It's official! (and some other stuff)

After months of discussion, I finally have a new job role at work! It's not a totally new job, but rather something that I will do for roughly half my time in addition to my old job. The title they settled on for what I will do is Research Assistant - Sales. What I will do is, yes, mostly research to support pitches and proposals our Sales department does to get new business, but also I will do a bit of putting together documents and slide kits and making sure they look good, and I'll be involved as a team member during preparations.

The reason I was looking for something new in the first place was because I've been at my job 4 years now and it's not been very challenging for a long time, but it's very hard for me to find a completely new position because most of the jobs are for people with PhDs and science backgrounds. There are a couple of areas I could move into without a science education, but they aren't jobs I'm interested in. On top of knowing my job in and out for awhile, my team often just didn't have enough work for me to keep me busy, so I was bored a lot of the time. I was looking for a new job for about 2 years, with no luck, but then I had my idea to go to Australia next year and I thought it would be best to stay at my current job and use my years with the company to help bargain a long-term leave instead of quitting my job when I go. But if I was going to stay, and stay in the same position, I wanted some new responsibilities and more challenging tasks, so at the end of 2005 I started talking to my manager (who then left early this year) about what I could do. There were a couple of ideas of what new roles I could take on, and we bounced back and forth on it a couple of times, but then someone in the Sales department came to me a couple of months ago about doing support for them and during June I was trying out the new role. Everything went fine (minus a pitch preparation that was a disaster, but we pulled through and the guy who made it a disaster ended up leaving the company), I liked doing the work, they liked me doing the work, everyone was happy, so last Tuesday I sat down with my manager and the head of Sales to discuss making it all official. And part of making it official is that I get a raise! I don't know how much it will be yet, but it will happen. I'm very happy with that, especially since when I first (very nervously) brought it up, my manager said she wasn't sure I would get a raise because it might be seen as a horizontal move, which I didn't agree with at all. Fortunately the head of Sales, who is also General Manager (so in a position to get things done) felt a raise was deserved. Yay! I may be disappointed by the actual amount I get, but for now I'm happy I get one. And I do like the work I will do with Sales, especially the research, I like delving into a new area and sleuthing things out and getting people the info they need.

On other topics, with the Bos en Lommerplein shut down, we had to find an alternative place to get groceries today. The closest option is a Dirk, which we usually avoid like the plague. And which we will continue to avoid like the plague. Our trip today brought back all the bad things we hated about having to shop at the Dirk on the Mercatorplein when we lived in our old house. It was crowded, they didn't have a lot of the things we were looking for, the lines stretched back into the store and we were standing in them for about as long as it took us to get the groceries we were buying. Which wasn't even that much because they didn't have quite a few things we needed. As we waited in line, being pushed and shoved as people reached to get to the shelves we were standing in front of, or as we made sure someone didn't cut in front of us, or as kids went running through the lines, we said to each other "Nuh-uh. We ain't doing this again. The money we save by not going to the Albert Heijn (the other nearest store) is not worth the loss in sanity." We had to go to the Albert Heijn as well, to get the things the Dirk didn't have, and it was quiet and calm and you could actually navigate your cart through the store. It's much smaller than our usual AH, so it still was missing some things we needed, but they weren't really essential things. O says the plein is meant to be open again in a few weeks, once they make sure it won't collapse, but I thought it was going to be closed for the forseeable future. We'll see how it goes.

I guess quite a few people tuned in to watch the Star Wars trilogy on a Dutch channel last week. We caught a bit of a couple of the movies, and the first night we saw part of one, we were lying in bed later on and distinctly heard someone walking by outside whistling Darth Vader's theme. And just a few minutes ago there was an energetic kid outside "singing" the main Star Wars theme. I guess watching the movies really stuck with some people.