Surplus to Requirements

There’s a kind of meeting you only get invited to once. No agenda. Booked for forty-five minutes, done in ten. Someone from HR you’ve never met before is there “for support,” though you’re never quite sure whose. They ask how you’ve been. You say good, because that’s what you say in a professional setting. Then they tell you that you’re no longer required, and start the clock on the mandatory four weeks’ notice.

The word they use is “redundant.” It’s an honest word. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at the job. It just means the job no longer needs doing — which is a bit of an existential problem to tackle at 8:30am on a Tuesday morning. After roughly two decades in the industry, a third of that with this employer, I had — in accordance with the HR-approved script — been advised I was surplus to requirements.

These things happen. Industries shift, budgets contract, organisations change titles to justify restructures.

So on a Friday afternoon, I exited quietly. No farewell drinks. No goodbye email. No cake slowly drying out in the break room while people you don’t really like say nice things about how great it was to work together. The Irish goodbye of the workplace. An exit so undramatic I suspect a few people are still waiting on a response to their email.

Sensible options, briefly considered

When you find yourself suddenly unemployed, there’s a well-worn playbook. You update your LinkedIn headline to “Exploring new opportunities,” a phrase that fools precisely no one but makes everyone feel better. You “reach out” to your “network.” You take a course in something with the word “agile” in it. You consider starting a podcast, or whether you have it in you to become a LinkedIn influencer who posts stories about what your fridge contents says about your workstyle.

I looked at this playbook. I gave it the consideration it deserved, and then I closed my laptop, because I had realised something important. For the first time in a long time, I had no commitments and no pressure. No job to race back to, no Outlook calendar dictating my life, and enough financial breathing space thanks to a tax-free termination payment.

Instead of following that five-year career plan, the only plan I left to follow now was that silly idea that had been sitting in a dark corner of my mind for over a decade. Between work, life and a global pandemic, it had never really found its moment. But now was it’s time.

The idea was to take a vehicle and drive it from Asia to Europe. This presented an immediate logistical hurdle, in that I didn’t own a vehicle capable of such a mission. I still don’t.

The plan

The plan is simple enough. Buy a ute and drive west until you run out of asphalt or money, whatever comes first. (For the non-Australians, a ute is a pickup truck — built for farms and worksites, and bought mostly by people who have neither).

Starting in South East Asia, driving somewhere in the direction of Europe and hoping you get there without too many issues. In between, you cross most of a continent and more borders than I’ve cared to count. And, with luck, collect a few life-changing experiences along the way.

Now, the smart thing to do would be to buy that ute in Australia. It certainly would be easier — register it to my home address, deal with the local authorities, sort out the paperwork. Instead, I’m making it harder than it needs to be by buying it in the Philippines. Because if you want a vehicle to drive across a large landmass, the logical thing to do, of course, is to buy it on an island.

Two questions

When I tell people I’m driving from South East Asia to Europe, they generally have two questions. The first is whether you can actually drive from Asia to Europe. (Well done, education system). You can. It’s a single piece of land.

The second is whether it’s safe, particularly in the current political climate. I faced the same questions before I drove across Mexico, and I have no reason to think the Stans won’t have some of the friendliest people on the planet. The roads, the altitude and the paperwork are another matter — but nobody ever asks about those.

Not my first trip

This isn’t my first time around the world. When I was seventeen, I bought a round-the-world ticket and only told my parents when I needed a lift to the airport. First stop India, then Turkey, then on into Europe. I made it halfway around the world before I ran out of money and had to phone those same parents for help. I’ve been travelling ever since: over seventy countries and all six inhabited continents.

After returning from that first trip, I decided to do it all again — this time in reverse, just to undo what I’d done the first time.

Where things stand

So, here we are. There’s an idea, a rough route, a budget I’m certain to have underestimated, and a chunk of cash with nothing better to do. What I don’t have is the ute.

And here I’ll keep a record of it all — the planning, the driving, the border crossings, and everything that goes wrong along the way. So if you’ve ever looked at a map and wondered whether you could just drive across it: join me, and let’s find out, as we travel the Globe by Road.