Job Hunt

Our entire reason for landing in Melbourne after months of scrimping and saving was solely due to the utter lack of work opportunities in Ireland. The Boyfriend has a Masters degree in Corporate Strategy and I obtained a meagre Bachelor degree in Philosophy and English – unfortunately, these were apparently the two least progressive areas in the Emerald Isle and moving off the continent was our only option. Well, that, and we wanted to see kangaroos up close.

So we began our job search. I applied for countless cafe-based positions, having had a good experience in a similar situation and considering the relative lack of responsibility in any such role. I had a few call backs – including one for a managerial post in a cafe about a hundred miles into the outback and another from a barely English-speaking cantankerous old man  who hung up the phone when I failed to pronounce his name correctly after four tries.  

After another awkward conversation with a woman who thought the wage I expected was “ridiculously low”, The Boyfriend and  I decided a tourist activity was due to brighten our spirits. We reluctantly asked Fat Shite and Sour Puss whether they would be interested in tagging along to the Aquarium. They jumped at the chance when they heard we’d acquired 10% discount vouchers, naturally. It took us an hour and a half to get there in old Dallas – parking came to a neat $14 an hour, but Fat Shite had no change to help out, an excuse I was to hear at least a jillion times more in the future.

The Aquarium was pretty interesting. What was not interesting was Fat Shite’s constant commentary on the sting rays – he’s seen a show about those very creatures on the Discovery Channel, you know. He watched it back in Ireland on his flat screen 72”, you know. He finds that kind of thing fascinating, you know. One of those bad boys killed Steve Irwin, don’t you know. He does a mean Steve Irwin impression if you’d like to hear it four times a minute, don’t you goddamnbloodyfrickinghellgougemyowneyesout know?

Anyway, while trying desperately to block out Fat Shite’s monotonous monologue, I heard my ringtone bleating away in my pocket. I answered the unknown number, but could barely make out the caller’s voice on the other end, registering only that it was someone responding to one of my many job applications. I raced to find somewhere quiet. Surrounded by  huge sharks and bloated goldfish swimming overhead, I ran into the only place I thought would be remotely silent. Luckily, there was no one else in the Ladies bathrooms.

 I ran to a cubicle, slapped down the toilet seat and perched on the lid. I took some deep breaths – I have a tendency to babble – and went through in my head what I wanted to say. I rehearsed what buzz words would impress this guy, what experience I should mention, what cafe-related terms I could impressively yet absently throw in to conversation. I smiled, so I sounded upbeat and outgoing, and presented myself; “Hi, sorry about that, I’m just sitting on the toilet now.”

There was a deafening silence on the other end of the line. At that very moment, as I cringed in my cubicle, I realised I was not alone in the bathroom as I had previously thought. I heard a slight moan, the sound of teeth clenching, a squelch and an almighty splash. Apparently the woman in the next stall over had consumed something bowel-erupting. The plop sound echoed all around the tiled room.  And still the line remained quiet.

But here’s some good news – somehow, I got the job.

Dallas

Because of Fat Shite’s soaring taxi rates, the Boyfriend and I decided a car was an imperative purchase. We visited a string of car lots and garages, encountering hoards of pushy salesmen and as many well-driven, outrageously overpriced automobiles. Still luckless at the end of the week, we got three trains out to a suburb which consisted mostly of Indian take-aways in a last ditch attempt to find something suitable.  We trawled the streets for hours, following the navigational systems on our mobile phones. We realised how stupid that was when we found ourselves playing Dodge-The-Truck on the Maroondah Highway.

After an hour we finally reached our destination. I bit my tongue as the Boyfriend hummed and hah-ed over Mitsubishis and Holdens (“They’re an AUSTRALIAN make, you know!”), and was over the moon when he decided a lilac 1998 Ford Mondeo warranted a test drive.

The car was lowered, with tinted windows and a sound system installed by an enthusiastic amateur. There were hideous earrings hidden in the glove compartment, cigarette ash all over the dash and the boot was inaccessible. Nonetheless, the Boyfriend fell in love. And I fell in love with the concept of not having to ask Fat Shite for a lift ever again.  We even baptised her – Dallas.

Delighted with our success, we greeted Nick the salesman as if he were a long lost brother. “We’ll take it!” we breathed, eagerly storming into the Portakabin that acted as their professional headquarters. The Boyfriend whipped out his trusty debit card. “Stick it all on this,” he proclaimed. I chortled and made small talk with Nick and felt generally happy as a pig in shit.

But the Boyfriend’s Irish debit card wasn’t reading. And nor was his credit card. I shakily handed over my card. “NO TRACK READING” the machine I was quickly beginning to loathe spat back at us. Mortified, we said we’d try some ATMs. Our cards worked there, but we could only take out $200 at a time.

We shrugged and made our apologies, promising we’d be back the next day if Nick would be good enough to hold the car for us. We traipsed back through the Curry ‘Burb – which, it turns out, was a single kilometre away from Kelly’s Motors, and didn’t require any trek along the Maroondah Highway, thank YOU, Google Maps – to the train station and clambered aboard. Some poor deluded fool with an Eminem complex rapped to himself at the top of his voice while scrawling in a battered note-pad the whole way back into Flinders Station. The tram that followed was chock-o-block with self-important CBD types in pencil skirts and Crocs. Having left at 11 o’ clock that morning, we arrived back in the Old Lady House at 8 o’ clock that night, car-less and with blistering feet.

