As a kid, I wanted to play the violin.

It’s funny how our lives unfold, or respectively, where the road of life takes us. We dreamed of many things when we were kids, and today, although we still dream, life sometimes takes us in a different direction. I wanted many things as a kid, I dreamt of many things. Actually, I still have so many dreams today that I sometimes get lost in them.

As a kid, I wanted to be a businessman.

Through education, through life, as we grow up and get older, we start to understand the realistic possibilities of our existence, what we can or can’t do, what we have talent for and what we don’t. Although, I really think that anyone can be good at anything. I’ve come to bore myself with how many times I’ve repeated that. What matters is effort. What matters is desire. Effort and desire. Perhaps this is too bold and too presumptuous a statement, because anyone can say they want something and are trying hard, but it’s easy and they aren’t getting what they want. I played the guitar for 4 years, a long time ago, while I was still in music school. I didn’t really have the desire to learn or put much effort in it. Today I’d like to know how to play again, but I can’t hit a single chord. I might start to learn it again.

Although I come from a musical family, I hadn’t really developed my own music taste until high school, but I had some musical knowledge that I gained mostly from my parents, listening to their Paul Anka and Platters tapes. That’s how I came to like the 50s and 60s, but that’s beside the point. Up until high school I listened to whatever people around me listened to at the time. This always bugged me. I knew I didn’t really like that music, but I wasn’t sure how to get out of it and venture out to discover my own taste. As my music-related identity formed, I changed as a person, but my ambitions also changed. I already mentioned my boyish dream of being rich, and as a typical juvenile idiot, I figured businessmen always had money. What’s best, that’s even true in most cases.

When I was in high school, the desire for writing appeared.

My interest in music formed my desire to get into my current profession. I call it current, rather than a final profession, hopefully. I have always said, or at least at those times when I seriously pondered my career choice, that I would never do a job that I wasn’t happy with, that wouldn’t fulfill me and that would cause me more stress and pain than pleasure. I know this is a somewhat stereotypical declaration, but we are all aware of modern circumstances in which many people work at jobs they don’t like and not qualified for (which doesn’t matter in the end, as long as they are doing them right) and only stay at those jobs to bring some money home and feed their kids.

Meteorology involves a lot of physics, math and various sciences, things I didn’t find particularly interesting through high school, or at least not interesting enough to want to study them at university, although it remains a profession I admire and respect.

What else did I want to be as a kid?

What happens when you find a job that you like and want to keep, even if only on the side, but conditions at work are so demoralizing and discouraging that they turn your otherwise dream job into a nightmare: you are being exploited, you hate your workplace because it exposes you to mobbing, but you don’t want to leave because –as in my case, you are a student and you have fulfilled one of your ambitions, you are tired of living on an allowance, and somewhere deep inside you still hope with time things will change for the better.

It’s sad to see that the firm you work at has enormous potential, but lacks the management that could develop and use this potential. It’s sad to see the firm slowly fail because one person isn’t qualified for the job they’re doing. It’s sad that this person won’t listen to suggestions from other employees, who might have ideas how to improve things. It’s sad when someone manages to kill your desire to work at a job you otherwise enjoy, a job you know you can do and do well even when your hands are tied by limitations and instructions imposed from above. Expect a more detailed report about this, on the absurdity of the firm I currently work at, one day when I actually get fired or find the arrogance within to quit on my own.

Still, for now, I hope things will get better. I hope.