Family Life

Today was my last day at work here in Hungary, a relief and a worry at the same time. It has been a good week, simple, with easy-going people, good weather, good food, plenty of sleep. But I’m keen to go home. Debbie and the boys are sick and really need some support. I’ll breathe easier when I’m home and able to care for them. Thus, I’m relieved to be going home soon.

At the same time, I was worried that I hadn’t been able to cover all the ground I needed in the training program. The staff had been busy in their day-to-day responsibilities and hadn’t set aside the time to concentrate and learn. Several times this week I felt useless, irrelevant, like it was a waste of time coming all this way. This was especially meaningful in light of the health crisis at home. I’ll be well-paid for this trip, so at least it’s a financial success, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to tour Budapest, but I feel badly about my family’s suffering while I’m so far away. I wish I was home.

I shouldn’t have been so concerned about the lack of training opportunities. At about 4pm a machine stopped working, and we spent the next three hours troubleshooting and fixing the problem. Why do these things happen last thing Friday afternoon, just when everybody is getting ready to leave for the weekend? It didn’t worry me too much: I don’t fly out till Sunday morning. But my Hungarian counterpart had planned to drive across the country tonight (a long way–250km) to visit his parents for the weekend. He was the one wailing, Why does this happen to me?

I was actually glad. It was the perfect training opportunity, encapsulating almost all aspects of what I had come to do in a real-life exercise. This is not a drill. The machine was urgently needed in production, and there’s nothing like having the logistics manager breathing down your neck to accelerate the learning process. He won’t be forgetting today’s lesson in a hurry. We successfully fixed the problem, so the day had a happy ending after all. I got back to my hotel just before eight, hungry for dinner and ready to go to bed. My work was done. I was ready to go home.

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