I was reminded recently by a very good friend of mine that it had been a while since I posted on the blog and its certainly not keeping up with my aim for one a day… I will try and make up for that now, its not as if my life has been boring since my last post, there always seems to be something going on…

Before I start this post, I’d just like to say I never wanted to make this blog negative, thats why I’ve left my last 2 employers out of it. For the purposes of this blog I will always refer to them as “L24″ and “PMO”.

I’ve been encouraged by a couple of ex-coleagues as well as friends to add a hint of “Corruption on the Costa del Sol” and/or “dodgy Brits setting up companies in Spain” to the blog. But thats all rather negative, I’m not sure I can pull off writing negative comments and making it sound at all interesting… Here goes nothing…

Unfortunatly its not just the Brits that seem to be running away with my hard earned wages… Yeah, that comment was aimed at you Gary, you know who you are. Austrians have also tried their hand at withholding money from me, luckily for me I won some of that money back. That was my first job in Spain and should maybe have been a hint that Spain was going to be a rocky road for me. Long story short, unless you know the person you’re working for, never take cash, it might be untraceable and you might think that its a good idea, but it also means you can’t fight for it when the company fire you with no valid reason. Luckily for me, I was already trying to get more and more of the money on the invoice and not in plain white envelopes, so I got a large portion of my wages back after I set my lawyers on them..

After loosing the job with L24, I then needed to find another job, I found PMO. The job was a lot further than I had planned on working but my field of experise is specific in nature and there are few employers in the area. I worked stupidly long hours to help them get their new website online, got paid for the first month, worked all the second month only to get a call on the final Sunday of the month, just 2 days before payday to be told that the job no longer existed. The directors of the company had declared the operation in Spain to be bankrupt. Gary tried his best, which to be fair isn’t great, to sound apologetic that he was closing the PMO office in Spain with no notice. But at the end of the day the management team at PMO knew what was going on long before closing the office and moving back to the UK. Why else would one of the “Directors” tell me that jobs at PMO were not safe and I should start looking for a new job. It was one of those out of hours, off the record, kind of conversations, but unfortunatly it was the friday before the office closed. To any PMO staff that read this, sorry I never said anything to you, but I didn’t have time, this conversation occured late on friday night, and by Sunday night the company had already made the final descsion to close.

After my first 2 years in Spain ending with those 2 employers I decided to use the self employed status I have in Spain to start working from home, doing what I do best, coding PHP and MySQL web applications. 6 months later and I’m still doing that, I’d say that things are going well, but with my track record I don’t want to tempt fate….

With whats happened, I’m now very sceptical about what people tell me, its not me being paranoid, everyone seems to have their own agendas. I guess if everyone was open about what was really going on and their own plans, life would be boring, there would be no hidden suprise lurking round the corner waiting for us… Its those suprises that turn our lives in unexpected directions and open up new oportunites to us. What’s waiting around the corner for you….? Only time will tell

Tags: crooks, L24, paranoia, PMO, Spain

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under Spanish Life, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.