(no subject)
Good things that have happened to me in the past week:
1. A friend has hooked me up with a flat that I can have in Paris in August/September for FREE because it is her grandmother's, but her grandmother is "summering" elsewhere. This is clearly fantastic, as I was otherwise looking at paying about £150 a week for a room in a shared flat. Paris is not cheap. Unless you know kind people with empty flats! Which it turns out I do, so yay.
2. It has been wondrously, gloriously sunny and warm. Life seems so much better when the sun shines. It's forecast to rain for all of next week, but the past ten days or so have been so lovely that I don't even mind a little rain now.
3. Work has been good: the audit issues I was worried about have gone away (as these things that seem so horrible and worrying at the time inevitably do) and I'm enjoying my job more than I have in quite a while. Which brings me onto the fourth thing:
4. When I told my boss I was handing my notice in, as I was going to go to France and try something new for a while, he told me he'd like me to consider taking a leave of absence and commiting to return back to my current job, with a payrise, in September 2010. But only if I felt reasonably confident I would actually return (as opposed to stringing them along with promises, then never coming back, leaving them in a position of having to recruit for the job twice within a twelve month period).
...now, as it happens I am not 100% confident that I will definitely want to return to my current job in a year's time. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I'd have said definitely not, but then see above re: work being really good at the moment. Also in the pro column:
- My employer is making me feel very valued at the moment which is really nice and flattering and makes me like working for them more.
- There's every chance that I WILL want to return to my "current life" after I've had my year of trying something new abroad
- Financially it would be really liberating over the next year to know I had a good job to come back to at the end of it all. It would mean I could concentrate on enjoying myself and making the most of my year away, and worry less about earning enough in a foreign country to sustain myself indefinitely.
- There's a little thing called a credit crunch on and thus promises of well paid jobs are not to be sniffed at.
But in the "con" column...I'd feel a little like I was giving up on my original ambition to try something new and open my mind to new ways of living my life in the long term, if I committed to returning to my current job and current life after one year. Also, there have been times over the past year that I really haven't liked my current job very much. And it's just impossible for me to anticipate how I'm going to feel in a year's time...maybe I'll have LOVED my experiences so much that I won't want them to end yet, maybe I'll find a fantastic permanent job in France that I don't want to leave...or maybe I'll feel ready to come home and be really glad of a good job to come back to. I just don't know, I honestly can't anticipate how I'm going to feel and it's incredibly hard for me to therefore try to make a decision as to whether to just leave my current job permanently, or take a year's leave of absence.
Given that I have to decide tomorrow though, I'm erring on the side of taking the leave of absence. I figure that ultimately, if I can't bear to come back after a year then I just won't. I'll feel guilty, because it would be screwing my employer's over slightly, but then they must know that there's a chance I wouldn't return and they want me to take this opportunity anyway. So if they're happy taking that risk, then I am too.
1. A friend has hooked me up with a flat that I can have in Paris in August/September for FREE because it is her grandmother's, but her grandmother is "summering" elsewhere. This is clearly fantastic, as I was otherwise looking at paying about £150 a week for a room in a shared flat. Paris is not cheap. Unless you know kind people with empty flats! Which it turns out I do, so yay.
2. It has been wondrously, gloriously sunny and warm. Life seems so much better when the sun shines. It's forecast to rain for all of next week, but the past ten days or so have been so lovely that I don't even mind a little rain now.
3. Work has been good: the audit issues I was worried about have gone away (as these things that seem so horrible and worrying at the time inevitably do) and I'm enjoying my job more than I have in quite a while. Which brings me onto the fourth thing:
4. When I told my boss I was handing my notice in, as I was going to go to France and try something new for a while, he told me he'd like me to consider taking a leave of absence and commiting to return back to my current job, with a payrise, in September 2010. But only if I felt reasonably confident I would actually return (as opposed to stringing them along with promises, then never coming back, leaving them in a position of having to recruit for the job twice within a twelve month period).
...now, as it happens I am not 100% confident that I will definitely want to return to my current job in a year's time. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I'd have said definitely not, but then see above re: work being really good at the moment. Also in the pro column:
- My employer is making me feel very valued at the moment which is really nice and flattering and makes me like working for them more.
- There's every chance that I WILL want to return to my "current life" after I've had my year of trying something new abroad
- Financially it would be really liberating over the next year to know I had a good job to come back to at the end of it all. It would mean I could concentrate on enjoying myself and making the most of my year away, and worry less about earning enough in a foreign country to sustain myself indefinitely.
- There's a little thing called a credit crunch on and thus promises of well paid jobs are not to be sniffed at.
But in the "con" column...I'd feel a little like I was giving up on my original ambition to try something new and open my mind to new ways of living my life in the long term, if I committed to returning to my current job and current life after one year. Also, there have been times over the past year that I really haven't liked my current job very much. And it's just impossible for me to anticipate how I'm going to feel in a year's time...maybe I'll have LOVED my experiences so much that I won't want them to end yet, maybe I'll find a fantastic permanent job in France that I don't want to leave...or maybe I'll feel ready to come home and be really glad of a good job to come back to. I just don't know, I honestly can't anticipate how I'm going to feel and it's incredibly hard for me to therefore try to make a decision as to whether to just leave my current job permanently, or take a year's leave of absence.
Given that I have to decide tomorrow though, I'm erring on the side of taking the leave of absence. I figure that ultimately, if I can't bear to come back after a year then I just won't. I'll feel guilty, because it would be screwing my employer's over slightly, but then they must know that there's a chance I wouldn't return and they want me to take this opportunity anyway. So if they're happy taking that risk, then I am too.