I open one of my eyes and stare at the clock. It is already 9 am. I slept for seven hours and still I have a headache. I don’t want to get out of bed. I don’t want this Sunday to end. Next week is going to be a long and brain-draining week. Too many decisions to make.

For the n-th time, I think about my job options. I don’t have too many of them but each has a problem. The major problem in each and everyone is that the people with whom I have to interact seem “weird”. Oddly my preferred place is where my colleagues warn me the most against the potential “boss”. Does this say something about my own “normality”?!

My last chance to meet a “normal” potential boss is today. She gave me a rendez-vous at the airport to meet during her two-hour connection time. I guess already the circumstances suggest that there is little hope for this one to be normal either.

During this job search, I realized how much personal interactions are important in our decision making. The place that I absolutely wanted to go (which is now out of question) had that quality that the moment I talked to those people, I felt a love at first sight. I had no doubts that I would love to work with them, and it was reciprocal. Let us not go through the details of why it didn’t work out in the end, suffice to say that French hiring system is complicated.

My lab, my job search and my colleagues are part of the big mess we call life. Our daily decisions are made upon our impressions of people we encounter. I shop at the stores where I like the seller, or let’s say, I won’t shop at a place where the shop keeper is rude. And if you look carefully to your surrounding, most decisions are made based on a simple formula: you like the person with whom you have to deal or not.

In life we meet many people, we talk and we socialize. There are many with whom we even party and we feel happy. But there are very few who get in sync with us. How many times have we been in a gathering and or at a conference and we can’t wait to leave? For me quite often. But sometimes we stay, we wish the conversation will go on for a while because we feel a connection. These rare occasions are those to hold on to. When we find ourselves in harmony and we can sing despite our voice types, we better keep on singing!