Working at a Strange, New Workplace

Four months ago I was laid off along with my entire team. It's never easy being laid off, but when you work in advertising you get accustomed to the knowledge that it's a possibility.

I joined my first agency in a recession, watched it grow, then departed as clients left and employees were shed. A few years later, I watched another agency gradually lay off colleagues and close down as the sole client shifted business elsewhere.

Stints at ad agencies are often short — clients and employees move frequently from agency to agency as budgets rise and fall — so I was happy to stay at my most recent agency for as long as I did. I made the acquaintance of some great people, did some good work, had a few laughs, and learned a few things along the way.

But all things must come to an end – it's the only way other things can begin.

I've started at a new agency, with new people, new clients, and new challenges. This is the first job I've had in almost five years where I didn't relocate to another city to start work. So while the excitement and nervousness is there, its amplitude is turned down from Life-Changing-Big-Step-Culture-Shock to Oh-a-Different-Commute-to-a-New-Office-With-New-People's-Names-to-Remember.

What a lovely, yet strange feeling to not have to turn your life upside down for a new job.

The Ruins of Xanten

Xanten's temple.

To see what remains of the Romans in this corner of Europe, you take a train to Duisberg. There, you change trains and ride northwest, in the direction of the Netherlands.

You leave the Rhineland, and enter the Lower Rhine. As you ride to your destination — that train's last stop — the land flattens out, towns spread out with more cows grazing between them, the houses look more Dutch than German, and there are more signs selling raw herring.

After a nearly two-hour train ride, you're in Xanten, Germany.

The Roman ruins are in a fenced park just outside the small, old town. The fence runs along where the Roman city's walls once stood. There is a glass-and-steel museum, built over the remains of the Roman bathhouse. There's a temple, an amphitheatre, a rebuilt gate.

We arrived on a day when the park's staff had erected dozens of tents to house craftspeople making Roman-style leather and metalwork, carving stone blocks, and braiding hair in the Roman style. Kids were everywhere, trying the activities out.

Kids or not, it's a great afternoon out, especially on a sunny day.

"Are you not entertained?!?"

We've come across Roman ruins in Pecs, Hungary; Sofia, Bulgaria; Istria in Croatia; Trier, Germany; and, yes, Rome.

Considering the amount of ruins that can be visited across Europe, Rome's leftovers can seem as commonplace as McDonald's — for number of locations and their architectural consistency. I've seen two city gates now, a few temples, the colosseum, a few smaller colosseums, ampitheatres, a bathhouse, and various rocks, bricks, stones, column stubs, and ancient foundations.

It's not that I get tired of seeing it in so many places. It's the opposite: I'm in awe that I see them all over the place.

We can all appreciate the Romans' ability to build incredible feats of engineering without modern technology, but their ability to build these feats in so many places, and that so many have survived, is astonishing.

It takes hard work to achieve that kind of ancient standardization.

Much of the stone in Xanten was shipped in from quarries to the south. The town layout was in a grid pattern, with exact 90 degree angles. Xanten's gate was built to similar specifications of the gate in Trier. And it was linked with the rest of the Roman Empire by the roads that led to Rome, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

One of the great things about living in Europe is how close you live to history. Sometimes, you discover a slice of people's lives from a long time ago or bask in the glory of some medieval ruler. In rare cases, you're able to wrap your head around the scope of an ancient empire. 

The museum and the bathhouse exhibit, built to the bathhouse's specifications but with different materials.

Getting German Wrong Until It's Right

Ein bier, bitte!

I started learning German after I found a job in Germany in 2014. It wasn't a serious effort, just a free app, but my intention was to get a head start before I arrived.

After a few days in Germany, I knew an app wasn't going to cut it. My new employers had promised German lessons, so I doubled my efforts on the cheapskate app while I awaited the real thing. By the time my employers said there wouldn't be lessons after all, the app told me I had 26 percent fluency.

Of course, that number was bullshit.

Learning a language is like hiking. You can study maps of the trail, check the elevation, and buy some comfy boots, but you have no idea what you're in for until you start hit the trail. It might be rockier and much steeper than you anticipated, maybe the air is a little thinner up there too. You don't know anything about the trail until you start walking it.

When I started German class, I noticed that despite the hours of tapping and swiping at my app, I couldn't speak the language in a pinch. Slowly, I realized you learn a language by doing it.

The novice German speaker practicing his skills in public encounters two types of Germans. There are the sympathetic Germans who nod encouragingly at your clumsy efforts. And there's those who are annoyed with your crappy German: "You're in Germany! Why can't you speak German yet?"

The first group has some lingual empathy, often from pecking at another language, and understand the notorious difficulties of learning any language, especially German.

Take the pronoun sie. It can mean she, her, it, they, them, or the polite you. I must listen carefully for the conversation's context to understand if a German speaker is talking to my group, addressing me politely, or questioning my manhood.

This would lead you to believe the German language is running low on words, but this is a language whose precision gives you so many lovely words, like Treppenwitz, as in stair joke, that witty comeback you thought of after you've left the room and walked down the stairs.

That precision also gives it those frighteningly long compound nouns, like Rentenversicherungsverlaub, which is a pension insurance thingy I recently picked up from a few different government offices.

The native German speaker, like the native speaker of any language, has been using their language since childhood, so they sometimes take the utter strangeness of their grammar for granted. There are masculine, feminine, and neutral nouns. There are three cases for articles: nominative, accusative, and goddamn dative… oh! and the forgotten fourth, genitive. Which case you use depends on what's happening to the nouns in the sentence.

That means there are seven versions of the (der, die, das, den, dem, der, des) and another six versions of a (ein, eine, einen, einem, einer, eines).

You might be able to study your way into memorizing when to use them but there are exceptions, and the German speaker's language, despite their stereotype as a rule-and-regulation-loving race, is riddled with just as many exceptions as rules. Plus, I haven't even touched the subject of verbs, which is another lengthy blogpost you're apt to skip.

German is difficult. So is English or French. As a Canadian I was taught French for over ten years in elementary and high school. We wrote out verb conjugations and memorized noun genders. I didn't really learn French until I moved to Montreal and took an intensive class, where we had to speak French in class.

As I listened to and spoke French, I developed a sense of what sounds right and wrong, what sounds masculine or feminine. Think of it like tuning an instrument, you never know it's flat until you play it. Then you hear it's off and make adjustments and play it and make more adjustments until it sounds right.

You can study. You can memorize. You won't learn a thing until you find your feet and find your voice, and get out there and keep getting it wrong until you get it right.