Carmen's Story, Part 4: I'll Travel The World
Hello Yarn Lovers,
When I mapped out this blog series, there was a topic I seem to have left out: travel. So I am going to try and pack that into today's blog as well as what I had originally planned. Please bear with the length.
I took my first trip to Germany when I was 10 months old. My Mom took me to see her family, including her mother who wasn't well and passed away before I turned two. I of course have no memories of this trip but I am sure it had an effect on me. I was brought up bilingual and spending two months in Germany with only that language around me at that age certainly helped set it deep into my brain.
My next trip would be at the age of 8. A good family friend was flying to Germany that summer and I was given the opportunity to accompany her and go visit my cousins who I was incredibly close with despite the 12 year age gap. They had been visiting us regularly since I was a baby and one of them, Dagmar, had lived with us for a year when I was six. It was between this and going to basketball camp with friends and I agonised over the decision (one of many between my interests and my sporty obligations over the years) in the end I chose to go to Dusseldorf for two weeks. Two weeks turned into six and six turned into nearly three months. We kept changing my flight because I was having the absolute time of my life and I ended up spending the entire summer there. I cried for at least the first 3 hours of my flight home, which by the way was as an unaccompanied minor because our friend had of course gone home after the originally planned two weeks.
This was the first of many solo and family trips to Germany and the beginning of my wanderlust. It was expensive to fly and my parent's owned a business that demanded their attention and presence but they afforded me the privilege of seeing the great big world because I think it was clear to everyone around me how much it fuelled my soul. I did have to chip in for these adventures, don't you worry.
I don't really remember ever not having a job. Of course I didn't start working at age 5 or anything but I started babysitting regularly at the age of 11 and continued to do so all through high school. At the age of 14, as soon as it was legal, my Dad put me to work as a dishwasher in the restaurant. I believe I mentioned it was a small space so during the week there was only one dishwasher working, a role that also involved prepping food. Needless to say it was HARD work but I absolutely loved it. I loved getting to hang out with my Dad, hanging with the other team members and just feeling useful and like I was accomplishing something.
On Saturday nights after service was over my Dad would cook for the team - he invented a recipe he called Peanut Butter Beef for this meal and it was the trimmings of the steak filets from the week with mushrooms and a peanut butter sauce he created with a side of spaeztle (because every dish he served came with a side of spaetzle). It was delightful. Dad's staff was made up of two classically trained waiters(resses), a couple of bus boys which were usually university students and then the dishwashers who were sometimes high school, sometimes college students. I learned a lot working there over the years and I was promoted to bus boy when I got older. My Dad was a pretty good boss but he wasn't perfect and there were moments that resembled a Gordon Ramsey style melt down in the kitchen. Do not ask for ketchup in a fine dining restaurant, just don't.
He was an excellent small business owner though. Always appreciative of his customers, never dwelling too much on individual bad days and he valued the little things. At the end of the night when he was done cooking he would walk through the dining room and chat with customers. He knew so many of them by name. And if I was working he'd call me out from the dish room and introduce me to people. A proud father is an understatement and he would gush about me and usually tear up in the process. This was wholly embarrassing to me as a teenager.
It wasn't just him though, my Mom was an excellent business woman. Where my Dad was a bit of a dreamer sometimes she was practical and a real financial wiz. They were an excellent team and if there was ever conflict, I wasn't aware of it. It was a team effort to turn that place into the success it was, I understand that now better than I did at the time.
I didn't really have time for a job during university given all the sports activities but I was also a broke student so I took on some tutoring work with The Princeton Review. For those of you unfamiliar there is a standarized exam call the SAT that all students take before getting into college and The Princeton Review specialized in preparing kids for this so they got better scores and could get into better schools. It was a well paying gig so I didn't need to do do a lot of extra hours and it was really flexible work.
After graduation and taking a summer to work (both tutoring and in a restaurant) to earn money for the backpacking around Europe trip my roommate and I had planned, I started working more and more for The Princeton Review and eventually they had a full time role open up that I took. I won't tell you my title there because it won't make any sense but basically I organized the teachers we had and assigned them to classes, I hired new ones, I ended up training them as well as well a dozen other things because this was also a small business where everyone pitched in.
