An Open Letter To My Former Workplace

By now you will probably know that I've taken a job elsewhere and will soon be moving to Dubai for it.

I sat chatting late one night with my bff Najwah about our former company (Amazon) that we both worked at for about a year, and we both had the same feeling towards it:

Working there was the hardest, best year of our lives.

When Najwah and I started there, we both came into the place thinking we were only going to work there for about 4 months to make some quick cash.
It was going to be for the seasonal period where Amazon hires extra customer service agents to help carry the load of the Dec-Jan peak.
Najwah and I didn't know each other at the time. I myself knew only one other person there, and trust me because of work schedules, running into her wasn't easy.
Even though we came into briefings for working there at different times, by some wonderful twist of fate, Najwah and I ended up signing our contracts on the same day, and ever since that day we had been in the same "groups" and work teams at Amazon almost until the end.
Looking at us on that first day, I don't think anyone would have predicted how close we would grow to become.
But God had a plan and made sure that we would be with each other for those 4 months at least.
We had our training together.
We both were placed in the same phone team together.
We both then had our chat training together, and eventually we both became chat agents at the same time.

Initially, Najwah thought I was snobby; I thought she was weird.
If you ask her she'll tell you that she thought I was quiet but interesting, and that (apparently) I had an accent. (I do not have an accent).
I've asked her once about this and she's told me that she knew there was a personality to me that I wasn't showing, and she liked that.
I on the other hand quickly grew to love her because of how un-filtered she is.
Anything she thinks, she will say. And to me, finding someone who genuinely speaks their mind is refreshing, and I absolutely love that about her.
A memory I will never forget is Najwah swearing at our new supervisor the very first time she was introduced to him because he called her 'Najwah Petersen'.
She hates that.
She immediately felt guilty afterwards and apologized for it, but the fact that she had the balls to say that to him in the first place is what I admire about her.
For the time we were at Amazon during this "temporary" phase, Naj and I had one goal, and that was to become a permanent employee.
Working at Amazon has a lot of benefits.
Secure job.
Good pay.
Opportunity for growth.
We had no idea where our lives were going to take us and had no plan, so all we knew was that was our goal, and we both needed to achieve it.
For those few months we kept our heads down and worked damn hard to make sure we reached that goal, which we eventually did.

Anyone who works between the hours of 7pm-7am can tell you that it is not an easy lifestyle to live.
Say goodbye to your friends because, honey, you'll be working; and that includes public holidays.
There were times where we were required to work overtime amounting to at least 50 hours a week, which although I wasn't a fan of, I could manage. Bringing in the new year at work was probably the most bitter pill for me to swallow.
Because you're forced to sleep in the daytime, you lose all contact with your social life.
Anyone outside of our little world couldn't truly understand what it's like to have to tell people you can't go out on a Sunday afternoon because you'll be asleep due to the fact that you need to keep your sleeping pattern.
Getting people to be quiet in the house during the daytime is a damn mission.
You start to genuinely become a different person, snapping at people for waking you up; getting upset over small little things because you're so stressed out of your mind that even someone just smiling at you could annoy you.
"Night owl" becomes an entirely new concept to you, and because of the nature of your job as a chat agent, you couldn't just sit still when you weren't at work. You always had to be multitasking, so much so to the point where you can't watch TV without doing something else at the same time.
Combine that with working in a position where all you do for hours on end is listen to people complain, and where you're driven to compete for excellent statistics, it's enough to make you sometimes feel like you're going to go crazy.

Because nobody outside of your work can understand what you're going through, you begin to rely on your teammates for so much more than even you realize.
Due to Amazon's security policies, you have to shut out the rest of the world, so you spend hours on end isolated with just your colleagues.
You're constantly asking their help on a situation, and making lunch-run requests at 11pm at night.
Through the good and the bad times, those people are right there in the trenches with you.
They know what it's like to have to force yourself into caring about the most trivial of problems for the sake of the job.
Those people become your family.
Now that both Naj and I are no longer working there, we can see that with so much more clarity.
I can say with ease that everyone there helped me in one way or another, because they did.
Thanks to Amazon, there are now some people that I can truly consider life-long friends.

