Archive for February, 2009

2009-2-21, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

My shoes have been untied for four weeks. I’ve broken glasses, dropped food, and spilled many beverages. This one-handed life is a constant struggle against a world that you never realized was so dominated by things with the size, shape, and mechanics of two-handed use.

I beg you, please, do not use the term “single-handedly” without proper respect for how tricky single-handedness really is. Next time you cut bread, peel an orange, open a twist-top bottle, button your jeans, or zip up your jacket, have a go with just one hand. If you give up quickly, consider this: suddenly finding yourself needing to relearn simple tasks is more than anything an exercise in judging your own limitations. Should you not have wimped out and kept trying? Or is doing something one-handed when you don’t need to a ridiculous waste of your time that you shouldn’t have bothered trying anyway?

My natural response to a challenge is to try stubbornly until I succeed or until I become absolutely convinced I can’t do it. This is often good; by now I can single-handedly button things, zip things, eat and drink things, and open, close, and pack things without much thought because I took the time to make myself learn – even when help was offered. But then there were all those times that I struggled with something obscenely long until some nearby person got tired of watching me, and did it for me in about 20 seconds. The skill I’ve needed most to learn has been asking for help, and I’m still somewhat lacking in that regard. This can have disastrous consequences, too. Like the time I tried to open a yogurt drink at the train station in Paris with my teeth, resulting in yogurt all over my bag, jacket, and pants, not to mention the table and the ground, leading me to get yelled at by a waitress and causing me to miss my train to London by less than a minute. (But don’t let me talk it up too much – they got me on an express train 15 minutes later and I arrived at about the same time anyway.)

Assuming my lame stumbling around Europe hasn’t kept the bone from healing too much, I should be out of this sling in about two weeks. In the meantime, I’ve pretty well adapted. I can even just about touch type one-handed now, and on an AZERTY keyboard, no less! Most importantly, I’ve come to almost enjoy the confused looks of people trying to figure out whether I’m a guy with his arm in a sling under his shirt or an amputee with a big, funny-shaped belly, while they all the while pretend not to stare.

Incidentally, I’m in Dublin for the night because I found a cheap flight on Aer Lingus to SFO, but it had a terrible overnight layover. Then I found an even cheaper first leg from Amsterdam to Dublin, and the difference more than covered the price of a hostel bed and an evening bemoaning my woes over pints of Guinness. Which, by the way, really is as better here as they say it is.

Taken this very evening in Dublin

2009-2-13, Heathrow International Airport, United Kingdom

The titanium rods in my arm don’t beep. So far, anyway, I’m two for two metal detector un-detected.

What if I pulled them out mid-flight, sharpened them in the lavatory, and then committed unspeakable acts of terror? This is very troubling. A one armed man – as I at a glance am sure to seem – is surely a prime bandit possibility. And I snuck through with 8 inch titanium potential weapons hidden fiendishly inside my bone!

And I have plenty of reason to lose control of myself, the way the year of 2009 has started for me. Not only am I broken and impoverished by my own recklessness, but I have now also lost my job before I even started it, a victim of the recklessness of nations. The Netherlands immigration agency has decided that the position in question is neither critical enough for the operation of the organization, nor specialized enough to warrant the hiring of a foreigner. They further claimed that the Max Planck Institute did not try hard enough to find a European for the job.

The institute has assured me that this has never once happened before, and that this month they’ve now had two work permit applications rejected. There are a great number of reasons why this is absurd. First off, I am quite sure that the Max Planck Institute tried very hard to find a European for the job. It was very much in their interest to avoid the delays of hiring me, even with confidence the the application would have been approved. Moreover, the reason the process took longer than my would-have-been boss thought, was that there was an extra pre-stage to submitting the application during which the job offer must be posted through an independent, government-approved job agency for five weeks. If no qualified European candidates apply, only then will the government process the application, giving their answer 6-8 weeks later.

Secondly, the requirements of the job are clearly specialized: they wanted someone with advanced computer skills, a strong background and interest in linguistics, teaching skills, and excellent English. Also, a willingness to relocate to a little Dutch city on the German border and not get paid a particularly huge amount of money. There must be few Europeans fitting this description, sure, but there really is only a certain amount of time that is reasonable to expect they be found.

As a kind of Dutch national protectionism the decision particularly does not make sense. The longer I’m not doing this job, the longer they keep looking for someone else to do it, the longer German money is not going into the Dutch economy and not contributing to Dutch income taxes. The most plausible theory I’ve heard is that this is the product of a European Union numbers game; after the financial crisis the national governments are getting demands to show they are being much stricter in applying protectionist EU labor laws. Regardless of how other countries follow these demands, the Dutch government is ever-keen to be a heroic EU team-player. And now I’m a statistic.

I’m flying home, after a night in Dublin, next Friday. In the meantime I’ll be in the Netherlands collecting my various belongings and eliciting pity from everyone I meet.