I started a business. It made me want to drink copious quantities, smoke myself into oblivion and hit my head against a brick wall. Instead I wrote a blog.
Site Launch Day: 10
User Count: 41
Going right: Starting up after 2 weeks holiday.
Going wrong: Feel like I haven't had a holiday.
Comment: Difficult to take time off when you know every day costs you. Makes for very expensive holiday in opportunity cost terms.
Once upon a time, I had a corporate job and a corporate life. Barely got home in the week, traveled with my colleagues abroad, dined in hotel rooms with BBC World or fancy restaurants after a conference. I've lived in Paris, Dusseldorf, Milan, Dublin, Nicosia and spent considerable amounts of time in Budapest and London. And loved it.
"The mark of of VP" said one Boss "is that you can party and drink everyone under the table until 4am and then be in at your desk at 8am the next morning." He was 6'4" and was good at that game. He also had an enormous amount of charisma and I, like many people, hung on every word he said. I would give you his name - because he was awesome - but he sacrificed an awful lot for that job, time with his four children and fidelity to his wife.
I don't judge him. Not one little bit. When you spend that amount of time away from your family doing VP stuff and get wrapped up in the egocentric world that is top management, many people betray their own values and forget why they are doing what they are doing. That's corporate life. Or can be. The crazy thing is that I aspired to it. For years, the goal was to climb the ladder and be the best.
"They've asked me to lead the center of excellence for decision support." I said. "The exact title is Head of Decision Support Excellence."
"Putain" said my french husband (confused? you might well be) "A job with head and excellence in the title, it sounds good. What would you do exactly? Accrue things?" He giggled at his own joke. As far as he was concerned the perfect balance of accountancy was a mystery.
"Well, I would lead a team to design investment appraisal methodologies and models in excel, but the only thing is....that the job is in Milan. It's an international assignment. We would both move." I said. He stopped giggling and drew breath. He realized at once the enormity of the decision at hand even if he hadn't understood the first half of the sentence. Stopping me from doing a job involving my passion - the creation of excel models - might have meant the end of our marriage then, instead of 2.5 years later.
No one reason can be blamed for the breakdown of a marriage, but I would say that the strain of my corporate life certainly didn't help it. My husband didn't have any qualifications, or indeed knowledge of Italian but fancied living in a hot country with the help of his wife's salary. Our plan was that he would use that time to study - distance learning. That way it would be for him but also for our future.
It's a sad but true fact that even now, it is expected that the husband will be the one who gets the high flying job and the wife will follow. Going to Italy, my husband was not only in the minority of men who were supported by their wives, but also totally isolated as a foreign man having followed his wife on international assignment. There was no social support system and worse, total unspoken disrespect for us both. To the outside world, I was the ball-breaker and he was the wimp. Pretty soon we stopped telling anyone what we were doing, and that put paid to our social life with Italians in general. As his resentment smoldered, so did my shame...with surprising consequences. But that's another story.
So was my promotion worth it? No one can regret what happens in life. But you can learn. And my lesson was that corporate life won't be the cause of the downfall of your relationship (that's up to you), but it may be a big catalyst for cracks that are already there. Cracks that you may otherwise be able to repair.