I've met some of the most interesting personalities there (looking at you, Sasman), and I've learned what it takes to be a good leader (thanks, Titus).
I've learned to not judge a book by its cover; and that people you previously would not have paid attention to can surprise you.
I've learned that the world is not as black and white as I once thought (names shall not be mentioned but you know who you are :)).

As I've now closed that chapter of my life and am looking towards to the new one, I can't help but reflect back on my time there and smile.
I know that working there has taught me so much, not just about people, but also about what it really takes to run a good business; how to be successful in general; and most importantly how to work hard and take charge of a situation.
Working there has taught me about life and how the world works.
As someone who was pretty much straight out of university, I had dabbled in working for other companies, but never learned nearly as much as I did from my time at Amazon.
I believe that working there in one year has taught me so much more than I would have learned at any other company, and that I know would have taken years to get to learn if anything.
These are life lessons I know I will carry with me for the rest of my life, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
Working there was hard, it was sometimes painful, but I would never change that experience for anything, and I would highly recommend working there to anyone.

My friends, I will miss you more than you know.
I will miss our daily banter and making fun of the stupidity we had to deal with.
I will miss your stories of crazy weekend antics at some party.
I will miss our competitiveness over trying to be better than each other and almost always kicking the other teams asses.
I will definitely miss the free food and incredible parties that Amazon throws.
Amazon knows how to treat their customers, both external and internal, and I'll always carry the value of that with me no matter where I go.

I wish you all the best of success, and I know we'll keep in touch.
I can't wait to see who we all are 20 years from now :)

I thank you.
I love you.
I'll miss you.

Rasheeda xx

Do You Want To Exist In Your Life?

Recently I was watching The Real Housewives of Orange County (I'm a sucker for reality TV and the RH series is my crack), and the topic of happiness resonated with me, enough to inspire writing this post.

One of the ladies was having trouble with her marriage in that she and her husband had reached a place in their life where they had everything they could possibly "need", but they were unhappy.
A big house, a boat, expensive clothing, trips around the world; they have all of this, and yet they aren't happy.

Why is that?
Isn't society teaching us that these are the key ingredients to the happily-ever-after formula?
Isn't it practically written somewhere that if you follow a specific, responsible path, it will lead to having money, a family, status, and that you will be happy?
Isn't that why parents push their kids to do well in school so that they can get into a university to be backed up by a piece of paper that will eventually allow them to sustain such a life, thus resulting in the "key" to happiness?

I can say that I've been to university.
I have a degree. As a matter of fact I have two.
I worked at a job that paid well, a job that had all the benefits needed in order to be "secure" in life.
At the risk of sounding cocky, yes I was very good at my job and I could with time grow into a higher-ranking position at the company. Just before I left I was offered a higher position with better pay.
So why did I leave?

From a young age I've always realized that nothing can make you happy but you.
Money doesn't buy you happiness. Money buys you things.
How you utilize these things in your life is what makes you happy.

We create our own happiness.
As Oprah-ish at it sounds, what we want from life is what we put out there.

If you eat an entire chocolate cake by yourself, there are two ways you can feel after you eat it.
You can either choose to think:
"Man, that was a damn good cake. I'm so going to get fat from it, but I'll try and work it off. Or maybe I won't, I don't really care. All I know is, I enjoyed that cake".
Or you can think:
"Wow, that cake was good. Crap. Now I'm going to get fat from it. Damn it, I have to go to the gym. What if I don't go to they gym? What if I can't work off that cake? Oh no, I really AM going to get fat from it. WHY did I eat that cake?? All of this could have been avoided if I had just not eaten the cake!"

The money bought you the cake; either way you look at it, the cake is destined to have the same effect on your body. You can go to they gym or you can not go to the gym, it doesn't matter.
Your attitude towards the cake after you have eaten it is what determines your happiness, because life is what you make of it.
The chocolate cake will always be there, whether you take it or not.
The question is do you try to take it, and once you have had it, what is your reaction to it?

Whenever I look at my family or my friends going about their lives, trying to work towards that certain "happiness goal", I can't help but think that our life paths could not be more different.
That's not to say that I don't want the same outcome as they do, because I do.
Eventually I would like to settle down and get married and have kids and lead a simple life.
But for now, I want to stir things up a bit.

