Engerland Part 1

Its been just over a year since I said a tearful goodbye to my mother and father at Dublin Airport. Its still very fresh in my memory. I had been to London for a three day seminar/interview. The interview consisted of making the hangman game in unix and convincing the sales team you had some social skills. I was given two days to do it and I was really struggling. Near the end one of the first day, one of the other hopefuls gave me some of his code and I kicked on from there. I dont know if I had writers block or nerves or what but once I had a few lines down I was flying. Two very late nights writing code into the wee hours followed and I finally finished Wednesday morning at 2am with something which I thought was decent.

I woke up late for my third day on the course. Half the candidates had not even bothered coming in the third day. We were called one by one from the training room to explain our code to some guru who would give Toners a good run for title of King of the Nerds. After he had ripped me apart for a good hour on unix code I was told I had been accepted. I was pretty ecstatic, I rang my mother and told her before I had even left the building. She was really happy for me and then told me she would be sad to see me go. It only really hit me then that I was leaving. I was on a train to Gatwick to fly back to Ireland but in two weeks I was leaving Ireland for the forseeable future.

I left Ireland for several reasons. After living in Spain for 6 months after Uni it was hard to go back to living at home, I wanted my own space. I had been unsuccessful in landing a job I actually wanted in Ireland. At the time I was temping for the government and was giving serious consideration to taking up a full time job in the civil service. (Not to be confused with my work for Dublin Council, where Toners worked me like a slave) In ways the civil service would have suited me perfectly. It was very relaxed and so was I. My boss basically did his own thing and I did mine. I can remember one week when I didnt even reply to an email or open any work related post. I was a bit of a lazy bastard and thought a year or two abroad fending for myself would serve me well. The consultancy I joined also promised to get me good work at a blue chip client. I also quite liked the idea of living in London.