Megane III - review

A year passes since my parents signed over to me their 5-year-old Renault Megane III, after my father had given in to his whim to upgrade to Megane IV (I call it a whim, since if somebody drives less than 10,000 kilometres per year, changing a vehicle after five years is nothing but the whim).

This meant a farewell to Megane II (2003), my first car whose reliability on account of age could have been called into question. I had liked that car and it had met all my needs, but wondering what would pack up next had made no sense.

In terms of interior and its functionalities, I have not noticed much upgrade. The car had nearly everything the trim version old Megane II had, but since Megane III is more like no-frill version, some fancy fittings are missing. I still hanker after hands-free door opening system (you could only approach a car and have the card with you to open and start the vehicle), yet on the other hand air-conditioning is more efficient and audio system has AUX socket.

The upgrade is felt most intensely when it comes to dynamics the 1.4 litre turbocharged engine offers. The engine works like a dream above 2k revolutions per minute which comes in useful when overtaking or changing lanes when traffic moves at higher speed on the adjacent lane.

As with all turbocharged petrol-fuelled engines, fuel efficiency critically hinges upon how your right feet touches the accelerator pedal. If you drive aggressively in town, expect the engine to gobble up nearly 10 litres per 100 kilometres, but if you practice eco-driving like I do, 8 litres in town is utterly achievable. Beyond town, if you drive smoothly, 6 litres is within reach, while on motorways, while sticking to speed limits, the engine might consume around 8 litres per 100 kilometres. I believe these are all modest results though the very from average fuel consumption declared by carmakers.

The two drawbacks I find most irritating are slowly heating up engine and “too short” gears. As for the former, in winter, when the car is parked outside, it might take up to a 10-kilometre drive before the engine reaches its working temperature. As for the latter, though the car has six gears (excluding the rear one), the sixth gear, at which you can comfortably cruise at 70 kmph, is in fact the fifth gear and the car lacks the actual sixth gear for out-of-town and motorway driving (which would reduce appetite for petrol as well).

The car is definitely good for longer runs (I am not in favour of driving short distances and prefer to use public transport around Warsaw) therefore it perfectly serves its purpose in private and business trips around Poland (and beyond). I actually have not driven it that very much, since the car now has around 39,700 kilometres on the clock, while a year ago it had exactly 30,000. Over the past year and less than 10,000 kilometres the only breakdown was an airbag sensor defect, repaired in Renault garage for somewhat less than PLN 400 (but the breakdown hit just before setting off to Berlin in May and I drove over a thousand kilometres unsure whether airbags would go off in case of serious collision).

The car is now over six years old and I plan to keep to going as long as it is economically viable and fear of another breakdown does not begin to cause me discomfort. I do not need to swank about a fancy car, so the vision of being the owner of a car whose market value is equal to my monthly after-tax salary does not scare me. There are several better ways of spending money than replacing a quickly depreciating, yet not worn-out vehicle with another brand-new one.

Sadly, the prospects of getting a company car are negligibly low and though it is not entirely cost-free (the New Factory has recently introduced a reverse mileage allowances for private travels and punishes drivers whose style of driving results in well above-average fuel consumption), being a user of such vehicle is the most convenient and cost-effective option one can imagine.

Half-year into

Just for the record, to save my mindset for posterity and mark exactly six months ago we first kissed.

It has been the first serious (rather than just occasional dating or going out) relationship I have been in since student times (the previous one had been terminated a month before I set up this blog, with little regret, we had just let it go), so over these years spent single I have moved on, grown mature on my own, I am not the same man I was over eight years earlier. I have developed self-limitations, habits and inhibitions which had to be overcome when I had to learn to reckon with a presence of another person in my life.

Looking for a candidate for life companion had not been easy, there had been many failures, rejections, disappointments and flawed decisions along the way. It used to hurt and taught me to keep my distance towards women. For some reason, the fear of rejection vanished into the air when I met my girlfriend.

From the very beginning it was not a bed of roses as it should have been by the books. As for first months, there were too many moments it could fall apart, but it has not. There were so many swings in my approach towards her. At times breaking up was an even more conceivable option than mending this relationship. We have hurt each other several times, but emerged stronger out of each crisis, we have learnt to talk openly to each other, thus we have become true close friends. The relationship is about communicating one’s needs, about reaching compromise. Affections and emotions are crucial, yet insufficient to build something long-term that would withstand ups and downs of daily life and problems.

