Thomas Trip Report - Part Two - Still in MoBay - but not for long
It was funny how things worked out, Thomas thought – funny in the odd sense.
Eighteen months earlier, he was fat, dumb, and happy working as an air traffic control supervisor at the Vancouver Area Control Center. Over the years he’d earned a reputation as a solid controller. He was well-respected among his peers.
The job was great. He’d ride his bike to work, sign in, sit down at a radar display, plug his headset into the console and start moving airplanes. As a supervisor he’d also do a little paperwork and maybe go to a meeting once in a while. After his shift he’d bike home. Five minutes into the ride, the air traffic control business was the furthest thing from his mind. His job never came home with him; he left it on the road. Best of all, he was well paid – very well paid.
His home life was great too. He truly believed that he’d met his soul-mate when he met Eugenia.
Thomas was an avid mountain biker. He owned a condo in Whistler. Every summer he would spend a week there riding the cross country trails in the valley and another week ripping the lift-serviced runs on the mountain. One afternoon he was making his way up the slopes to get in the last run of the day. He’d taken the Fitzs chair to the halfway point and was in the queue for the Garbonzo lift which would take him the rest of the way to the top. He was solo, and as he got on the chair he was paired with another solo. It was Eugenia. They hit it off right from the get-go. They rode down the mountain together, taking ‘Freight Train’ and ‘No Joke’ then threading the lower trails. It was all Thomas could do to keep up with Eugenia – she shredded the trails and literally left him eating her dust. By the time she hit the GLC drop at the bottom of the hill he was trailing her by a good twenty yards.
They racked their bikes in front of the Longhorn Saloon and sat on the patio where, in the interest of rehydration, they downed a pitcher of the local Weissbier brew. Thomas invited Eugenia to his condo for dinner. She accepted. To replenish the carbs that they’d burned on the trails (and to fuel the effort that they were about to expend in the bedroom) Thomas prepared his special dish of fettuccine carbonara, adding extra cream and butter to the recipe.
After dinner he opened a bottle of Bin 707 Cab. Eugenia spent the night. Two months later they were living together in Vancouver.
Eugenia was tall and slender. She wore her blonde hair cropped and spiked. At the age of thirty she was five years Thomas’s junior. She worked as a freelance professional photographer. Her mountain biking shots, she called them ‘nuggets’, blew Thomas away. Eugenia’s parents had immigrated to Canada from Russian when she was four years old. She spoke with a slight accent. When she wanted something from Thomas she would cuddle with him and lay the accent on a little thicker – invariably this would get her anything she desired.
All things considered, life couldn’t have been any better for Thomas. He had a job that he loved, and he had Eugenia – the love of his life. Perfect.
But after ten years of controlling airplanes Thomas had begun to yearn for a change. While he was clicking through the Company’s intranet one afternoon he noticed that a middle-management position at the Head Office in Ottawa had been posted. On a whim, not really thinking it all the way through, he’d fired in his application. Two weeks later he was called into the Shift Manger’s office. His application had been accepted, and he was going to Ottawa.
But there was a problem; he’d neglected to inform Eugenia that he’d even applied for the job in the first place. She was, to put it mildly, shocked when he broke the news. It took a while, but she eventually warmed to the idea of leaving her family, and her beloved Vancouver, to follow Thomas to Ottawa. He offered her an engagement ring and, to his great relief, she’d accepted it.
So, Thomas and Eugenia packed up their things and moved east to Ottawa. Thomas left his operational position in Vancouver filled with high expectations. He truly believed that he could make a difference working as a manager at the Head Office.
His hopes were soon dashed on the rocky shores of corporate priorities and office politics. When he’d taken the job he hadn’t realized that what he’d actually signed up for was indentured slavery. His work week jumped from an enviable thirty-seven and a half hours to a gruelling sixty. His leisure time evaporated like the morning mists lifting from one of his favourite biking trails. His mountain bike languished on its rack in the garage; its tires went soft and cracked. Metaphorically speaking, the same thing was happening to Thomas.
He soon learned that his years of operational experience meant nothing in the boardroom. When he expressed his often unasked-for opinions, they would be greeted by silence and blank stares. The Company had its objectives and there were schedules to meet. Nothing else mattered. Thomas had become an odd-job lackey on a short leash, and that leash was his company-provided Blackberry.
To make a not-so-long story even shorter, there was a change in the VP of his division. Unfortunately for Thomas, years past, he’d crossed paths with the VP on union business and since that incident the two had developed a long-standing and intense dislike for one another. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Thomas was the subject of a division-wide email informing all and sundry that he’d decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities.
