Life is precious

I had only been in the office for about ten minutes today when our manager asked me and everyone else who was already in to join him in the nearest meeting room. When a member of HR I came in, I remember thinking "wow, this must be important to actually have a member of HR physically present" - what I didn't expect, what none of us expected, was to be told that the head of another department we work with had passed away over the weekend.

He was only 42 years old and perfectly healthy for all anyone knew; his wife just suddenly found him dead in his bed. They have a little daughter as well. It was shocking and upsetting to all of us. The colleague sitting next to me exclaimed "What? We just messaged each other on Friday about how we were going to see each other today!" before bursting into tears.

I didn't know him that well personally, but he'd been in the company for as long as I have, so we'd effectively been working together for almost ten years. He was popular and charismatic, and when I think of him now, I picture him chuckling or at least delivering a quip about something or other.

More than anything though, I can't help but take note of how close he was in age to me and my husband. Finding my spouse dead next to me one morning would be my worst nightmare, and I can hardly even imagine how awful all this must be for his young family. Dying in your sleep is not the worst thing for the person doing the dying, but it still sucks for everyone else. Life is so fragile.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crunch time

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und...
Read more

None of these

Image
I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.
Read more

My first ex-boyfriend

I have this (occasionally) re-occurring dream about my first boyfriend. In it, I go to visit him for some reason (he lives in the Netherlands) and we're really friendly and get along great... as if we'd remained friends over the last twenty years instead of breaking up and never speaking again (which is what actually happened). Sometimes I may even end up getting flirty in this dream and express an interest in getting back together... though around this point a part of my subconscious usually seems to raise the alarm that something isn't quite right with this scenario and throws some kind of curveball into the mix - in the case of last night's dream, this meant me finding out that he's actually married and has a six-month-old baby. The latter was funny to me upon waking up in so far as I could tell exactly what piece of real life news my brain had pulled inspiration from for that one. As far as I can tell from my ex's public Facebook profile, he's not actu...
Read more