Bizzle’s big adventure

A phlegmatic Bizzle faces the future

So, this feels weird.

A week ago I left the company where I’ve worked for more than 14 years. Tomorrow I start a new job, in a different city, with a very different business.

Lest anyone think, having read this blog and my Twitter feed over the last 18 months, that I’m doing this because I hated my previous job, let me set that record straight.

When I started working for this company, I’d been drifting for more than five years post-university. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a career, or even if I wanted anything that you might call a career in the first place.

My first job there was in a call centre, and I took it because it was there and it was better than bar work. I spent two years phoning customers of a couple of large retailers to ask them to pay their overdue accounts.

And then a job in the legal team was advertised. Until that point I didn’t even know that we had a legal team, but it sounded pretty cool and I had a vague interest in legal aspects of collections work that I thought I might be able to blag into a plausible interest in the law generally.

Bizarrely, it worked. And then they paid for me to do the GDL and the LPC, and then when I was done with all that they set up an in house training contract for me and a colleague, and then (even less plausibly) they asked me to manage the legal team.

All of that I owe to three people, who supported and mentored me and set an example for me to live up to. They each put up with a lot from me over the years, and without them I wouldn’t be what and where I am today.

So this is the place where I learned how to be a lawyer, and how to be a manager, and how not to be a total dickhead. It gave me pretty much everything I have in my career and my life, including my marriage.

And there were some awesome people there over the last decade and more. Awesome people aren’t as blogworthy as irritating sales managers, but they’re the people who made the job great when it was great and tolerable when it wasn’t.

So that’s quite a lot to leave behind. I’m going from a place where I know everything and everyone, to a place where I know nothing and no one.

This is quite scary, but in a good way. There’ll be new people and new work and new things to learn, and in six months I’ll forget that I was ever scared in the first place.

It’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve done for years, and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a big adventure for a little bear.

All of this is by way of saying that this blog is going to become even more occasional than it already is. I’m going to be pretty busy in my new role, and there isn’t going to be any woo there (I hope).

So thank you for reading over the last 18 months, and for all the support and linking and commenting that you’ve given me. I’ll see you around.