The welts on my heels were so grotesque that I enlisted the boyfriend to pop them. Face-first on the wire mesh that was our bed, I let my beloved pop my blisters. As terribly as the car hunt had gone, we had never been so close.

Reasons to Smoke

This is a handy tip if you are going to relocate to the other side of the world: take up smoking.

                Here are a few things about Fat Shite you may be interested to learn. He was unemployed for 21 years. He filled his evening with PlayStation games and beer consumption. His only friends are his two younger, gullible brothers. His mother has wrapped the apron strings tightly around his gonads. He has a girlfriend – I did mention Sour Puss, didn’t I? – three years his junior and she suffers from a terrible superiority complex. He organised a job from Ireland in Melbourne coaching a soccer team, and it was this team’s head coach who organised the house we would be temporarily staying in. And here’s another news-flash – I pretty much hate his guts. That’s about everything note-worthy there is to report about good old Fat Swine.

My initial impression of said house was tarred by the giant two-metre tall “For Sale” sign that blocked my view. The Boyfriend and I stared at it for a while, our bulging suitcases at our sides, our pockets significantly lighter after paying the gibbering taxi man. There was also a car parked in the drive. We checked the address Fat Shite had provided us with. We were at the right place, anyway. So I had a cigarette.

We waited for an hour and finally Fat Shite and Sour Puss rocked up. They had been shopping – for a can of deodorant. Fat Shite informed us that the car in the drive had been gifted him by the same guy in the soccer club who had organised the limousine escort and the house. He kicked one of the back wheels, declared it embarrassing and shuffled up the steps to let us in. I had a cigarette.

Fat Shite gave us a grand tour. He and Sour Puss had gotten the bigger, better room and i had no qualms with that, of course, as it had been his contacts that had sorted the arrangement and therefore it was his prerogative to call dibs. The house smelled of old people, the wallpaper was outdated and stained, the carpet was a bit squishy underfoot – but it had a roof and we were content enough with that.

After making pleasantries with the other two, The Boyfriend and I retreated to our room. It was a decent size and we even had a wardrobe. So we had a celebratory hug and a giggle, revelling in the realisation that all our planning and dreaming had a chance of coming to fruition now that we were in Australia. I jumped on the bed.

There was a crack and the noise of springs straining. Rubbing my injured face, I pulled back the sheets. “We’ve no mattress,” I intoned, hardly surprised. We surveyed the metal mesh and the bars that made up our bed. After several minutes, I went out for a cigarette.

Fat Shite called that he was heading to Woolworths and whether we would like to go with him. Starving and sore from my face-plant on to the make shift bed, I happily agreed to an outing. Two miles down the road, Woolworths was huge and busy. We gathered up some basics – bread, sugar, wine – and headed back to Fat Shite’s complementary car. And then he did something that cemented my opinion of him forever.

“So can I get ten bucks off you for petrol?”

I had a cigarette.

Touchdown

As an Irish girl just out of college, I’m finding it extremely difficult to adjust to the ways of the dreaded “real world”. My arts degree in English and Philosophy was fun but futile, and all I seemed to have earned from that time spent in third-level education was several embarrassing drunken stories, a long-suffering boyfriend and no prospect of future employment. The latter is due to the current Irish economic climate, might I add, and fully unrelated to the drunken stories.                

 Anyway, we did what every other young unemployed person does in Ireland, and bought our tickets to Australia. We travelled with another couple, Fat Swine and Sour Puss, and left in the first week of February of 2012, amid tearful goodbyes to family and friends.

We were delayed for three hours at our stop-over in Abu Dhabi and I smoked endless cigarette after cigarette in the stifling indoor airport smoking rooms.  Sour Puss was silent and sullen, and as the corresponding girlfriend, I had to attempt in vain to drag some conversation from her, while Fat Swine and The Boyfriend chatted amicably about how shit it was that the plane had been delayed. They were quickly sated when the airline handed us coupons for a free Burger King meal– we are Irish, after all. Finally, we boarded the plane and the first three hours were an absolute hell of turbulence and arm-rest-clutching from yours truly. The Boyfriend snored and farted loudly at my side.

We touched down in Tullamarine and eyed the sniffer dogs warily. I’ve seen enough of Nothing To Declare to scare myself stupid, innocent as I was. We passed through hassle-free and stepped out into the night air. The air was stifling and heavy. Fat Swine had organised a house to live in for the first month through the contacts he’d established applying for jobs at home in Ireland. The Boyfriend and I had booked a hotel and due to the delay, we had paid the two hundred dollars for a mere five hours in the bed. We watched as Fat Swine and Sour Puss were greeted at the Arrivals by a man in a cap and a suit with a name-placard. I smoked an entire Marlboro Light in one inhale as we watched them clamber into a limousine and drive off into the night. The Boyfriend and I hauled our luggage to the bus. We were shuffled to a station seven blocks away from our hotel – seven up-hill blocks. We arrived at the hotel and everyone was Asian and finding our accents impossible to comprehend. The Boyfriend drifted off to sleep within minutes. I looked out the window for a while at the tall buildings. Exhausted, my thoughts drifted back to that last tearful hug with my little sister and I welled up – as a girl does. Instinctively, I reached into my pocket and opened the box of cigarettes to gape, horrified, at its emptiness.

I opened my suitcase to put on my pyjamas.

And realised I’d forgotten to pack any.