Undercarriage wash

Despite formally not being a car-owner since May 2025, I look after the Octavia (in papers a company car, under a subsidized scheme, due to be purchased well below its market value in March 2027) as it was mine. It had the oil changed after first 1,683 kilometres, then after 1 year with 11,201 kilometres on the clock and then had a full service after nearly 2 years and 18,502 kilometres. It was supposed to be a family car, yet life has verified my plans, but a sizeable estate car has proven useful in Szlachetna Paczka, facilitating moving (friends relocating from one flat to another) and surprisingly frequently it carries 4 persons on board.

The lesson learnt when selling the Megane after 14 years is that no matter how perfect the car might be in terms of mechanics, its softest spot is the undercarriage, not seen every day, not making itself felt until something cracks up, eaten up slowly by rust. Some time ago I read statistics a typical Polish car whose last road is to a scrapyard, ends it useful life due to damage done by rust so such extent that a vehicle is no longer roadworthy and does not pass the MOT. Factory protection of bodywork is decent, but when it comes to the "invisible" chassis, this is where savings in designing cars not built to last are made. Polish road clearance winter practices only speed up the pace in which rust wreaks havoc to cars' undersides. Amounts of salt poured on roads do not correspond with depth of snow cover on roads. As a driver I would prefer to see the snow mechanically removed, as it is done in northern Scandinavia and use of salt to be constrained to ice or freezing rain which are a factual threat to traffic participants.

To make a vehicle long-lasting, a separate anti-corrosion layer ought to be put on its undercarriage soon after driving out of a showroom gate. As this costs some money, Octavia, formally not mine, has not had it done, but as I have found out, after 3 years first spots of rust might still be cracked down on and the protective cover still can be applied (albeit the operation will be more expensive).

By the time it happens, but afterwards too, an undercarriage wash after winter is a fix. To do it properly, a vehicle needs to be lifted on a car jack and washed with dedicated chemicals and then flushed. I found only one car wash in Warsaw which does it well, but comparing how dirty the undercarriage was ahead of the wash and how clean it was after, I do not regret any of one hundred seventy nine zlotys spent on it (and some twenty zlotys forked out for petrol to the other end of Warsaw and back).

I hope those treatments will help Octavia be a durable car to keep me company for some two decades. I realise driving will get more expensive with petrol prices going inevitably up, but on the other hand, I drive it sparingly and the car is amazingly frugal beyond town. For the record, between my last long-distance journeys, i.e. from 4 March to 19 April I drove merely 337 kilometres. On 21 April on its way back from a workshops somewhere in Dolny Śląsk, the odometer hit 20,000 kilometres. Fuel consumption with 4 persons (3 passengers and me) on board and their luggage with 120 km/h on tempomat: 5.8 litres per 100 kilometres. No SUV nor a crossover, by dint if their weight and dimension, could boast of such low appetite for petrol on a motorway!

A manager's stool - four months on

Given four months have elapsed since I took up a new professional role. I’m seeing the back of the shake-off period, yet I am still far from being a seasoned leader.

The experience from Szlachetna Paczka, which according to my predecessor on the area leader stool, should have been a dry run ahead of taking charge of a team in a corporate world, has indeed paid off.

I started my stint with a series of sign-up interviews with members of my team. They were meant to mostly break the ice and apparently they have done that job, but those one-over-one talks were mostly to get to know each other's expectations, working style and concerns.

Being knowledgeable in one's area of expertise definitely helps, but is way too little to get ahead as a manager. Leadership involves making use of soft skills. If people ask me how to describe the nature of the recent transition, I reply my role is about solving conflicts, managing emotions and reaching rotten compromises. My self-insight also reveals my paternal instinct is laid on my team.

The most frustrating aspect on the new role are meetings, or rather their number and senselessness of many of them. Their multitude is an aftermath of remote work in covid times when attending a videoconference was a proof of being busy at work. I aim to skip as many calls as possible (getting away with it so far), aiming to keep those I partake in short and finished with conclusions or homework. I frequently do catch up with simpler tasks in the background, but all in all multitasking, critical not to fall behind really badly, is debilitating.

With respect to decisiveness, I have had no inhibitions rising up to this. Mostly likely because I have long been fed up with senior managers getting paid for decision-making and shunning such responsibility.

Since the beginning of the year I have constantly been overloaded with excessive duties, regularly short of time, learning to live with overdue stuff despite working overtime and not getting extra paid for that (the Polish labour code does not envisage overtime pay for managers).

A bright glimmer of hope is that soon 3 out of my 8 corpo-children will be taken away from me (a new manager hired this month). Sadly, people around her (including me) are short of time to onboard her, which is an absurdity since she can't take over some of our work because of our ineptitude.

All in all, life has become more stressful and fatigue-abundant. Over weekends I keep away from work and my mind is free of work-related thoughts, but even despite that it takes me much longer to regenerate. Long-term weariness is also a side effect of not taking longer holidays since June 2025, a shortage of days off I might catch up with no earlier than in late May.

Trump's sanity?

I recent days it's not just US president's sanity being called into question, it's his insanity looming unquestionable.

Early this year he pulled off a 3-day operation of hunting down Venezuela's dictator and overthrowing his regime (all in the name of seizing the local oil deposits, not to spread democracy).

The war in Iran, sparked at the end of February, to some extent resembles (in military, not moral dimension) Russia's invasion into Ukraine. The USA's attempt to knock down the Iranian regime could drag on for a few years, circumstances permitting. Donald Trump has most likely not realised so far he messed with a hornet’s nest. Iranian people, in spite of being suppressed by a backward regime for 47 years, will not stand down. Trump might (provided he has not fallen back altogether) attempt to leave no stone unturned, burn the entire Iran to the ground, but the Persians will not succumb until they bleed out. At death knell they would fire the nuclear missiles towards their enemies just to go down in history as invincible.

Over the last weeks those of you keeping track of international politics have wondered what would happen the next day and whether Trump would keep his (hollow) promises of destroying Iran's infrastructure or bringing the country's history to a wicked end. The threat of nuclear war has never seemed so close in my lifetime. Now for a while it is gone.

The major upshot of the warfare is the fuel crisis, whose intensity remains uncertain. It is not just the blockade of the Ormuz strait that sent oil price skyrocketing. Drilling and refining capacities have been destroyed and given the global retreat from fossil fuels, it may make no economic sense to rebuild them. More expensive crude oil and natural gas are likely to keep us company for months, thus accelerating embracing green energy, while I won't hazard any guess if oil deficits would lead to fuel rationing and called off passenger flights.

Popularity of the US president has plummeted recently. His decisions do not only taint the reputation of USA as a cradle of modern democracy, but brutally hit wallets of ordinary citizens.

Democrats have been licking wounds after the awful defeat in 2024 elections, but given today's anti-Trump sentiment they are bound to win the mid-term elections in November 2026. They don’t owe it to getting their act together, but benefit from being labelled as the only opposition to Trump. I will watch the story unfold and keep looking forward to impeachment procedure in 2027.

Before it happens, I am keeping fingers crossed for Hungary, hoping today the country will democratically set itself free of the pro-russian authoritarian oligarchy. Under the rule of Victor Orban and his cronies Hungary became the poorest economy in the EU, with democratic institutions being a façade of what they ought to be. Hope the bleak period in Hungary’s history is drawing to a close.