Having written all of that, I remain uncertain of what the future of this relationship would be. Some say at the age of (nearly) 30 a man should judge after half a year whether a woman he dates has all makings of a good wife. And I do realise I have little time to decide whether to hold on or let go, and for sake of being honest to her and to myself, I will need to do this soon.

Łódź, EC1

Drove to Łódź last Sunday… We felt like going to a planetarium, but the nearby one in Centrum Nauki offered no breath-taking show, hence we had decided to check out the state-of-the-art one opened last year in revitalised building of heat and power plant (hence EC1 name) in central Łódź.

We could have taken the train directly to Łódź Fabryczna station, but given lower cost and faster journey time, the car again had the edge. For no apparent reason, I thought the train covers the distance between Warszawa Centralna and Łódź Fabryczna in one hour and five minutes, but PKP Intercity webpage told me it takes 20 minutes longer, in total as much as door-to-door journey by car, so time which could have been spent getting to the station (in advance) and waiting on the platform was spared. Besides, the price of two return adult tickets was PLN 112, compared to less than PLN 100 spent on petrol (I’ve gotten on drive within speed limits, as playing about with accelerator pedal not only means playing with safety but also increases fuel consumption which hits the wallet painfully).

The A2 motorway between Łódź and Warsaw is more and more congested. Traffic density predicted for 2030 was reached in 2015 and though I have never experience a traffic jam out there (though driving out of Warsaw in the morning I could see snarled-up traffic on Warsaw-bound lanes between Grodzisk Mazowiecki and Konotopa), I am of the opinion three lanes in each direction are a must on this section, just as one more lane in each direction ought to be built on the A2 bypass of Poznań. Some time ago the ministry of infrastructure was considering widening the road, yet I believe this task should be given lower priority than upgrading dangerous national roads to the status of expressway (DK7 from Gdańsk to Kraków being the most glaring example of such trail).

Following the guidelines on EC1’s website, we left the car on Łódź Fabryczna’s giant (nearly 1,000 lots) P&R car park. We could have left it directly in front of the planetarium, since many parking space were free on Sunday.

Now a word on Łódź Fabryczna station, opened in December 2016 along with huge transport hub (changing between trains, tram, city and long-distance buses and car park is possible there). I could not resist the temptation to sightsee the object which had set the taxpayers back 2 billion zlotys and on Sunday seemed well ahead of its times. The station is huge, large spaces are empty, there is no place to eat a lunch (a passenger must make do with a sandwich, cake and coffee, don’t hope to buy a schabowy out there), trade units remain unlet. The impression the station made on me on Sunday could have been misleading, as the place surely does not look that desolated on weekday early morning, when hundreds of Łódź residents (including two of my workmates) set off in their journey to Warsaw to work.

We strolled around the city and the part between Łódź Fabryczna and ul. Piotrkowska has not changed much since my last visit there in 2012. Few new buildings have been put up, the reek of urine and alcohol still lingers. I wonder how many workplaces have been created over that time in Łódź. If Łódź itself does not draw in investors, I doubt its proximity to Warsaw makes the city attractive as a dormitory city of Warsaw. Everyday commuting by car is impracticable due to cost and time wasted in traffic jams. The monthly train ticket costs PLN 400 (which as my workmate says is tax-deductible) which eats up some of your savings made on lower cost of housing and services if you reside in Łódź. Besides, even on the assumption that train ride duration shortens to 65 minutes, you need to add up the time necessary to get to the station (a few minutes before the train departs) and from the station to office or home (my office is under fifteen-minute walk from Warszawa Centralna, luckily). This means your daily commute takes between three and four hours, around two hours a day (ten hours a week, over forty hours a month) more compared to average door-to-door journey time of one and half hour (in both directions) if you live within the boundaries of Warsaw. For me, not an argument to save around PLN 3,000 per square meter of a property if you still plan to work in Warsaw.

Moved the clocks backward last night. I sincere hope this is the last time and in a year Poland stays in daylight saving time for the entire winter. Will not miss the later sunrise, but I am longing for one more hour of sunlight in the afternoon.

