Wednesday, October 13, 2004
One day we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny
When you drive from home to somewhere new, it always seems to take ages. The anticipation of “it may be just around the next corner” stretches time so that the outward journey always seems much longer than the homeward one. I was thinking about this because I find myself at the moment being screwed around by a client on a proposal. Waiting on someone else to take a decision that will dictate the next 6 or 8 months of your working life is a painful process. We are in a continual state of maybe. Hurry up and wait. Any day now, they might sign. At that point, we will go from killing time to charging around like lunatics. It’s been any day now for weeks, and the indecision, the not knowing, is killing me. At the same time, we have another client who is desperately trying to tap dance out of the money he owes us, and when we tried to push our claims with him had the front to give us a whole “you’ll never work in this town again” speech. Trouble is, we will, and he knows it. Prat.
I find it very hard to do anything with the time. The stress of being on tenterhooks creates an inability – with me at any rate – to do anything constructive. The irritation with the situation, plus the stress of knowing that getting or not getting this project is critical to our future, takes up so much emotional energy that there is little capacity for anything else. Even blogging.
In the meantime, the company’s financial woes mean that I got paid 2 weeks late, and it looks like the same thing will happen this month. All this puts a strain on daily life, since I am overdrawn, with nothing left to pull out of my bond (mortgage). We moved to Cape Town so that we could live a low stress, high fun life, and now I find myself in deeper financial doo doo than I ever was in London. It’s all entirely of my own making, of course – if I had made some different decisions, latest of which was to over extend myself on the house, then things would be different.
What I need is a big advance, which will seem a lot cleverer if you know where the title came from.
I find it very hard to do anything with the time. The stress of being on tenterhooks creates an inability – with me at any rate – to do anything constructive. The irritation with the situation, plus the stress of knowing that getting or not getting this project is critical to our future, takes up so much emotional energy that there is little capacity for anything else. Even blogging.
In the meantime, the company’s financial woes mean that I got paid 2 weeks late, and it looks like the same thing will happen this month. All this puts a strain on daily life, since I am overdrawn, with nothing left to pull out of my bond (mortgage). We moved to Cape Town so that we could live a low stress, high fun life, and now I find myself in deeper financial doo doo than I ever was in London. It’s all entirely of my own making, of course – if I had made some different decisions, latest of which was to over extend myself on the house, then things would be different.
What I need is a big advance, which will seem a lot cleverer if you know where the title came from.
