It begins, or maybe it ends, or maybe both

Before the winter of 2014 my family had settled in a cul-de-sac new construction house we had customized with the builder. It was in Fort Mill, SC, a suburb of Charlotte just across the state line from NC, about a fifteen minute drive to my job. We had an older black Mercedes Benz wagon parked next to a mighty minivan outside a three-car garage. In summer I kept the grass neatly cut, and a poop scoop service with a punny name came each week to clean up after my neighbor-irritating doggies. In cold weather we'd go out to the Towne Tavern for wings doused in varying degrees of hot sauce, mashed potatoes, meatloafs, and good, cold beer. Life was easy and comfortable. Dull and routine, some would say, but very comfortable.

 

So it happened Caroline, my wife, and I let this idea take hold between us, which was finding a job in Europe and moving there. I worked for Microsoft, a company sitting on a mountain of cash, so surely they wouldn't have a problem footing the bill to relocate us over the ocean, we thought. I talked to my manager about the idea, and he was all for it. He had always wanted to spend time in Europe himself, so he was encouraging and claimed a bit of envy for the effort.

Microsoft publishes its open jobs on the intranet much as they appear on their public-facing "careers" page. There were dozens of openings, all over Europe, but organized by country and native languages. Openings in France were written in French, for Germany they were written in German, in Italy, Italian, and so on. I looked quite a bit at roles in the UK, many of which looked like great matches. When I looked at rent costs around Reading (home of Microsoft UK headquarters), though, it quickly deterred me from looking any further there. London was right out, needless to say. One of the things that was great about working for Microsoft in Charlotte was the relatively low cost of living compared to most of the places in the world worth inhabiting. Where Microsoft had regional offices in Europe prices were hardly encouraging, like Paris, Berlin, and so on.

One of Microsoft's offices posted all its openings in English, as I discovered. The office was in Brussels. Brussels, Belgium. For anyone who doesn't know why Brussels job postings are in English, I'll be talking about that later. I didn't question it myself at the time. It appeared the cost of living in Brussels was reasonable, if only by comparison to other Western European cities. I talked with a manager of a team of field engineers that needed someone with my skills. The only catch? We'd have to pay all relocation ourselves. Microsoft wasn't going to pony up for it. No matter! A somewhat long story much condensed, by February 2014 my family and I were boarding a Lufthansa flight to Europe.