On the edge

Can I recall why I have leapt into it? There was a desire, a pure lust, same one which makes men fight, steal or lie. And apart from the desire there was an opportunity. First, since many years, the one I needed to seize, had I not done it, I would not have forgiven myself missing out on it. And finally outcome of a plain calculation tipped the scales in favour of her – had I turned her away, I would have hurt her certainly, had I given it a chance, there would have been just a chance I would hurt her. The chance which is about to materialise…

Why have I been putting in so much work in it? If something has not been right, firstly I have been wondering whether something has not been wrong with me. Over years spent being single I had developed habits which could have made building a relationship difficult. I have realised it and fought it. Besides, I have seen my work on this relationship and on her bearing fruits, it has not been like banging my head against a brick wall. Slowly, we have been moving on, though my hopes at the beginning had been frail…

With hindsight, that has been too much work put in, given we have been past our first half-year period and usually this is when honeymoon is not yet over. Every time I wanted to give up, I kept telling myself breaking up because something went wrong was a sign of cowardice. When something breaks down in a relationship, if people care for each other, they firstly attempt to mend it; when it goes to no avail and they run out of energy, determination and love, break-up comes up in sight.

Too frequently something has been out of right. I am sick and tired of looking for a human being in you, though many times you have proved inside your shell you are a genuinely good human being, only breaking through the shell costs me so much effort. I am sick of searching in you traits I see in almost all other women. I have had enough of seeking the comfort, safety and acceptance, seeking what I should simply feel.

Even when things go wrong, two people have much in common that keeps them together: children, common dwelling, liabilities. In such respect, there is nothing to unwind what could keep us together. We stay together as long as feelings inside us burn. Keeping this going just for the sake of continuity makes little (or just no) sense.

Breaking up is just one of scenarios in this game, if attempts to fix it go in vain. Apart from sadness, loneliness and emptiness, the end might bring relief. Recently, while recalling the last months, I compared the intensity of stress and joy brought out by this relationship and sadly more often it frayed my nerves than lifted my spirits.

Whatever next days or weeks bring, it is still too early to lay down weapons. If too much goes wrong, maybe keeping it going senselessly is a sign of cowardice, rather than having courage to terminate a relationship before it gets too deep?

Promotion

Perhaps the best strikes out of the blue, perhaps.

December 2016

After a few drinks on a Christmas party my boss suggested we needed to have a longer chat. I had awaited this conversation for weeks and had hoped he would appreciate my hard work and signal an imminent promotion and pay rise. Over the next days I kept insisting he did not go back on his promise and so we eventually landed in a conference room. My boss simply wanted to ask me how I felt, overburdened with work. His reason to have a chat with seemed so absurdly silly that I straightforwardly asked about my prospects of promotion. He honestly reassured they were none…

February 2017

Annual appraisal. During an hour-long meeting to talk over my performance over the previous year I learnt whatever I had done superbly, I had just lived up to my superiors’ expectations, but whatever mistake I had made (the more you do, they more likely you are to make an error, statistically) I had been destined to be rebuked over. Then I took out a sheet of internal memo on promotion criteria to prove I had met all requirements set out in the document. My boss rebuffed this, claiming those guidelines were just a bare minimum and meeting all targets did not automatically qualify me for a position upgrade, but was just a condition precedent to it. At the end I was told the reason why I could not be promoted was that I displayed “emotional immaturity”. I immediately demanded examples of behaviours proving my lack of maturity. Needless to say the assertion of my emotional immaturity had no backing. That appraisal was held on Friday. The weekend thereafter in a spurt of anger I sent out CVs to competitors of the New Factory.

March 2017

I attended two interviews with other financial institutions. Even if in terms of competencies I was eligible, with hindsight I found out my pay rise expectations had priced me out of any considerations. In terms of salary growth, banking sector bucks the trends visible on the labour market. Had I even gotten a higher position, I would have had to accept a similar or lower base salary, not to mention I would have given up on a generous bonus.

April 2017

Found a job opening for a senior position in a similar area at the New Factory. I knocked on some doors to senior managers’ offices and shed some tears over my hapless situation. They were meant to play the cards right.

May 2017

I attended a serious of informal meetings with my would-be superiors (would-be boss and his boss) and once they decided they would take me on, I officially applied for the position. For the sake of transparency, a full-blown recruitment procedure needed to be run before they would select me.

July 2017

Meeting with candidates for my position dragged on for weeks and eventually nobody, including me, was offered that position just because the vacancy was either cancelled or put on hold. My hopes were dashed, actually I was not officially turned away. In the HR system my application was not even rejected, I only received a message the process had been completed. Actually since in the meantime my priorities had changed, the loss was not that painful.

September 2017

Shortly before my holidays gossips about substantial reshuffles in the organisational structure were put about. With little hopes to win, I began to wonder how to take advantage of the changes.

