WORKING 9 to 5 would be a bonus. But now I've finally secured some full time employment, full time is exactly what it is.
I leave the house at 8.20am and get home for 6pm and the days are long for this working girl who hasn't earned a cent since December 23.
I know, I know... I shouldn't complain. I'm on the ladder to employment success so I should consider myself lucky. But half of me just wants to put the clock back and have me sitting back at my Leader workstation looking after all my loyal correspondents and having the odd daily giggle or two, three, four, five or six with my colleagues.
I have made the right decision in coming out here and I realise it's going to be difficult to re-discover a mirror image of the fantastic job I voluntarily gave up - but the facts remain ... it's taken the best part of three months for me to be back on the payroll and I thought finding work would be so, so much easier. I mean... I'm such a good worker. Loyal. Trustworthy. Dependable. Punctual. Flexible. Personable. But work for me out here hasn't been forthcoming. At all.
In fact, a part time office role I know of has, in the past three days, attracted some 180 applications. Competition is fierce and the pressure is on but having spent the best part of two months on a daily prowl of the pages of the Australian job websites, paid work is minimal and you should count yourself lucky if you've got it.
So I do. Count myself lucky. I'm working at a fast-paced publishing company and have been thrown in right at the deep end. I showed up to clock on well within time on Monday morning all bright eyed and bushy tailed only to have the wind taken out of my sails after the MD told me my fellow 'graphic designer' was off on holiday for the week. Sink or swim were the options so I got my waterwings out of my handbag and sailed through the week. I say 'sailed' in the broadest sense... spluttered would be more like it.
So, I survived the week ... just. I now know all there is to about Adobe Photoshop, tifs, jps and artwork to follow. Granted, I had a fair understanding of all this before but flying solo and coming up with the goods single-handedly is a totally different ball game. I was spoilt at the Leader. I had my picture desk colleagues at my constant beck and call and I only wish they'd been with me this week to help me in my 42 and a half hours of need...
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
On the bottom rung of the employment ladder
TOMORROW, I will be the new girl at the office. I've landed a job at a publishing company and to be honest, I'm feeling a little nervous.
Not only do I still need the sat-nav system to help me get there, I also need to get the boys to school, drive the 20km trip, find a parking space and hoof it to the office. And all by 9am. However will I manage?
Nostalgically looking back with fondness, I had it easy in the UK. A 4-minute car ride separated my kitchen sink from my community news computer and there was on-site car parking aplenty.
It's been a long time coming, but me back in a job has brought with it relief. Not so much in the cash stakes but it was getting to the stage where my get up and go had got up, legged it round the block a couple of times, come back and locked the door on itself.
I heard one sad story a few nights ago in that a British family had come out on a sponsorship visa, the husband's firm offering him the chance to relocate to their Aussie branch.
They'd been here a month and he was made redundant, leaving them with no other option than to return to their starting blocks over the water.
I would have been devastated if that had happened to us. The first month is most definitely the hardest and to get through that and then have such a shocking piece of news is hard. Their container of personal belongings was probably just docking as they were boarding the plane back to British soil.
Due to red tape and a lack of identity, it took us the best part of a month to simply get a mobile phone, car and secure a house to rent. Then followed the boys starting school and learning to start again in building roads into new friendships.
Even I have stood at the school pretty much waiting for someone to make eye contact with me and strike up a conversation and it's hard. But after muscling my way in on a couple of social events, I can now stand and chat at the school gate with the rest of the parents. The ice has been broken.
There's loads of Brits at the school our boys go to and sometimes it can feel like 'Us and Oz' but I never wanted purely to rotate in Pommy circles.
I wanted to get out here and put myself about with the locals and it's only now, some five months in, that I'm no longer feeling like the square peg in a round hole and fitting in is becoming a tad easier, thanks to some key people who have taken on board what we're going through in carving out a new life.
Not only do I still need the sat-nav system to help me get there, I also need to get the boys to school, drive the 20km trip, find a parking space and hoof it to the office. And all by 9am. However will I manage?
Nostalgically looking back with fondness, I had it easy in the UK. A 4-minute car ride separated my kitchen sink from my community news computer and there was on-site car parking aplenty.
It's been a long time coming, but me back in a job has brought with it relief. Not so much in the cash stakes but it was getting to the stage where my get up and go had got up, legged it round the block a couple of times, come back and locked the door on itself.
I heard one sad story a few nights ago in that a British family had come out on a sponsorship visa, the husband's firm offering him the chance to relocate to their Aussie branch.
