I was made for other things.
O. Wilde, De Profundis
Mom will never put up with it. Just as with the fact that in my mid, or better, late thirties I’m neither married nor engaged without any immediate plans to become either.
Going to Russia (Russia!!!) as an expat PR specialist was just a tad too much for her.
I guess she would prefer my coming out as a gay, transgender or both, but staying home and pursuing some decent office career, paying out my mortgage for another couple of decades and retiring around 60-65 to start a senior fitness or cooking blog.
But there is a but, I am one of those misfortunates who try to escape from themselves. While Martin Eden failed, many keep cherishing rather vain hopes for a fresh start on a foreign turf.
Oh, I can hear you asking, “Ok, but why the heck Russia? Why not Italy or France with good wines, healthy food and climate, nice music and fine arts all over the place? Why not, by God, good, old Britain? Same language, though with a twist, a change without the shock. Why take your white Oregonian ass to Siberia. Even if Moscow is not exactly Siberia geographically, it still is culturally and politically just as bad”.
Well, I still remember that email written in strangely correct English. You know, that textbook, precise and clear-cut style smacking of the Cold War era. No typos, deliberate avoidance of complex phrases and tenses. Just the amount of emotion prescribed by an old-fashioned template from a business correspondence handbook. That is none. A chilly hello directly from KGB read out with a thick Russian accent with its very distinctive falls and rises making it sound aggressive. Yet, it was not the infamous secret service addressing me.
What it actually was is a message from a recruiter named ….ugh… Snezhana. She represented a tiny but ambitious IT startup (legion is their name and they are many) fooling around with blockchain and, obviously, demonstrating all signs of corporate delusions of grandeur.
After the “Dear Jeremy” line the letter exposed to me the titanic achievements the company made over the first year of operations. The main achievement seemed to be a speech by the CTO delivered in bad English (the link to a video was enclosed) at some executive meet-up in a luxurious venue in Malta (I had to consult the map) and an extensive documentation for a non-existent product published online (another link in the letter).
Then she got down to business and inquired whether I was interested in joining their great team of world best programmers, engineers and managers as a PR specialist and evangelist.