11 October 2017

My would-be boss dropped me an e-mail with an urgent request to meet up and asked whether I was interested in that job any longer. I came over, showed some reserved interest and declared I would need to think it over seriously, especially since some time had passed.

12 October 2017

I met a boss of my would-be boss to haggle over my base salary. The basic they offered was some 15% higher than my current one, yet I feared with much lower bonus multiplier, my all-in after-tax remuneration would go down by some 10% – quite astonishing side effect of a promotion, though you must remember bonus multipliers may change any time and the only bonuses you could be certain of are those ones already transferred into your bank account.

13 October 2017

Pay bargaining turned out to be successful. I got more that they wanted to offer me two days earlier, yet still less than what I held out for while applying. I accepted the base salary, bearing in mind how much some of my ex-workmates who had changed jobs recently earn. We nailed down the deal, yet before I sign the annex to my job contract, my promotion and pay rise remain in the realm of gentlemen’s agreements and the New Factory still stands a chance to double-cross me (it can boast of track record of mistreating its employees).

The unexpected goings-on from recent days prove one timeless regularity – the less you care, the better things shape up. Same happened to me a few months ago when after several spectacular mistakes in the love life, I decided to give up on looking for girlfriend. Less than a month later I dated somebody and future still looks bright.

Swimming with the sharks – book review

Not a secret I am fond of all books and films which lay bare pathologies of murky financial sector. Several such works have sprung up in the wake of 2008 financial meltdown and they have turned out in different genres: from nearing conspiracy theories, through more substantive, critical, though at times quirky analyses, to narratives that have gone to silver screen and whose plot have been approachable to nearly everyone.

Swimming with the sharks by Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch journalist, is a compilation of interviews with the insiders from the City, who, provided their anonymity was protected, decided to let in on some of the secrets of how the top of the world works. All interlocutors who have contributed to the book have broken the code of silence, the unwritten rule that outsiders should be deprived of insight into the spoilt financial sector. Those who deliberately break the code of silence take the decision to burn their boats (just like the Cityboy did) or go the extra mile to make sure nobody can trace their confessions back to them.

Predictably, though financial sector in Poland generally does not resemble the City (especially in terms of payrolls) many semblances can be discerned and I most focused on them while reading the book.

Front Office (bankers who deal with clients directly, solicit and foster relationships) are worshipped everywhere. No matter if it is Warsaw or London, sales guys who bring bank the bacon are the upper class in the hierarchy. This manifests itself not only in higher salaries and perquisites, but also in informal pecking order. FO look down on Middle Office, while the latter often feel underappreciated, shrugged off, less important despite their undeniable contribution to well-being of an organisation.

Polish banks have accurately copied the way laid-off staff are handled from their HQs. Waves of redundancies became the order of the day after the 2008 crash when violent cost-cutting had to be pursued to shield profits, in the absence of adequate revenues. I once described how it looked in Poland and the practices in principle do not differ with how sharks are given the sack.

While going through the book, I naturally sought the answer to the ever-nagging question, whether the system or the people were to blame for all malpractices that had sent the global economy on the verge of collapse. The interviews prove most workers (who had agreed to be interviewed) were genuinely righteous people, with moral spine, abiding by ethical principles in their own job, yet they were cogs in the immoral machines, trying to hold back from wrongdoing while doing their bit.

Interviewees, decent or indecent, in unison blamed the whole chain of institutions for all evil financial sector has done to ordinary people. No one, including politicians, regulators, shareholders, employees and clients (people living beyond their means), in their opinion could feel innocent. Yet the most destructive part of the system were built-in incentives and disincentives (they even came up with lack of fear not greed as one of major causes of financial crisis, yet the book was released in 2011, while I published my concept in early 2010). It paid off to chase profits in short-term while calling for long-term sustainability was inconvenient to everyone in good times. The foregone conclusion, which I have reached on PES several years ago, is that the financial system is still wicked and no major reforms have been done to preclude the reprisal of financial tornado from 2008.

I have found quite interesting the passage on passionate bankers whose relish on their jobs, working late hours, travel to distant parts of world, celebrate closing jumbo deals; zealots who toil away not just for seven-digit yearly compensations but who draw genuine satisfaction from what they do. The only question is, whether such time-consuming profession (working until midnight during working week, spending weekends in the office, being on every beck and call of your boss) can be combined with happy personal life and for how long one can withstand it. This is a part of general question about priorities in life, not confining just to popular work-life balance.