Milan Kazarka
Here you can see things that I find, interesting links, videos and also photos from my life.
So I live in Vienna, the second most livable city in the World. I must actually agree. Living in London, Prague, being in Berlin for a while this city is actually great.
Why?
Food’s still not that expensive. The U-Bahn (Vienna metro system) omg. It’s great and people are mostly liberal to you.
I mean I’m being laughed at when I’m in Bratislava or some other cities, because of my hair and how I dress (like a cyberpunk?). Here people just do what they want.
And the city simply has cash. The businesses also. If I want a project or to find someone to work with I just search for ten minutes.
My grand-grand father’s been born here - orphan, then brought to the Czech Republic, then he had a son, he married a Slovak girl, they had a daughter and that’s my mom. Then I came back to Vienna. Geographically speaking our family made a circle around Central Europe.
I would like to reflect on the last year and the people I knew in Vienna Austria.
I’ve known some people whom I seriously believe that are underdeveloped or which have a strange perception of social interaction. When I came to Vienna I started living at a friend Ihsan. He’s a smart young student who works and overall tries to be successful. He’s got some positions at the local university and he does what he can.
After a month or two his brother arrived to live with us.
He is Ihsan’s younger brother who didn’t speak German nor English at the time of his arrival and to my standards still doesn’t. He was accepted to the local university, which I only vaguely understand and someone found him a job to teach young kids Arabic. After being kicked out of this job he tried several other things unsuccessfully. After some time you could only see him sitting on the sofa in his shirt doing nothing or endlessly chatting on Facebook. I really never ever known anyone else who would use this social network more than these people.
After some time the boys have been given ‘jobs’ and a computer to search for hotels and send them offers. This folks is how spam is created. Find some guys who can’t do anything, give them an older PC and let them send emails without even thinking.
This do-nothing, be grumpy at Milan & call me brother - kind of mentality was a culture shock after I came from Oregon.
Living here served it’s purpose, but now I’m moving again to my own apartment. What I learned is that some people don’t have any ambitions whatsoever other than facebook, video games and sleep.
These are just my views. Views of a boy that grew up in Central Slovakia in a rather cold environment when it comes to showing your affection to friends or family.
When I came from Watford to Vienna a year ago I landed at a friends place in ‘so to say’ the middle of the Turkish community. From day one Ihsan has told me that I’m his ‘bother’ and that the neighbour next door is like his ‘father’.
At first I found this extremely neet and I really appreciated it.
Very soon I realised that brother = dude. If you sit in a Turkish cafe, then it might happen that someone tells you the word brother, thanks brother, you’re welcome brother. The word brother has a completely different meaning than it should I believe. It loses weight, since it’s used so many times in so many occasions.
I began to view this word very cynically. For me words like ‘brother’ ‘dude’ or the Czech ‘vole’ mean that someone tries to generalize you, or just pinpoint that they are talking to you and that they want you to listen.
I’m maybe overly critical, but I simply don’t like being called brother if there is nothing substancial like friendship. I don’t like being called ‘dude’ and I actually find it rude. The word ‘vole’ in the Czech language also makes me want to trow up.
Have a nice day
The Flower And The Bugs
This document tries to describe what I’ve went through during six months of my stay in a telecommunications company in Vienna Austria.
I came to Vienna in the beginning of 2012 to search for a job after coming back from Watford England in December 2011. Two years ago I already lived and worked in this city so I knew it quite well and found it practical to search for work here rather than in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia which is only sixty kilometres away. The wage difference still exists and there are far more possibilities to get a day time job here.
After being invited to a few meetings I traveled to Vienna from Ziar, the city I grew up in in central Slovakia and where I was staying until I was employed again.
One of the interviews I had were with a man who fooled me greatly.
My first weeks at the Telecom company were quite nice and I actually liked my work. Soon I started having problems with the set up infrastructure that was provided to me. I didn’t get a Mac although I was doing iPhone development and this created large problems for me, since I needed to run a version of MacOS on my HP Windows machine. The second month being in the company I’ve sent a mail to my boss stating that “I believe that we won’t make it.” if I won’t get a computer that works, a Mac for developing the iOS app. Immediately he asked me to come with him to the meeting room and I experienced the first shock of my stay in the company. The guy who I thought was an intelligent experienced manager started telling me things I didn’t hear for a decade.
