Conclusions

So, finally after 2,5 years of working in Ste-Adèle, I have only 3 days left. My last day of work is December 12th, and on the 22nd I'm flying back to Europe with Gin. It's been an interesting 2,5 years, and completely different from anything I imagined when I took the job. Having just graduated with my masters, my plan was to get away from a stale and academic world for a year and do something completely different, and then return and get serious about finding a job in music. I applied for this job in video game QA without really having much of a clue what it was about, and unexpectedly, I got the job. I didn't have anything else to do at that time and I had never been to Canada, so I took the job. On a three week notice I got rid of my apartment, got all my stuff packed, got a flight ticket and moved across the Atlantic.

It was a quite surreal experience to arrive at the Trudeau airport in Montreal, especially since everything happened so fast. I got the job, and three weeks later I started working on a different continent. I landed around 7 pm and it was way warmer than I had expected. Not really knowing much about Canada, I had pictured it as a place pretty far north where there are lots of maple forests, the climate is similar to Sweden and where everybody says "eh" all the time. A closer look at a map later revealed that Montreal is actually over 1000 km further south than the place where I left from... I was picked up by one of the ladies working in HR at that time and taken to my first Canadian home. (Or rather, my first Quebecois home. I learned rather quickly that many Quebecois don't consider themselves Canadian at all. The French heritage is a rather touchy subject it seems.) The place was a nice-looking house in Prévost, and I was to share it with three Germans. I ended up living there for only 3 weeks, after which I moved into another house in Ste-Adèle, much closer to work.

The work was pretty fun. Not really something I saw myself doing for the rest of my life, but definitely different from what I had been doing before. With 8 hour days and almost a complete lack of responsibility, it was a welcome break from an incessant flow of being up to your ears in things you had to do and things you had to remember. Here I could go to work, do my thing, then go home and forget about everything until the next morning. It was an incredible vacation for my brain. But one can only handle so much non-responsibility before one gets bored. At least I did. There was an opening for becoming a Lead Tester, so I applied and got the job. 8 months later I became a training agent, responsible for training all new linguistic testers. The added responsibilities and heavier workload were a welcome change. It was a highly independent position with many varied tasks, and it allowed me to do things pretty much from the bottom up on my own in many ways, which was quite enjoyable. I've always been more comfortable working on my own than in collaboration with someone. Even in 3rd grade I hated the assignments where we had to write essays together with someone else, sharing the task and the work. I much preferred writing the whole thing by myself, even if it took longer. It's not that I don't like working with people - on the contrary, I like it a lot. But (and this is going to sound really snotty) I found very few people whose work I was happy with. Most of them were unstructured, inefficient and slow. Whenever I had to share a task with someone, I found that the quality of the result would have been much better if I had done it alone. The teachers seemed to agree, as I always had higher grades on the assignments that I wrote alone than on the ones where I collaborated with someone. But I digress.

Working here has taught me many things about myself, about others and about people in general. I've learned that I am often too nice to people, allowing myself to be used or taken advantage of. I've learned that given a task that I enjoy and that I have an interest in, I have no problem working 16 hour days for as long as is needed to get the job done well. The challenge is to find something to do that I have an interest in, as I tend to procrastinate a lot if I don't like what I'm doing or if it doesn't interest me.

I've learned that people are much the same no matter where in the world you are. Europe, North America, Asia... Some people are really nice, some people are not. Some people will care about you and treat you well, while others will be selfish bitches who will do anything to exploit you. Some people take their thing seriously and do it well, while others are only looking for an easy way out. Some people have courage, some don't. It doesn't matter if a person is black, white, red, yellow, green or purple with pink dots. A good person is a good person regardless of color. An asshole is an asshole no matter where he's from. That's just life. The really tricky thing is that the assholes usually don't walk around with a sign that says "I'm an asshole".
Being a good judge of character is way harder than it may seem, and I've learned that I'm nowhere near as good at it as I thought. A person isn't necessarily a nice person just because he acts nice, and even after a year, what do you really know about someone? People who have something to hide are often very good at hiding it.

I think I've gotten back the spark to invest myself in something, to look at a task and really dig into it and get it done. That was largely missing before I came here. Most of the time I just wanted to lie down and hibernate for a couple of months and do nothing at all because I was so overloaded with stuff I had to get done all the time and with people pulling me in a million directions all at once. After having seen how shitty things really can get in a couple of different countries now, I think I have a more optimistic outlook on things. I know I can't change the world very much, so I'm not going to let the world get me down too much when things suck.

I've learned not to jump head first into unknown situations. Informed decisions may be less spontaneous and exciting, but when it comes to bigger decisions the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. The consequences of throwing yourself into something without looking could in a very literal sense kill you. There are plenty of opportunities to be spontaneous and daring with things that don't have as much potential for disaster.