When the dog owners of the world are asked for the wonders of winter in this country, they may talk about bright crisp mornings where the world seems brand new, of hounds galavanting across hill and plain, of doggy snow angels in fresh drifts of fluffy white bullshit.
It is unlikely, however, that they will go into detail about the unseen heights of ecstasy found by trying to locate a well-camoflagued dog poo on a steep muddy bank at eight AM on a rainy January morning. This is because the joy of such things is in the cup of tea when you return. In this particular case, the joy was not found in slipping over upon said muddy slope, and executing a perfect four point of contact fall.
Two knees in mud, one hand in stinging nettles, and my head in a puddle. A state of a affairs that was enough for the dog to stop investigating bushes for possible squirrels, and come and lick my face to make sure I was all right. I did then find the dog poo, mercifully undisturbed by my descent.
What’s A Metafor?
Much of my last year has been similar to this morning, to be honest, After a company reorg moved many of my responsibilities to the Paris office, and a “return to office” policy put a strain on other negotiations, I parted ways with my former employer in May, only to have an extremely stressful six months of unemployment. The current market is the worst it’s ever been from my perspective – and that includes coming into the industry just after the dot-com bubble burst the first time, and new-job-every-six-months during the great recession. I wrote something of a tirade about the situation on LinkedIn of all places – possibly the first and last time I’ll use it for its social media properties.
But the end result is positive enough, I’ve started a new position for ICEYE who do interesting stuff in space, and started for them back in November with a week in Helsinki, which was not only enlightening but also cold. This involves more interesting infra stuff than “How to host a large multilingual WordPress marketing site without ACF giving you nightmares”, which is nice. Alas, those stories are locked behind scabs and NDAs of equal thickness.
So 2024 happened, and space-year-2025 has begun, and we can hope it gets better. We can help it get better too, but mostly hope at this stage.