It was an intense but very cool place to work. The owner of our franchise was a slightly eccentric Brit named Paul who was deeply passionate about education. The office was in no way typical and it was full of young people - I think most of the team was under the age of 30 so there was quite a bit of silliness. It was an environment where you worked hard a played hard - we had the most epic work events. Every year there was a national conference in an exotic location and the year I went it was in Hawaii and helicopter rides were involved. Oh and since it was Southern California, flips flops were acceptable work attire.
I learned so much in my three years at this company. I could write a lot about that alone. Our VP Michael had a management style I've been trying to emulate my whole life. I remember the first time we had a one-on-one meeting and he said to me "what can I do for you? I work for you, I'm here to help you succeed." They were good at giving you big opportunities and having faith that you would succeed.
I went from an irreverent and chaotic office to an even more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants company. On a Friday afternoon I got a coffee with a surfer dude named Mike and on Monday morning at 6am I jumped into a bright green RV with him and two guys I'd never met - Steve and Matty. We were off on a 6 week tour of univeristies across the southern states. This was Roadtrip Nation - they produce a documentary series for public television in which they send three students out on the road to ask leaders from all walks of life how they got to where they are today. The founders were out to prove that being a doctor, lawyer or accountant weren't the only choices in life and goodness was I on board with that concept!
I was hired to help with a promotional speaking tour as they had just published their second book and were about to launch their third series. So for six weeks we drove from Laguna Beach, CA to New York city through the South. I was being paid to travel and I was elated! I ended up staying on with them for about 9 months and did everything from organize PR events to demolishing walls in their new office. There were 9 of us in total that worked here and I was paid next to nothing but I really enjoyed it. I did another promo tour in a different RV (they owned 4 of them) and with three different boys I hadn't really met before and this time we toured the Pacific Northwest, Montana and Idaho in 4 weeks.
At the end of September I called my cousin for her birthday. I hadn't talked to her in a bit and we caught up on life things and it was clear that I was flailing a bit; still reeling from the break-up with my college boyfriend. You know that one that crushes you in such a way you feel like you are never, ever going to recover? Yeah, that kind of break-up, even though it had been my choice. Well Dagmar says on the phone to me: 'Why don't you come live with us for a while? I had twins 9 months ago and could use some help, we have an extra room, you can use the car and we now live close to France and Switzerland and you always wanted to do a semester abroad but you couldn't because of sports. Come live with us.' Three days later I called her back to let her know I had booked a flight for December 1st.
I arrived in Germany on December 2. 2014 - it was the twins' first birthday and I spent the next year being an au pair, teaching English at Berlitz and applying for 'real jobs' with not much luck.
I was given a student at Berlitz, she was in her 50's and couldn't speak a word of English. We were starting at the beginning. I don't know why but this student took a real liking to me and couldn't understand what I was just teaching English. Her name was Anjoede and she ended up hiring me to work for her in the payroll company she ran. I filed travel expenses, it was so boring but it was a big engineering company and I had my foot in the door somewhere. Anjoede was also amazing in that she took me to training course after training course and pushed me to learn and become employable in Germany. A few months in, the parent company was going through a restructure and the perviously large HR department was now just 1 person so Anjoede took me to the new default head of the department and essentially sold me to her as someone who could do anything she needed done as I had lots of experience. I don't know where I would have ended up without Anjoede, she was my champion and my friend and I am forever grateful I met her.
That is how I came to work for a high tech engineering company in Stuttgart, Germany. My boss here was the worst manager I've ever worked for, she was wicked smart and knew her stuff inside and out but she was terribly socially awkward sometimes in a way that really didn't suit a head of HR. I think firing people was her favorite task and that just wasn't something that sat well with me. I found my niche of expertise and ended up running the Training & Development program for the company as well as our Global Mobility Management. It wasn't easy being a twenty-something woman in an engineering company, who wanted to listen to anything I had to say? I won them over in the end, mostly.
This is where I worked while doing my MBA which really wasn't very easy sometimes. My team wasn't particularly supportive and there was a lot of friction the last few months I was there. I proposed a new role in Corporate Communication to the powers that be and when they rejected the idea I knew it was time to leave - I had learned all I could there. They replaced me with three people, including a guy who came in on twice my salary for just the Training & Development stuff, he also got an assistant. I hadn't has one of those. It wasn't a terrible place to work by any means but it also wasn't a place I wanted to stay and so I didn't.
I found I was good at working - way better than I was at being a student or an athlete, I always found it much more satisfying.
Carmen's Story
Part 1: Let's Start at the Beginning
Part 2: You're Tall - You Should Play Sports