He said that he thinks the way I wrote the mail was rude and that we in the IT department are payed to work around obstacles and find new ways of dealing with problems. The problem with that was that we tried for two weeks to get my machine stable for the development. No use. I simply felt that I needed to speak out.
The meeting I was at turned out very strangely. My boss told me that “who is working for whom? you for me? or the opposite?” which I then later on figured out meant that I shouldn’t tell him my professional opinion, rather I should be silent.
During the course of my stay in the company I started getting to know the people around me. There were two guys in the tech department and a young lady responsible for marketing sitting right next to me. We actually sat all together at four tables put together, which was nice. I like to work with people. I guess the worst thing that happened to me was when I’ve gotten my own office in my first job. I felt very isolated.
As anyone new to the company I started asking questions and I tried to get to know the people around me better. The guy I needed to communicate with about the new technology I was building was a stressed infrastructure engineer, who also did tech support. In the first two weeks I tried to talk to him freely, ask him a question when I wasn’t sure and asked him about his professional opinion. The work thing was that he showed me in an extreme way, that he’s annoyed by me. I never ever have been shown by anyone that he’s annoyed by me more than him.
Whenever I asked him something or wanted help in the first weeks he put an acid face and smashed the mouse whenever he moved it, which got all of us in the office nervous and kind of sad.
You didn’t want to get him upset, you didn’t want to make his day bad. You actually wanted to be friends with him. But for him I was just a young boy from Slovakia. A fool. I never understood why.
At first I lived with it. I tried to be as polite as possible, tried to speak silently and asked him to let me know when he actually had time. Nothing changed. Then one day when he did his computer mouse smashing again I asked him if he doesn’t want to trow his mouse and keyboard out of the window to feel a relief and I told him that this is insane.
He did the same smashing with the phone whenever someone called. He hated to talk to people and was very upset when something didn’t work and took it personally.
I also gotten to know the lady from marketing with whom I always went out smoking. When also the other went we just chatted in general, but when we were alone she was telling me about her concerns, her feelings about the workspace, the company and her fears.
It’s interesting that I always feel that people like to talk to me. Many people like to tell me their story and like to open up to me more than they usually do to others. I like to listen to people genuinely, so I believe that they kind of sense my interest.
She quit about a month after I started in the company and stayed for another month. The main reason why she was quitting was officially because of her aunt having problems and her needing to take care of her. This was true, but there were also more reasons. I believe that you never quit a job only because of one reason. She told me that the other reason was our boss, who was very manipulative to her. I didn’t see that in the beginning, although I sensed something. After a few months I met her in a nice cafe and she told me how she’s very happy in her new job. How she likes her boss and the way how her life’s going. She divides things into tree areas. Her family, her boyfriend and work. Two of these things weren’t and she needed to fix them. I guess her boyfriend helped a lot.
At the time I met her I had already quit my job. I’ve sent my resignation and was simply waiting for the few weeks to end during which I still needed to come to work because of the law.
We were both quitters from the same company and I found out from her that there were a lot more before that. Most of the people stayed for a few months. She stayed for over a year, which she considered was actually impressive in the company. Only the tech guys are staying there for years now.
Overall we both agreed that the our boss was a pathological narcissist, lied to us on many occasions just to get his way and whenever possible tried to have us be insecure about one another.
There was for example an instance when he tells one of his employees that some complained. Basically he tells people “someone complained about you and it’s not, xyz.” and he always tries to push you in believing that your best friend was the person.
The thing we all realised after a wile is that non of this is true. We were quite open in our collective and were friends who chatted openly to one another. These attempts of manipulation were always clear to us.
But there was a problem in our collective. In general we didn’t trust one of the tech guys. The one smashing the mouse. We knew that the boss was always getting insider information, information about our arrival times from him and overall whatever was going on. This was indeed an environment of receipt, mistrust and overall very toxic. We were insecure about what to tell to whom. We were insecure about speaking out and even though we tried to come close to the one who was collecting information on us, it didn’t work. The marketing lady warned me about him in the first weeks of my stay. She said I should watch out.
We all tried to live our days with dignity. Being innovative. Communicate. Trying to do what we like. But we were simply hindered. It’s strange how the essence of what makes a company successful is the thing you are supposed not to do.
- end part one -
What you’ll experience when living in larger cities across Europe is that you’ll meet women who are quite different than those you find in smaller towns and in the country side.
Overall I hate people who use money and large numbers for reasoning. When I lived in London and now that I’m living in Vienna I meet almost everyday people who bring numbers and money into the foreground.
