Congratulations!

“Congratulations on your selection to the Corporate Service Corps....” This was the first line of an e-mail I received on May 22. Just one e-mail in long list that morning. So I closed it, skipped to the next one, looking for e-mails that needed handling this morning. This couldn’t be for me. I’m CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) manager for IBM, in the months before I presented IBM’s Corporate Service Corps to many colleagues in Netherlands and Belgium. Some came back to me and asked for more information on how to apply and what to expect; this was probably an email someone forwarded to me to inform me his/her application was successful. An hour or so later I worked through the e-mails again and found to my surprise it was meant for me!
“Wow, that’s great!” and after a split second “Oops, how can I break this news at home?” I told I was going to apply for the CSC programme, but I also told that there would be thousands of colleagues competing for a few hundred seats; probably several tens from Europe and probably a handful of places for Netherlands. So nothing to worry so far…