Your Being Redirected

"Your Being Redirected" 

That's the message I receive on my computer screen at work when I click to go to the intranet home page.  I know that the message that the IT guys meant to program in is "You're being redirected".  While some might chaulk this up to the lack of a well-rounded, comprehensive education for some of the technical disciplines I, of course, took it as a personal message.  There are a couple grammatical problems with the statement above.

1) "Your" vs. "You're"

"You're"- The abbreviation for "you are".  So, if  the message above had said "You're being redirected" it would mean "You are being redirected".

"Your"- The possesive case of "you" as is "your book", "your job", "your kids", "your LIFE", "your BEING".  Example: Shakespeare's Hamlet who asks "To be or not to be?", ie. to live or not to live.

Unfortunately, in this case they used the latter rather than the former.

2) "Being" vs. "being"

To make it worse, they capitalized the second word "Being".  This infers that they were meaning the noun definition of "being" meaning "the state of existence".  For instance, "she put her whole being into the part", or "a human being". While the lower case of "being" can mean "life" when it is capitalized it infers that the writer is trying to use the existential version of the word.  Instead, I assume what they meant was the verb of "Being" (which should have been lower case) which in this context means the act of transitioning from one screen to another.  For instance, "you're being redirected..." or "you're being fired" or "you're being somewhat semantic" (although this last one is also somewhat a state of existence in my case- oh oh, grey area!).

My apologies for the grammar session.  For whatever reason this particular language flub got to me.  I've been feeling a little sensitive as of late.  I haven't quite found my niche at work and things are moving very slowly there.  We are still trying to adjust our lives here at home and we're trying to find our way. Just about everything is uncomfortable at the moment.  I don't mind stepping outside of my comfort zone from time to time but here and now there is no such thing as "time to time" as we are constantly outside our comfort zone and never really have an opportunity to go back in.  So, the result is that we are basically in a constant state of discomfort despite all of the creature comforts and luxuries that we have now that we haven't had before.  We have a very nice home, a beach within walking distance, possibly the best weather on the planet and we get to speak our native tongue.  Even so, everything for us has changed and frankly I fear change.  As a matter of fact, part of the reason for making this journey was because we were so comfortable and I wanted to be shaken out of my comfort zone a little bit in order to stay sharp rather than get dull and complacent.  Mission accomplished...sigh.

I've spoken to many ex-Pats here who say that the first 6 months of living here is hell.  They needed to adjust to the lifestyle and different ways of life.  Hence the phenomenon of "yo-yo Poms": an Englander who comes to Oz (a "Pom"), then goes back to England, then comes back to Oz.  All of the ex-Pats I've spoken to, however, also say that they would never go back home now.  Of course, this particular survey may be flawed as I'm only talking to people that still live here.  The numbers might be a little more balanced if I were somehow able to talk to those that left and went home. I suppose it's a little like taking a survey of Fox News viewers to ask which US political party is superior. There are certainly days when we feel like packing up and going home with our tails between our legs, but we won't.  We will find a new comfort zone here, likely just in time to leave and either go home or somewhere else.

Frankly, I'm not sure how people do it.  How do Pakistani people, for instance, pack up their family without any employment prospects, with very little money and almost no English, uproot their lives and move to Canada, or Australia for that matter.  Sure, maybe their quality of life back home was very poor but even so they would have had their comfort zone too.  This experience has certainly made me appreciate, even moreso, what my family went through when we emigrated from Russia (nee: USSR) in the 70's.  I had the luxury of being a baby and not remembering or suffering through any of it.  My parents and sister certainly couldn't say the same.  In any case, my guess is that the more comfortable and entrenched you are the harder it is to break out of that trench of comfort.  We were very comfortable and that particular bandage was ripped off quickly and without notice.  My apologies for the mixed metaphores.

So, thanks to the damn semi-literate IT guys at work I've experienced a minor existential crisis.  I'll be fine.   I recognize that this is a lot of whining for getting essentially exactly what I signed up for.  I will and do try to focus on the positives as we transition our lives.  In the meantime, I will try to be a little less sensitive towards the edicts handed down by my employers "Department of Information Technology, Systems and Self-Realization".  And I will try to remember that, perhaps, my Being needed a new direction.