photo friday: end of an era

wonderwalls 2015 - askewwonderwalls 2015 - smug

wonderwalls 2015 - tristanwonderwalls 2015 - finished city
After an almost three year contact that made up the end of 16 years in and out of that building, I'm done. I'm officially unemployed... again.

And it's been a fucking weird week.

It started with the Monday public holiday, where I basically played Uncharted 4 from about 10:30 in the morning until around 5pm... I really have fallen in love with the game for the most part. There are a few things that drive me nuts, but overall it's been amazing.

Tuesday I called the ENT specialist to try and book an appointment to get my ears looked at... they didn't have anything until the end of May, but after a little begging she found something earlier in May. Not ideal, but I resigned myself to being mostly deaf for another couple of weeks. Later in the week the receptionist called me to say they'd had a cancellation that Friday... SCORE!

Wednesday I had an appointment at the optometrist after work to have my eyes looked at and also buy new glasses, since my current ones are slightly falling apart. Not exactly great timing... but better now than later I guess.

My prescription is essentially the same, which I expected it would be... I mean it's been nearly six years since I last got new glasses, and the time before that was even longer and they'd hardly changed then either.

The optometrist was lovely, perhaps not quite as informative as the last one.

And the glasses I chose were for all intents and purposes exactly the same as the old ones.Okay, not exactly... they no longer make that model, but it's a model that is essentially indistinguishable from the old ones.

I did look at some other ones, but let's be honest, I hate looking at myself in the mirror, and none of the other glasses really seemed to do either diddly or squat for me... so ones that look like the ones I already like will be fine.

Wednesday I stopped off at the comic shop to pick up an order.

Thursday I had an appointment with a new recruitment agency after work. The woman was really nice, but I'm not completely sure if anything will come of it, as my skill set may not be a match for the type of positions they get. But that makes three agencies I'm signed up with, so it can't hurt.

I'd also spent the week slowly taking all of the personal crap off my desk and out of my drawers and ferrying it home, one bagful at a time. This also had the side effect of filling my whole apartment with random crap that doesn't have a home. And me having no fucks to give, the apartment pretty much looks like something explosive went off.

Really the most dramatic change was last week when I took all the stuff down off the wall, but there were definitely moments during the week that felt somewhat final.

Friday was an odd day, unsurprisingly.

I felt like I needed some Disney villain magic to get through the day, so I wore my Ursula "Sea Witch" tee.

The morning was weird... catching up on stuff I needed to get done first thing, which turned into doing some additional things that weren't really my responsibility, but fuck it, at least they got done. Then I had to head off the ENT doctor.

The short version is that I can hear again, the longer version is that according to him both of my ears were essentially blocked and I shouldn't have been able to hear out of either ear (yet I could)... and TMI, he pulled a lump of ear wax out of the "good ear" that was roughly about the size of my little finger nail.

I did feel a little like I had bionic hearing when I left the office though.. so many sounds. Okay, yes, that's a little overly dramatic, but still.

I came back to work and even though I'd said I didn't really want any fuss, La Ninj had taken it on her herself to make a cake and gathered just The Nuthouse staff together around my desk. It was nice to be honest... when I said I didn't want a fuss, that was mostly about not wanting to hear platitudes from certain people, and not really being that fussed about sharing my going away with certain other folk. But just having The Nuthouse together as much as possible like old times was pleasant.

At various points during the day people came over to say goodbye or just to say nice things about me. And it was also interesting to notice who didn't say anything at all. Part of me wonders if saying that I didn't really want a fuss was part of that... but certain people still fussed, which was nice.

As always happens I'd noticed, quite accidentally, that there was a card doing the rounds... so I knew I wasn't going to get away scot free... so between finishing up a few things, filling Plaid's head with the last of the things he needed to know to do my job now that it's his and not mine.

I knew there was going to be some sort of formal goodbye at some point (as usually happens, I'd realised there was a card doing the rounds... which is weird because when it's a card for other people, I don't tend to notice it at any point other than when I'm writing in it, but I almost always spot a card intended for me somewhere in the office)... and around 2:30 or so everyone who was around the place clustered around (seriously, could I say "around" any more in the same sentence) my desk and said some very nice things and then gave me my card and present, which turned out to be a set from the Lego Batman Movie (Killer Croc's Tail-Gator)... and then a couple of other presents just appeared on my desk, one from Owlgirl, one from Plaid and one from someone I've known almost as long as I've been around The Nuthouse who at times gets on my nerves but it really very sweet.

some lovely parting gifts
So this was the haul I ended up lugging home along with the last of my stuff from work.

I did make the mistake of reading the cards while I was still at work. And while I didn't actually cry, there were a couple of close moments. And it's so weird to only really know what many of your coworkers really thought about you as you're leaving a place. Yes, some of it I knew, but some of the words they used aren't words I would ever think of to describe myself...

I'll be honest though, other than the brief moment reading the cards, I was very calm and mellow throughout the whole day... and I think I said "it is what it is" about 100 times throughout the week. Because, well, it is what it is... to quote Morpheus "what happened, happened and couldn't have happened any other way". There's no point in dealing in "what if's", it's better just to recognise that this is the universe given you the most direct message that it can and that it's time to move on.

I also wondered at various points in the last week or so if the fact that I've been through this scenario a number of times before and I'm just generally a little bit numb when it comes to rejection (as in I've experienced a lot of it under a range of situations and circumstances), so while this is going to be weird on Monday when I don't have to go to work, I don't know if I'm going to have that big emotional moment with this that I've had previously.

Tomorrow though I need to tidy this bombsite of an apartment.

Today wasn't much of anything to be honest.

I got up, went shopping, came back, unpacked and headed off to Ma's place. Not quite as quickly as that sounds, but it was fine.

Ma wanted to run a couple of errands at the shopping centre, so we did that... there wasn't anything on at the movies, so we did the usual loop and called it a day. Then I got about halfway home before realising that I'd left my glasses at Ma's place and had to go all the way back to get them. That was fun.

What probably should have been happening this weekend if my life hadn't fallen in a heap and Ma's shoulder wasn't screwed would have been the Wonderwalls street art exhibition. That's where the photos at the top of the post come from. But we can always go at some later point when everything is finished and take photos then.

I will say that right now I have no idea of any kind about where the road leads me from here. It's all "Here there be dragons" and vintage sea monsters. But we'll see what happens.

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