Paulitko Accounts

It had really come to its natural end anyway, but the timing of the whole event was almost a little too good to believe.

I’d been with the company for ten months as I emailed in my resignation notice, following some courtesy phone calls and explanations to friends I’ve made there. It was the job I found following the Camino, and it had served me so well.

My four-year apprenticeship and subsequent two years as an engineer had been a mixed bag. Trying to gain experience involving all of commercial gas, air conditioning and electrical work had been difficult, and while I was a hard worker and far from useless, my level was not where I wanted it to be. I felt determined to change that, so when returning from Spain (exactly a year to this day, 1^st of June), the search for employment had the possibility to learn as the upmost priority.

Fast forward a month, I’d had successful interviews with two different companies back-to-back and received both job offers literally within a minute of each other by the end of the week. Despite the inferior salary, I followed up on the above and chose the one most suited to learning, a role split between air-conditioning and gas in a compact, youthful team of guys.  

The months would be a whirlwind of hard-work, satisfaction, learning, mistakes, new experiences, and far more value and stimulation than any job I’d had before. There were some frustrations and hard times of course, but I was happy to throw all of my energies into the work, and felt I was getting plenty out of it. The role was working for both the present and the future, where I could pay my share of the life I had with my girlfriend, develop myself personally i.e. learning Spanish, all while having some leftover to put away for whatever future plans I might conjure. The wage was far inferior to what I’d had with my previous company but assurances of a wage review that would be judged on my performance gave me a goal to work towards.

Like all good things though, it would come to an end. A tumultuous start of year for the company itself and then the failure to consider a wage rise as per my improvement and efforts (a small general percentage rise was handed out instead), led to a breakdown in my relationship with the job, and I could no longer put my full enthusiasm and commitment into the role. I’d promised myself on the Camino that I wouldn’t leave myself again in a position of stagnation, having to force myself and suffer with every day and so, after a bit of soul searching, I quit.

The coincidence, and strangely natural timing, is that other forces and emotions had been at work, separate to what was going on with the job. As I was receiving the news that my salary wouldn’t be open to improvement for a further 6 months, I was dealing with a hard return from a trip to Morocco where, for the first time ever, I had found so much difficulty in coming home. As explained in the latter stages of my Toubkal piece, intense instinct was telling me that there was something for me in Morocco, something important. A door had opened right before my eyes, exposing a path that I could take, and I wanted to take it.

Yet at the time, I had a job that I was still enjoying, a supposed wage rise to look forward to and an amazing future plan to work towards.

Well…

As fate would have it, I am now free to search for this path I felt, to explore and find whatever I can find out there.

Perhaps there’ll be nothing. Perhaps I’ll return within a week. Perhaps I’ll find somewhere else I’d rather go. Or perhaps, the most wonderful, reality-defying things are there waiting for me.

Either way, I welcome it, with open arms.