They'd been here a month and he was made redundant, leaving them with no other option than to return to their starting blocks over the water.
I would have been devastated if that had happened to us. The first month is most definitely the hardest and to get through that and then have such a shocking piece of news is hard. Their container of personal belongings was probably just docking as they were boarding the plane back to British soil.
Due to red tape and a lack of identity, it took us the best part of a month to simply get a mobile phone, car and secure a house to rent. Then followed the boys starting school and learning to start again in building roads into new friendships.
Even I have stood at the school pretty much waiting for someone to make eye contact with me and strike up a conversation and it's hard. But after muscling my way in on a couple of social events, I can now stand and chat at the school gate with the rest of the parents. The ice has been broken.
There's loads of Brits at the school our boys go to and sometimes it can feel like 'Us and Oz' but I never wanted purely to rotate in Pommy circles.
I wanted to get out here and put myself about with the locals and it's only now, some five months in, that I'm no longer feeling like the square peg in a round hole and fitting in is becoming a tad easier, thanks to some key people who have taken on board what we're going through in carving out a new life.
Saturday, 13 June 2009
WE made an impromptu visit into the city this weekend.
Other half always tends to get these hair-brained "let's go-Go-GO" ideas when I'm suffering a hangover so after a couple of Panadols, we set off.
Leaving the sunshine of the peninsula behind, we found some hotel accommodation and unpacked our toothbrushes. We'd been told that a trip to the casino was a must-do so we gathered some directions from the hotel reception staff and headed off.
There was just one problem. The outfit I was wearing when we left home - in the sunshine - soon deemed totally the wrong one after we found ourselves walking the streets in the rain.
Sporting white trousers and flip-flops, sorry, thongs, I found myself aqua-planing my way around the city's walkways and felt no way as chic and cosmopolitan as my tram-riding counterparts as I squelched around in my mud-splashed and now virtually transparent lower body clothing.
I always wear the wrong thing. Take today for example... I've sat with the laptop for the lion's share of daylight hours looking for jobs and checking emails, wearing clothes obviously but nothing on my feet.
Too idle to make a sidestep into the robe for a pair of woolly slipper socks, I sat there tapping away at the keys until my extremities started to turn blue. At one point, I started to look somewhat patriotic, what with the white of my skin and the red of my fingertips after a seven hour stint at the QWERTY. And as for the stars ... I was seeing those as well after being on the jobhunting websites for the day.
I wonder which path fate will set me on in the world of work. I could really do with persuading my former editors back there if they can put it to the Board to set me up to do my community news pages remotely from 10,000 miles away. It's not such an impossibility. Not with today's technology. Surely??
I would just be sitting in a different room, in a different time zone with a different deadline. But the same old me giving the same one hundred and ten per cent.
All those in favour, lobby me at mandi.pugh@gmail.com and I'll pass your comments on...
Other half always tends to get these hair-brained "let's go-Go-GO" ideas when I'm suffering a hangover so after a couple of Panadols, we set off.
Leaving the sunshine of the peninsula behind, we found some hotel accommodation and unpacked our toothbrushes. We'd been told that a trip to the casino was a must-do so we gathered some directions from the hotel reception staff and headed off.
There was just one problem. The outfit I was wearing when we left home - in the sunshine - soon deemed totally the wrong one after we found ourselves walking the streets in the rain.
Sporting white trousers and flip-flops, sorry, thongs, I found myself aqua-planing my way around the city's walkways and felt no way as chic and cosmopolitan as my tram-riding counterparts as I squelched around in my mud-splashed and now virtually transparent lower body clothing.
I always wear the wrong thing. Take today for example... I've sat with the laptop for the lion's share of daylight hours looking for jobs and checking emails, wearing clothes obviously but nothing on my feet.
Too idle to make a sidestep into the robe for a pair of woolly slipper socks, I sat there tapping away at the keys until my extremities started to turn blue. At one point, I started to look somewhat patriotic, what with the white of my skin and the red of my fingertips after a seven hour stint at the QWERTY. And as for the stars ... I was seeing those as well after being on the jobhunting websites for the day.
I wonder which path fate will set me on in the world of work. I could really do with persuading my former editors back there if they can put it to the Board to set me up to do my community news pages remotely from 10,000 miles away. It's not such an impossibility. Not with today's technology. Surely??
I would just be sitting in a different room, in a different time zone with a different deadline. But the same old me giving the same one hundred and ten per cent.
All those in favour, lobby me at mandi.pugh@gmail.com and I'll pass your comments on...
