My Inner World

Munchkin and I were playing "I spy"

I said I spied something Yellow.

Munchkin's first guess: "Your teeth?"

Ehhm, Thanks Honey!

Yesterday afternoon, we received an e-mail to all be present in the largest meeting room at 16:00 hrs. They were shutting down the lines to facilitate this meeting... This set off my alarmbells straight away. The lines are holy, Service Level does not get compromised unless it's something BIG.

And, it was.

We all gathered there to see the general manager walk in with a very solemn face. He proceeded to read from an earlier prepared statement.
I work for an outsourcing company and we take care of the customer service for a VERY large software company. (Yes, that one) and this company decided to pull their business and give it to another company with a larger presence globally.

This means that as per the end of June, Mieneke is out of a job.
This is two weeks before my maternity leave is to start. Going job-hunting when you are very much pregnant? Somehow I don't see myself being all that successfull. Finding a part-time job that pays as well as this one did after my maternity leave? Snowball's chance in Hell.

Most of the people in my job are only in Ireland for a year or two anyway. They don't have families here and can pretty much do what they want in regards to finding a job. As my sanity was starting to cave, the faces around me were not too worried. The average age is about 22.... they all went to the pub afterwards to have a "redundancy piss up" (Only in Ireland.)

One very sweet colleague, who knows about the baby was very concerned and even offered to drive me home. I got the feeling that the rest of them thought I was overreacting. Yeah, 4 months pregnant, a three year old at home and just lost a job of 5.5 years that provided a steady income.... Overreacting is right...

On top of that, there was talk of Paddy's job cutting over 70 jobs, too. Can you imagine what it would have been like if that had happened? And it's still not certain that it won't.

Stress and pregnancy do not go well together, so I am forcing myself to chill. Things will go as they are meant to. The Universe decides...

I know that everything happens for a reason, but at the moment I am having a very hard time thinking of what the reason for this could be. It will all reveal it's self though....

When my friend was over last week and we went out and about, I once again noticed the amount of tourists that flock to Ireland. I love this, it makes me realize how lucky I am to be living in a country that many people pay good money for to visit.
However, what get's me sometimes is the sheer sillyness of some people.

I have had German people start asking me something IN GERMAN. Now, I happen to speak German. But I was sitting on a train, had not spoken a word when they asked me where the stop for such and such a town was. How were they to know I could understand them?

I was standing in a pharmacy on Henry Street once, looking at eye make-up when two Dutch "ladies" starting talking about me in Dutch. Saying that no amount of make-up was going to fix that mug.
I told them they were being ignorant and that that kind of stupidity would get them in trouble some day, in Dutch. They apologized but I knew they were sorry for being caught, not for what they said. And told them that, too.

When I lived in my MiL's village, I heard a story of an American lady asking a cab driver if he knew if a lady called Mrs Murphy (can't recall the exact name used) had lived there at the beginning of the 1900's! Like the cabbie was going to know!

When we were in Glendalouch, we met a group of American ladies who stood in a ruin, holding hands in a circle. (which is fine, I am all for connecting the the surroundings, centering yourself) expressing their gratitude of being back in the land of their ancestors and then proceeding to sing a SCOTTISH song together....

It makes me laugh sometimes... So go on, tell me, what's the silliest thing you have ever seen/heard a tourist do?
Do your fellow countrymen/women ever make you cringe?