The Offer

Last Thursday, I was given my offer for my overseas assignment. I knew we were being considered for an overseas assignment and had already interviewed for it. As well, I was asked, point blank, is there anywhere I would not go (I cited Bangladesh and Pakistan as my only no's). There was much discussion around several locations during the month+ process, but never was India mentioned. I am a researcher, so I had my data on what I thought were the most probable locations and had spent a great deal of time managing my anxiety of change by developing transition plans with the available information on the internet. I was a busy bee! On Thursday, my boss's boss asked me to come down to her office and dropped India in my lap. Needless to say, it hit me completely unexpectedly and I got that feeling when you actually can feel the outside of your head as a separate, detached entity. Immediately, I thought "Olga (my wife)is going to kill me - I do not mean figuratively. I mean physically smother me in my sleep, poison me, or push me down the stairs!" I tried to outwardly recover as quickly as possible in front of the President, but I suspect I did a poor job. She gave me the weekend to think about it.....

Now, any of you that have ever been offered a promotion to a job that will "take getting used to" understand there are many check-point in which you have the "choice" to remove yourself from the process, but once the offer is made, you are a little beyond the "choice" point. For instance, when they asked me if I would be interested in an overseas assignment, I had the "choice" to say "no". When they asked me if there were any locations to which I would not go, I had the "choice" to say "no". When they scheduled my interviews, I had the choice to politely say "no". But after they had rearranged the global organization to accommodate me, I no longer had the choice to say "no". So when they tell you, "take the weekend and think about it", what they are really telling you is "take the weekend and reconcile yourself with your new home". Now in this case, after the initial shock, I was actually pretty excited about the opportunity, but there was a moment when I realized I had agreed to something I may not have really thought out (and my wife was going to kill me)!

In the end, we had some great talks and we both felt this was a great opportunity. We have moved from shock and denial stage to acceptance and anxiety and apparently where the blog should get interesting.