Showing posts with label part time work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label part time work. Show all posts

Saturday 23 February 2013

A Job

I always seem to land on my feet in terms of getting jobs of one kind or another. Maybe it's because I wasn't fussy when I was younger. Work is work, and I've done cleaning jobs, I've driven a rickshaw and I worked three different jobs the Christmas of my second year of college. I have the kind of mind and personality where I like to be busy. I usually have dance classes, some sort of music related activity, school and work on the go.

So, since I moved here three weeks ago, I figured it was about time I maximised my productivity, since we actually have so little class to go to. Ballet classes-check. Copious amounts of flute playing and session searching-check (would be nice if the pubs still existed though). Job-well, now it's a check in that regard too.

I sent out two emails in my 'Great Search For Employment'. Out of those two emails, I now have one job. It's lucky that I've worked in such a myriad of jobs, because now when people read my cv they're willing to give me a go and know that, without too much worry or training, I will probably be able to do a good job straight away. And this is exactly how things worked out.

I had been emailing the manager of a venue to discuss coming in to see about a job, when, out of the blue yesterday I received an email saying that some of his staff were sick and he really needed someone to work, and would I mind coming in. Well, yeah, sure I don't mind. So I cycled over to this venue a few hours later, and just started working.

It was certainly sudden but bar work is bar work and aside from cocktails (not yet) I'm pretty experienced at every aspect of working in a bar. It would just be me and two other guys manning the bar, running food, washing glasses and doing kitchen porter duties. No pressure. I jumped right into it and the only aspect I found hard was ringing things in in the till and cashing things off. I'm used to macros, super up to date sleek software. This machine was from the stone age. I still don't know how to use it.

Obviously I don't have more than about 5 words of Danish yet, so this was a bit...daunting rather than difficult. People were willing to speak English to me, and I even had some initially reluctant middle aged men regaling me with tales of reading books about the Irish famine and how much they loved Ireland within a couple of hours. The Danes are very polite, trusting and generally accommodating, and because it's a bar, you're free to banter and be a little sassy, so not speaking the language is not so much rude (as it might be in any other customer service environment), but can actually be turned into a talking point.

That being said, I can't wait to learn some conversational Danish so I can get through exchanges simply and not stick out like a sore thumb. So, I suppose I have a job now. I don't want to work too much, because my costs are quite low right now and the rate of pay in Denmark is pretty good. But I need to pay rent, save something and generally be autonomous. And, it wasn't that hard to actually get a job at all. Things are looking up for me.