Monday, 8 June 2009
Shower sharing
I ALWAYS said I'd feel like a fully-fledged Aussie after the completion of three things... continuous barbecues, being bitten by something and sharing showers.
Now, as liberated as the latter sounds, it's not so big a deal. I frequently share my showers these days. Not with a handsome stranger or anything like that, but a mop bucket. A lowly mop bucket. A piece of plastic that is systematically saving the planet. Or so I'd like to think.
Every morning, we greet eachother and purely by waiting for the warm water to filter through to the showerhead, it's upto the halfway level and rising.
Seeing as though, being an even-numbered house, we are restricted to watering the garden between the hours of 6am and 8am on a Wednesday and a Saturday, I do my bit in all things environmental by chucking the daily regime remnants over the natives. Plants that is, not the neighbours.
But as summer is now a long distant memory, winter watering of all things green can take a back seat. June marks the official start of winter - which I continue to struggle to get my Welsh head around - and I'm told that there's "worse wintry weather to come in July and August."
Worse wintry weather? In July and August?? That's an outrage. I'm simply not yet adjusted to having bad weather in what is usually so pleasant in UK weather terms.
But that said, I suppose when the locals expect "worse wintry weather", they actually get about 12C. So armed with that information, we've spent the day hot-footing it around the homemaker centres to pick up a tumble dryer. I've lasted until now before investing in the luxury, but I'd simply had a bellyful of hanging three loads of wet washing over a cheap and flimsy clothes horse, situated strategically over one of the tiny ducted heating vents in the floor.
Going back to the being bitten bit, I spent a couple of hours weeding the garden the other day that resulted in me itching the living daylights out of what I thought was a midgy bit on my foot. 24-hours later, the scratchy site had swelled up into a very attractive sort of blister. Ever the optimist, I continued to splatter antiseptic cream on it in the hope it would go away, although it didn't help my mental state with husband came home from work telling me he'd been told it was probably a nibble from a bull-ant or a white tailed spider. A spider bite?
If I'd been in UK, where life-threatening and killer spiders were regular visitors to my bushes, I would've been down the doctors' like a dose of salts but here, the £65 fee you have to cough up for an appointment kept me firmly at home. Being an optimist.
I was told by friends to keep an eye on the swelling and to get to the medical centre should it get worse. But, as I sit here, tapping this piece out, I remain alive and kicking and still enjoying the Queen's birthday bank holiday. Now, why don't they have one of these in the land of her residence?
Happy birthday Ma'am... fancy a tinny?
Now, as liberated as the latter sounds, it's not so big a deal. I frequently share my showers these days. Not with a handsome stranger or anything like that, but a mop bucket. A lowly mop bucket. A piece of plastic that is systematically saving the planet. Or so I'd like to think.
Every morning, we greet eachother and purely by waiting for the warm water to filter through to the showerhead, it's upto the halfway level and rising.
Seeing as though, being an even-numbered house, we are restricted to watering the garden between the hours of 6am and 8am on a Wednesday and a Saturday, I do my bit in all things environmental by chucking the daily regime remnants over the natives. Plants that is, not the neighbours.
But as summer is now a long distant memory, winter watering of all things green can take a back seat. June marks the official start of winter - which I continue to struggle to get my Welsh head around - and I'm told that there's "worse wintry weather to come in July and August."
Worse wintry weather? In July and August?? That's an outrage. I'm simply not yet adjusted to having bad weather in what is usually so pleasant in UK weather terms.
But that said, I suppose when the locals expect "worse wintry weather", they actually get about 12C. So armed with that information, we've spent the day hot-footing it around the homemaker centres to pick up a tumble dryer. I've lasted until now before investing in the luxury, but I'd simply had a bellyful of hanging three loads of wet washing over a cheap and flimsy clothes horse, situated strategically over one of the tiny ducted heating vents in the floor.
Going back to the being bitten bit, I spent a couple of hours weeding the garden the other day that resulted in me itching the living daylights out of what I thought was a midgy bit on my foot. 24-hours later, the scratchy site had swelled up into a very attractive sort of blister. Ever the optimist, I continued to splatter antiseptic cream on it in the hope it would go away, although it didn't help my mental state with husband came home from work telling me he'd been told it was probably a nibble from a bull-ant or a white tailed spider. A spider bite?
If I'd been in UK, where life-threatening and killer spiders were regular visitors to my bushes, I would've been down the doctors' like a dose of salts but here, the £65 fee you have to cough up for an appointment kept me firmly at home. Being an optimist.
