january 31st around 18:30 CET. you cannot imagine how hard it is to say goodbye to all that which pretty much just felt like defining who i am.
in the other one of those two ways, it is the best thing that could happen to me. my diurnal rhythm got completely messed up in those last 18 months. i lost money, i practically didn't earn any, i even collected a serious amount of debts within the last number of weeks. now, i will have fixed hours of work, i will have my old, much better health insurance back which i had to leave for stupid bureaucracy. the guys in the shop are just really cool. i am the third oldest one, if i remember right. bike freaks. all of them. sharing my taste, not sharing my taste, quite a diverse bunch. i will finally be able to help people with what i know about bikes (
which is a lot) in the offline world again as well. i will be able to use my brain in other ways again which i missed. i will get back some kind of reliable, solid structure back into my life which i really very much needed and failed to rebuild by myself.
phew.
yeah. that's pretty much it.