#211 3M

When we decided to move from Dublin to Tallinn, Janne quickly found a job with the company 3M. I still recall the building and floor where they interviewed her which is on my way to work.

Once we both started working, we’d take the same route to work. I just had to ride the bus for a few more stops. I am an early person, but she wasn’t. Even then she chose to wake up very early so we could ride together. When we got a car, I would drop her off and then picked her up after work. How lucky for me to have such commutes.

Her contract was temporary, but she managed to time everything to finish her contract just before Trevor was to be born. In 2018, 3M approached her again with an offer. She accepted it and got quickly into the speed of things.

People always liked Janne a lot. It was no surprise that she made a very good connection with her team distributed among many European countries. It wasn’t that the job was necessarily exciting, but she loved the people she worked with. Every time she’d talk about anyone, she always sounded happy. And what I could gather is that it was mutual. Probably people in her team were telling happy stories about her.

When we decided to move to Norway, she tried to get her job moved there too. The company didn’t allow it even though, ironically, she had two colleagues already in Oslo. It wasn’t easy for her to quit her job.

Her team decided to give her a farewell gift. They bought something special from each of their countries to give it to her when she’d arrived in Oslo. She left her job at the end of June 2022. No one could have told us that barely very few days later she’d be at the emergency of the hospital with the first signs of the disease that took her.

I drove to Oslo to collect our stuff in those hectic first few weeks while she was waiting for her first chemotherapy. While there, I met a teammate who was now our friend. She gave me all the gifts for Janne. When I came home, she was happy to get everything and asked me to make a photo of her with those gifts.

That red 3M logo means more to me than to most people: Janne was happy there.