I was told by friends to keep an eye on the swelling and to get to the medical centre should it get worse. But, as I sit here, tapping this piece out, I remain alive and kicking and still enjoying the Queen's birthday bank holiday. Now, why don't they have one of these in the land of her residence?
Happy birthday Ma'am... fancy a tinny?
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Preparing for the Poms
LATE autumn in Melbourne remains a very mixed sort of bag. There are no rustic leaves in piles on the ground or that biting sort of coldness that come hand in hand with the same season in UK and some days can even reach degreeage of 22.
Take today for example. Husband left for work at 4.30am, welcomed to his car by a layer of windscreen frost. This has been the case for a week or two. Or so he tells me. Personally I would have no idea of anything that happens at that time of the new day so I take his word for it.
So, for the walk to school, I got myself togged up in my woolly finest, boots and furry collared gilet that I've been told, on more than one occasion, that I look like a character from the Flintstones. And I'd like to think Wilma more so than Fred....
When we left the house at 8.45am, there was a smattering of dew on the grass and that crisp sort of air that gets deep into your lungs. I'm usually back within 10 minutes so the air ducted heating stayed on to greet me on my return. But by this stage, I'd had a brisk walk in the cool air - in my woolly finest, boots and furry collared gilet - and to open the door to an artificial 30-degree blast had me stripping off sharpish.
The days are bizarre and have me scratching my head at what to cover myself with each day. Just now, I'm on my third change of outfit for the day and before dusk falls, you can be sure I'll be back at the couture starting blocks - all Flintstone-esque.
When I'm chatting to friends and family back there, they're shocked when I tell them it's on the cool side just now. I think the word "Australia" conjurs up images of year-round thermometer busting temperatures with balmy evenings down at the beach.
But down in Victoria, we don't get that endless and bountiful supply of Vitamin D like our neighbours in the north. We simply have to boost our intake with copious amounts of salmon, mackerel and Swiss cheese.
Now we're getting more settled by the minute, we're more than ready to take in our first batch of visitors ... but the timing is all wrong. Without the weather, the beach is pretty much a no-go, without the sun, a visit to the city's ice-bar would be out of the question and without the guarantee of warmth on your bones, who wants to sit on a plane for 21 hours to go somewhere that's climate replicates the one they've just left?
As we wait patiently for spring in September, we look forward to welcoming our first confirmed visitors in October. The golf courses and peninsula wineries will be exhausted by our visits and maybe even the kayak we shipped over will get an airing at the local beach. Bring on the Brits...
Take today for example. Husband left for work at 4.30am, welcomed to his car by a layer of windscreen frost. This has been the case for a week or two. Or so he tells me. Personally I would have no idea of anything that happens at that time of the new day so I take his word for it.
So, for the walk to school, I got myself togged up in my woolly finest, boots and furry collared gilet that I've been told, on more than one occasion, that I look like a character from the Flintstones. And I'd like to think Wilma more so than Fred....
When we left the house at 8.45am, there was a smattering of dew on the grass and that crisp sort of air that gets deep into your lungs. I'm usually back within 10 minutes so the air ducted heating stayed on to greet me on my return. But by this stage, I'd had a brisk walk in the cool air - in my woolly finest, boots and furry collared gilet - and to open the door to an artificial 30-degree blast had me stripping off sharpish.
The days are bizarre and have me scratching my head at what to cover myself with each day. Just now, I'm on my third change of outfit for the day and before dusk falls, you can be sure I'll be back at the couture starting blocks - all Flintstone-esque.
When I'm chatting to friends and family back there, they're shocked when I tell them it's on the cool side just now. I think the word "Australia" conjurs up images of year-round thermometer busting temperatures with balmy evenings down at the beach.
But down in Victoria, we don't get that endless and bountiful supply of Vitamin D like our neighbours in the north. We simply have to boost our intake with copious amounts of salmon, mackerel and Swiss cheese.
Now we're getting more settled by the minute, we're more than ready to take in our first batch of visitors ... but the timing is all wrong. Without the weather, the beach is pretty much a no-go, without the sun, a visit to the city's ice-bar would be out of the question and without the guarantee of warmth on your bones, who wants to sit on a plane for 21 hours to go somewhere that's climate replicates the one they've just left?
As we wait patiently for spring in September, we look forward to welcoming our first confirmed visitors in October. The golf courses and peninsula wineries will be exhausted by our visits and maybe even the kayak we shipped over will get an airing at the local beach. Bring on the Brits...
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