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Hi from Zagreb!
I have a feeling we’re not in Dalmatia anymore. Don’t you agree, Toto?
I woke up in the Croatian capital after a long car ride through rain and fog, on the day that my hotel on the Makarska Riviera was scheduled to open. If you’ve followed along, you know I started working in guest relations at this high-potential resort back in February. The first guests are arriving today, so shouldn’t a Guest Experience Manager be there to greet them? Surely I’m at the wrong place at the wrong time?
You’ll notice this newsletter missed your mailbox for two consecutive weeks. A tornado swallowed me, and I disappeared. The turbulence was so hard that even Pipeaway‘s regular birthday article was published just two days ago, on April 13 (the website’s anniversary was on March 28!).
The short answer to this mystery is: I quit my job (yes, the one I was so excited about!). Quitting is always a sad piece of news, but after two and a half months of desperately trying to steer my boat toward success, I had to admit failure.
I hate seeing this like abandoning a sinking ship (not-so-fun fact: the hotel’s opening date coincides with the anniversary of the Titanic‘s disaster). But I wasn’t the only one spotting numerous holes in the vessel’s hull. The captain(s) should have already noticed that the ship was rather unbalanced. Instead, it was steered into the storm.
After my last working day, I walked along the coastline that I had started calling home. An 80-year-old lady was sitting by the sea, her wrinkles soaking in the spring sun. Next to her stood the two millstones, once used for the manual grinding of olives, now just a décor. Her house was a stone olive mill before; today, she only rents rooms to tourists.
We exchanged some small talk, and soon I learned that, three decades ago, this lady worked as Housekeeping Manager at my hotel. One day, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and decided to retire early. As she was telling me her life story, a story that painted the breakdown of everything in the ‘old days’ (from her village to the hotel industry to her own body), she pulled out a cigarette and took a drag.
“I ain’t giving up on these”, she said with the dignity of someone who decides to take the steering wheel of their life in own hands.
The chance encounter on my last day at the job made me think. This lady worked in the old hotel, in a system she described in positive superlatives. And yet, when the cancer showed up as an uninvited guest, someone she definitely didn’t want to rent space to, she decided to retire.
After the initial successful medical treatment, thirty years later, the cancer returned to her home. But the housekeeper is still here, breathing by the shores of the Adriatic Sea, determined to shape her life on her own terms.
Now, if it takes lung cancer to leave a great place to work, what makes us stay at unhealthy jobs that suffocate us?
Human and professional dignities are often undervalued. This lady’s heart spoke to me, in the moment when I needed to hear exactly the words “we need to take care of ourselves first”.
We may wish to believe we’re invincible, but in the end, we are made of the same fragile material. Therefore, quitting is not always just fleeing from somewhere; it is also a flight TO somewhere.
I came to my hotel room/home, and before I started packing, I wrote the article on the 9 lives I led, in this reality in which we are not cats.
I lost my father to cancer, and his words before I left for Asia (“Take care of yourself”) sounded very similar to the advice I got from the retired housekeeper.
We’ll never be able to control all the toxins in this world. But if we speak about the workplace, we should always opt for the healthy one. Hopefully, that much we can control.
Have an over-the-rainbow week,
Ivan Kralj
Pipeaway.com
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