I want to scare myself.
I want to challenge myself.
I want to do things no one expects me to do.

Why? Because, where is the fun in life if you're just going to do what everyone else does?
If at the end of our lives we all look back and say we've followed the same path, what interesting stories will we have to talk about?

I love my friends and family. We all have our roles to play in life, and I am sincerely happy and love that they have found and are walking the paths they have chosen in their lives.
I just think it's not for me.
I'm too much of a wild soul, a nomad by nature, to be settling this early in my life.

All my life I have always said that no matter what career path I choose, all I want to do is travel.
I've been fortunate enough to say that I love travelling.
Through travelling I have been exposed to so much more wealth and knowledge than money can ever buy me.
There is no greater teacher than mankind itself.
The world is our textbook and life is our degree.

I wanted to travel, but in order to do so, I needed money. I was always searching for ways that would combine the two, without even realizing that there was one clear option staring me in the face.
So, for those of you that have asked, this is the reason as to why I chose to pursue a career as a flight attendant. At least for the next few years, until another crazy idea takes hold of me.

Yes I'll be moving thousands of miles away to another country.
Yes I'll be saying goodbye to everyone and everything in my life that I love.
Yes, I'll be removed from my comfort zone.

But that is exactly what I want.

I want to be in an environment where I don't already know where the nearest place to go buy airtime is.
I want to be completely anonymous in a city; I want the city to swallow me up and allow me to disappear into it.
Let's face it, everyone knows everyone in Cape Town, and everyone has an opinion on everyone.

As much as I adore Cape Town, I've grown tired of it and the same repeated drama and stories in it.
I need a change of scenery.
I need to try new types of food.
I need new faces.
I need new people and the new stories that come with them.
I need new adventures.

People ask me: "Aren't you scared?" To be honest, no not really.
What would I be scared of?
I'm not moving to the middle of the jungle where there is no hospital or cell phone reception nearby.
Dubai has doctors and internet, you know.
If I need to speak to my family or friends, that's why I have Skype / Facebook / Twitter/ Whatsapp / Instagram / BBM/ Emails.
There are so many ways to be connected with people, and with modern medicine there really isn't anything to be afraid of.

Then I get the question: "Aren't you going to miss everyone?"
Of course I will.
But doesn't absence make the heart grow fonder?
I think being away from someone allows you to appreciate them that much more.
Too much of something is overkill, and soon you can't help but grow tired of it.

I don't even look at this as a challenge, because it isn't one.
I'm not really a fan of using the word "challenge" outside of the context of a sporting environment.
Things can be 'challenging' without actually being a 'challenge' per se.
A challenge is the breeding ground for competition, and this is life we're talking about.
You cannot 'win' at life because no matter what we do, at the end of it all we all have the same fate.

As with almost all things in life, I look at this as an experience.
Whether any experience is good or bad, I will learn from it.
I've always lived by the notion that one should not focus on what was the best or worst part about an experience, but rather focus on what it is that you learned from it.
That way you gain knowledge from it, and through knowledge is how we grow as people.

I know that for some reason people are afraid of dying.
Personally, I'm not afraid of death. I have no fear of dying whatsoever. Why would I fear death?
After you're dead, you're literally just dead. What's so scary about that?
No, I'm not afraid of death.
But I am terrified of not living.
I try not to think too much about the good or bad outcomes of a choice or path in life, but rather try and think of how I will feel if I don't go for it in the first place.
For example, in the past when an international act would come to Cape Town to perform and the concert tickets were pricey, I would always ask myself is not going worth more than losing a few hundreds?
Would I regret not having the memory of that night more than I would regret spending the cash?
That's pretty much the reason why I have been to every concert that I have been to.
That's the sort of "happiness" formula that I apply to my life.
I don't want to have life FOMO.

So to you I pose the question, do you want to exist in your life?
Or do you want to go out there and actually LIVE?

Whether it be with regards to this new chapter in my life, or anything else that comes up in the future, I personally feel that it's not about the end goal or the journey even.
For me, it's about looking back and thinking that no matter what, I can say that I did it.

And isn't that really the whole point of life?
:)