When you talk to them you hear things like ten thousand, twenty thousand or a million, wow! and you are expected to go “oh, wow!”.
Either you get used to the fake small talk and the endless chats or you are left outside. But is it so bad to be left outside of circles you don’t think are giving you any value?
What I learned last year is that you should never let your good friend or your girlfriend help out with your projects just because she is close to you. Things will only get messed up. Too many times I’ve seen businessmen dragging their girlfriends and wives around and they in turn try to show that they belong to that position and that they belong to their man and his wealth.
It’s no problem if this whole setup is a blatant example of mixing private affairs with your professional life.
You mostly see this happen and be extreme in the medium sized European cities. It somehow seems to not be so extreme in the US. This is probably because in the US it’s not the best thing if you’re viewed as a rich wive of someone, but rather a successful and independent lady. Yes, there are exceptions / differences in this. I’m just giving you my own experience.
Some time ago I went to a ballet piece. It was about two years ago and was a compilation of a couple of freestyle pieces from some interesting artists. I liked that, because they could I believe better express themselves as if they would have a predefined script and would need to stand up to the specific expectations of the audience. If you’re going to the Swan Lake, then people simply expect the Swan Lake.
I sat on the balcony right next to a Korean girl, who didn’t want to bend over to see the performance and so she was left out of the whole thing. She gotten sleepy after ten minutes after start and she almost kipped off her seat and landed on the floor. When klapping her hands didn’t touch and she was overall acting like a statue. She left during the first break.
There was an old Viennese guy sitting infront of me. He was over eighty if I recall correctly. During the break he asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Vienna. I told him that I was a developer and that I like the city, it’s culture and also the people.
He gave me a priceless look. The look of someone who couldn’t believe his ears. “You think people here are good?” he asked me. I think they’re terrible. “They have a terrible attitude and they behave badly to each other” he added. I thought that it’s just the attitude of someone who’s lived through war and all the conflicts between people at that time.
I come from Slovakia and no one would admit that he was a communist now. The back stabbing people are the most silent. Everyone is against the right wing extremists now. Everyone hates the nazis now.
It’s this attitude of not admitting that we did something wrong and that we were the participants that makes us repeat history. That makes us look silly to the history books. The communists, the nazis, all the same. Brainwashing, guns, indoctrinating children.
But back to the Viennese Opera.
In the last years I’ve visited many cities and lived in four countries and I now know what the old guy was talking about. I have nothing against Vienna in general, but there is a large concentration of narcissists, elitists and people who you just can’t trust. Too many times did it happen to me here that people are too cold, that they treat you as property. I don’t blame the whole nation, I don’t blame the genes. I blame the environment, the schools, the parents, the mindset in which so many Austrians grow up and the specifics they cary in their heads.
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A bad mindset:
If you lie to get what you want, it’s ok.
We’re better than anyone else.
Foreign influence is bad.
The social system is great. You all like paying 50% of your wage to the government.
If someone does a crime, the first thing to mention is where they come from. It’s the most important thing ever.
Smile even if you don’t mean it so.
Foreigners are the working class. Mozart is better on chocolate balls than in your ears.
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Me myself I don’t like paying half of my income to the government. I don’t like the all seeing eye of the nanny state. I am someone who believes in innovation and that one needs to have an overview of the world.
To be honest I believe that in Bratislava you are able to get a better non partisan overview of international events and happenings than in Vienna. This is because they’re non selective and don’t bash foreign affairs than they do here.
Too many people are brainwashed again and I fear that they already have too much power.
Only in a British pub it is possible to look at the peanuts, point your finger at the peanuts, say “one bag of peanuts please” and get an answer:
“beans? you want beans?”
Still less strange than my experience in Vienna:
I go to Anker, or one of those bakery shops. There are a lot in Vienna. And I point at the pizza slices / pizza rectangles or how should I call them. I say “could you please put it in the microwave for a minute please?”
And the girl serving me bursts to tears. Another one comes to her and tells me “it’s her first day!”. Oo-kaaay…
And this is not one percent of my stories.
Monks chill out before Dalai Lama speech - rally in Vienna - for supporting Tibet
Dalai Lama in Vienna Heldenplatz - we were one of the first people there, but still not close enough :)
Ottakringer at Mc Donald’s Mariahilferstrasse Vienna - Anke in the back ‘D’ fell off
