yesterday, i returned home braindead, exhausted and tired from a 3-day logistics career seminar in duisburg i attended together with jan. it was organized by and therefore took place at the locale of the kcl. the whole event was totally for free (including free lunch *lol*) since it was sponsored by the european union and the ihk duisburg. during the first two days, we had workshops with trainers from myLog consult. the workshops were held according to the method of richard nelson bolles, known as the author of the world’s best selling career planning book “what color is your parachute” (or the german version here). normally, you would feel a certain resistance against those ever-returning “chaka” and “wow, i can do it” career-motivation things, but not so with this workshop. remarkably, i was able to really drag value out of it. no value i could share with you here, it’s rather intrinsic, tacit value just for me. sounds stupid, i know. anyways, we were forced to think about ourselves, make notes and go through worksheets to get to know our talents, abilities, personality and ideal-job prerequisites better. now, isn’t that something? the number one reason for job dissatisfaction and frustration is that most people aren’t even aware of the simple fact that they are obviously doing the completely wrong thing! and should i forget everything else from these two days, i will at least try to keep this in mind… at the end of day two, we made a very cool roundtrip in the port of duisburg. what many people don’t know is that duisburg is in fact europe’s biggest inland port. therefore, we really enjoyed this experience on the ‘ms lehnkering’, a former sightseeing ship, now used by the vtg lehnkering to carry nosy students around for free. after two hours of information overkill, we went to the küppersmühle for dinner, which turned out to be another highlight of this seminar. needless to mention how quickly a 3-course buffet shrinks when a herd of starving students is involved. the day ended at 23:30 due to a stupid busdriver. on the last day, we jumped into mr. boss, tied mr. joop, slipped into the lloyd twins and went to see the 18 (!) companies at the fare. to sum it up: the economy is shit, therefore you gotta be top of the pops to get a job. besides that insight, we had nice talks with some of the companies about a thesis, and had our cv checked. all in all, also the last day turned out to be a quite positive experience. probably jan wouldn’t agree so much, for he got slapped in the face twice and i only once, but hey, this was only a first meeting-up with representatives of the industry we might wanna go into. besides, didn’t we learn in statistics that you cannot draw conclusions from a sample that is too small to be considered representative? — gestern bekam ich eine der komischsten emails, die sich je in mein postfach verirrt hatte:

sorry, bitte was geht? was laufen da draußern denn für leute frei rum? -also entweder ist das die abgefahrenste spam-aktion, die ich je erlebt habe, oder aber ich weiß nun endlich, warum wir in deutschland so viele arbeitslose haben: da sitzt diese arme judith k. aus t. nun den ganzen tag vor dem sozialhilfe-gesponsorten telefon und wartet auf den startschuß zum waffelbacken, und zwar nur, weil der umschüler, der beim arbeitsamt eine abm-stelle hat, zu blöd ist, die email-adresse eines arbeitsplatz-schaffers (also eines arbeitgebers im wörtlichen sinne) richtig aufzuschreiben! ist das bitter?