Perks

Lately, things at my job have been good. The company I work for has been quite successful in the past few months and we've been hiring new people in my department left and right. One new person started last Monday; another new one starts this coming Monday. We have been quite overworked at points though due to a lot of new work and not enough people to do it yet, and our general manager has fortunately recognized this hard work and given us some of the most reward-like stuff I've seen in the 4 1/2 years I've been at this job. One thing was just a nice break for people who'd put in a lot of overhours, which we have tracked when we enter and leave the building and which can be traded in for days off. Twice a year they chop down your hours if you have more than 50 and this was meant to happen in October, but management agreed to not do it this time around because a lot of people had tons of overhours but hadn't had a quiet period where they could take a day off or go home earlier. So they realized it wouldn't be fair to take those hours away. It wasn't a difficult thing to do on the management's part, but it was a nice gesture.

Something that is a bit more of a treat and which requires that they actually have to spend some money on us is that a few times now they've brought people into the office to give us a 20 minute back massage. I've gone twice now and it's lovely. Especially since I tense up my shoulders a lot and sometimes I do get stiffness in my right shoulder from using the mouse so much. It's so hard though to come out of getting a massage and then have to head back to work. It feels wrong to use my computer again and start undoing all the relaxation my muscles gained from the massage. I've heard good feedback from some co-workers, and we've filled in surveys after having one of the massages, so hopefully our company decides to continue offering them to us.

Besides company-wide benefits, work has been good lately because the group of people I know and like has been expanding. This is mostly due to most of my department eating together during lunch, so we've gotten to know each other pretty well. I used to eat lunch with just one friend from my company, but when she left and then some new people started on my team, the habit was started of going to lunch with people in my department. Since we've been hiring more and more people recently, the group keeps growing. Sometimes we can't find a table to all fit at. Anyway, I've just been stepping back and appreciating this lately, that there's this group of people at work who I really like, people all in their 20s and 30s, mostly without kids, from many different countries and with all sorts of stories, and we all get on quite well. I think it's made work more enjoyable, and while I've always liked where I work, I feel like I now have a good set of friends there as well which I didn't have in the same way before.

Last week we got our yearly present for Sinterklaas and it was nice to see that a bit more effort went into the gift than in previous years. Usually we just get a chocolate letter, but this year we each got a little Sinterklaas bag filled with a lot of speculaas and with a little poem attached. I don't know who wrote the note, but it was written in "Dinglish", a mix of Dutch and English (I guess they don't know it's called Dunglish) and I thought it was quite well done:

Dear collega,

Because de Sint's Spanish is beter dan his English
He decided to do dit gedicht in Dinglish
In the kader of Sinterklaas
I would like to geef you deze pieces of speculaas
This speciale department of Elsevier
Gives on this Sinterklaas party a whole eigen zwier
De Sint would like to bedank you voor your hard werk
And makes himself for the kado's of next year wederom sterk

About the bag the speculaas came in though, I bring up the whole Zwarte Piet issue, which is whether it's all racist or it's just a tradition or what. In my first years here I didn't think much about Zwarte Pieten except that they creeped me out, but now it is hard not to see it all as, if not totally racist, then done in very bad taste. I mean, Dutch people of all ages go around in black face and nappy-haired wigs, and it's hard as a foreigner to not think it comes across really poorly. So then there's the bag from work. This is the design on the side of the bag:



The Zwarte Piet looks like a depiction of a black person from the 1800s and early 1900s, with the big, red lips. I'm rather embarrassed to own it. But if I mentioned this to the average Dutch person, they would scoff and say "don't be silly, it's just Zwarte Piet. Sinterklaas is a kids holiday, it's all fun and is harmless." I'd be happy to stand by the holiday if there were no Zwarte Piet, but that's blasphemy here. I'm just thankful O's family doesn't do anything for Sinterklaas and I can mostly ignore it.