dream | act | succeed

And I thought, writing my master thesis is pure stress.

But little did I know! The thing is, life itself is not stressful after all. It’s the way we react to things, that makes it stressful for us. You want an example? Flying 500 people to their holiday destination on the other side of the world might be stressful if you are doing it for the very first time, but after a while, come on! That’s just what they do! Every single day! Of course they have already found a way to deal with it. And so, certain things in life might be stressful for some, but not for all of us.

Monday, work and appointment at the bank.
Tuesday, work and appointment at the optician.
Wednesday, work and appointment at the Audi dealership.
Thursday, work, appointment at the Audi dealership, hair dresser.
Friday, work, changing the water from the pool, getting an appointment because of my knee.
Saturday, watching the first race of the NLS on the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
Sunday, online meeting with the student I advice, letting my knee rest a bit and watching F1.

For me, that’s called a stressful week. Why? Because I couldn’t follow my normal routine and needed to waste a lot of my time. Stuck in traffic, looking for a parking space in the city, waiting and test driving the replacement car from Audi. I got an Audi Q3, by the way. Not the type of a car that I like, but it drives.

The thing is, that I can not focus on too many things at the same time. If I do my blog, I do my blog. But I can’t do my blog properly, when there is a lot of other things to do. Of course there is always something to do, but you know what I mean. With my 20 minutes writing challenge I am practicing to write under pressure and sure, I made a lot of progress with that. But at the end of the day this is supposed to be fun! This is supposed to be something that I am looking forward to do after a long day at work. I get home and write my blog. Enjoy the moment. Forget about the world around me for a minute or two. But life has other plans. And with this weeks appointment marathon, my routine got pretty much smashed into pieces. And when there is one thing that I do not like, it’s uncertainty. I just can not stand it. I have this inner drive to analyze stuff, to brake it down into pieces, to figure out what it really takes to do something. And so, maybe, I worry too much about unimportant stuff. I think too much about things, others do not even notice as being something we can actually think about.

And so, this week was very stressful for me, even though that I know, that it is not supposed to be stressful after all. Was my week stressful? No, it was not. But I allowed it to become stressful for me. I worried about things without any reason. I thought too much, when my only job was to just do not think too much after all. I guess I am just strange. I guess I am just different. But well, let’s see how this will change in the future. Let’s see if I will finally be able to switch off this ongoing narrator in my head. Maybe one day, we will see. But until then, I guess I need to go through it.

You want to know what the problem with my Audi is/ was? It’s interesting, Audi knows about the problem, but they do not have a solution yet. Meaning that I got my car back without any warning signs on the screen, sure, but if certain circumstances meet again, the problem will be back flickering up on the display. A solution that, at least from my point of view as a master of engineering is something I can not really accept. I drove around with this warning sign, not knowing if the airbags will work in the case of an accident or not and now I need to live with the fact, that the problem can come back any minute? Honestly, that’s not the service that I have expected. Doing a mistake, having some issues, sure, no problem! That’s just life. But I am not sure if that is the way we should handle things these days. Maybe just maybe they should test the cars a little bit more on their own before giving them out to the costumers. Sure, it’s just a leasing car and I do not care, but if I would have bought it, come on, what kind of a service is this supposed to be?

And the saddest things about it? Because the dealership couldn’t do anything with the car, they do not get the money for the replacement vehicle from Audi and needed to pay that with their own money. Honestly, what the hell? I pay for the car on a monthly basis, but if Audi can not provide me with a working car, why should the dealership pay for that? They have not build it. But I guess that is just how it is. Let’s see if the problem will be back in the future or not.

See you next time!