holy fuck

That really sums up the last week. Eleven and a half years after I started, I'm finally leaving AOL. I'm going to take voluntary redundancy because there simply isn't enough for me to do anymore. I had a large function to play up until the company split in two, and now that's all gone. Most of my role, and certainly all of the interesting bits have stayed with my old company.  That leaves me with basically two things to do. To put that in perspective, both of them would take me a a couple of weeks of solid work, in an entire year. There's just no point in hanging around. I had maneuvered myself into the position of working in a department that doesn't know how to use nor has any need for my skills, and I'm getting bored. Its time to move on, and we're gonna do that in a way that is exciting / scary / daunting / potentially awesome.  

We're going to move to Germany. I don't speak the language enough to get on in a job that uses German as the first language. That was illustrated perfectly to me yesterday when I looked at some ads for DSL with Deutsche Telekom. I had to get Anna to come and tell me what the packages meant. It turns out I don't actually know the technical language at all (except for the words in Windows). So I'm not going to be easily able to draw on the knowledge that leads me to make the decisions I make now. I won't also know where to look for stuff. Here I would just Google "DSL packages in UK" or something, if I was looking for broadband. I can't do that yet to the extent that I would be self sufficient.

I haven't worked in the real world in eleven years. I've been locked in the cozy insular world of AOL, and its proprietary software. I believe I am a pretty good web programmer, but I don't know if that's enough, or actually true. This site wasn't a small undertaking for me, and it has evolved through many evolutions in technology. However, what if I get asked to do something (in the programming languages that I understand) that is so far beyond anything I've done before that I simply can't do it?

So like I said - daunting and scary. Its going to be fun though. Munich is a really cool city, and I can only imagine that living there is even better that the yearly short visits we make. We should be there in time for the Oktoberfest. We can go snowboarding at the weekends - simply because the mountains are so close! The food and drink there are awesome too, and the cost of living is minimal in comparison to London. My redundancy payment will support us for well in excess of a year if I don't actually find a decent job.

All change then, and that's a good thing.  I was starting to get stagnant here. Anna hates this city, and you know, in comparison to her home; she's completely right. There's so many things wrong with London that I don't know where to start.  I'll do that posting later perhaps, but for now, I bid you good night.