My new office
About a year ago, shortly after I got into the bankruptcy protection and debt restructuring program (known by its initials in Holland as the WSNP) and a new room to live in, I began to see the positive in what had happened with me, my business and Covid. All of it.
I usually sum it up nowadays with the following eight words. Best…Damn…Thing…That…Ever…Happened…To…Me
Often I include a dramatic pause between each word because…well…that’s me. Performing in front of people on bike tours for 25 years does that to a person.
What it really means though, that’s a little tougher to explain, eight words doesn’t cover it all. Not even close.
Part of what it means is the bankruptcy stripped all the shit away. All the useless crap I had accumulated over 20 years was gone. Not just the physical and monetary assets but all the responsibilities that went with it.
All of it got stripped away, leaving only me, my family and friends.
No more worries about running a business, from the monthly tax envelopes to trying to keep a staff of 20 people running smoothly and not killing each other, all gone.
And no more shame about how it had ended.
As my friend Jon (who I’ve known longer than anybody in Amsterdam) put it in the winter of 2020/21. I had been talking about how when we last spoke just before the bankruptcy I wasn’t at my best, how I fell apart
Jon’s response : “Well duh, of course you fell apart”.
Yeah, obviously. I fell apart, but only because I cared. Not about the business so much as for the people who worked with me. It was my responsibility as the boss to look after them by making sure the business stayed running.
I felt I let everyone down.
I didn’t.
I did everything I could.
I would have done more…if……..then I didn’t get the government backed loan from the bank…so that was it.
Summer of 2020 I built myself back up, got a job as a bike mechanic and hunkered down through a Covid lockdown and curfew type of a winter that was Amsterdam in 2020/21.
2021 was up and down Covid wise but I kept it together, fixed my bikes, and had weekends off. It was good.
Then one day my boss stopped by my work station where I had been wrenching away.
Boss : “Why haven’t you applied for the new position we’ve announced is available”?
Me : stunned silence, followed by a ten or so minute conversation at the end of which my boss tells me he’s going to throw my name in the hat.
Okay, that’s nice. The boss wants me to apply for a promotion. A good sign.
I didn’t get that job.
But a month or so later the company announced that they’ve begun an internal hiring / promotion / career path initiative. They want people to feel there are opportunities at Swapfiets to grow with the company.
This is a European wide approach they’re taking, not just Amsterdam. We are told that someone in our city, region, warehouse, office or store will be speaking with everyone over the next few days about long term possibilities with the company.
My meeting begins with the normal opening pleasantries. “Hi, how are you”? “I’m fine” and so on.
Then a sheet of paper is slid across the table to me which I read.
…
What…??
…
Promotion, they want to make me a Master Mechanic.
There’s a lot of people who have been there longer than me, who have more experience repairing bikes. I’ve never repaired an E-bike at this point.
Nevertheless they see something in me and make the offer.
I take it.
Over the next few months, through the end of 2021 and into 2022 my job and responsibilities come into focus.
Train new people, help develop a new training system (onboarding, as we say in corporate speak), be available to assist people around the warehouse, do checks on newly repaired bikes (audits, more corporate speak) and learn how to fix E-bikes. Which I begin with by taking apart a half dozen of them, every nut, bolt, cable and engine.
We hire more mechanics, so much that by the spring of 2021 I don’t have a regular work station anymore. I float around the warehouse and work wherever a space is available.
Then I’m told that they’ll set up a new place for me in the center of the warehouse where I can work from. My own personal laptop is ordered for me and there’s talk of a desk and workbench as well.
In the meantime I cobbled together a few milk crates and some cardboard boxes (very 1980’s university life) as a desk for a laptop I’m borrowing, my tools and coffee cup.
I go to Utrecht at the end of March for a three day convention / meeting of warehouse leads and other mechanics from places such as London, Paris, Milan and so forth.
While there I ran into some of the mechanics from Utrecht who were at the new warehouse in Den Bosch the previous week when we helped out fixing bikes for a school in Senegal.
I believe the corporate word for this is “networking”.
Back in Amsterdam at the beginning of April and one day my desk arrives. Nice one, a stand up model with shelves that’ll hold my laptop and coffee cup nicely.
Couple of days later the workbench arrives, a place for my tools.
This is cool, that the company thinks well enough of me that they’re setting aside space in the warehouse and spending some money to make sure I have the tools necessary to do my job better. They even say I’ll be reimbursed for the hotel I booked in Utecht for the mechanics meeting.
And then…
then…
I work with some very nice people.
Two of them, Jos and Menno, are a couple of logistic operators for the company.
They drive the bikes to and from the warehouse to the stores in Amsterdam, the Haarlem warehouse and other locations around the country.
They found something that got tangled up in a broken bike on the way to Haarlem.
Something they thought I’d like.
So they took twenty minutes to pry it out of the back wheel where it had gotten all tangled up.
And they brought it to me in the warehouse, to my new “office” where they said it would fit perfectly.
It was an American flag.
So…
Like I said at the beginning.
Best…Damn…Thing…That…Ever…Happened…To…Me
