Day 23: Let's Get Down to Business

Having spent the better part of the last three weeks in Sydney screwing around and being a tourist, I decided that it was time to exercise the “work” part of my “working holiday visa.” On Monday I left the city and moved to a suburb about an hour away called Collaroy, a very small town located on a beach favored by the locals. The hostel in the area advertised as being a great place to find work, ranging from full time jobs to cash-in-hand one day work, and considering the fact that I’ve blown through over 50% of my life savings already, I was ready for any job I could find.

My first two days in Collaroy were spent distributing resumes. In those two days, I visited two major malls, three separate towns, and inquired at close to 50 stores, and by the end of the day, I had only three good leads (good in that they had made vague comments about looking for new hires in the near future). I returned to my hostel after the second day, finally understanding the meaning of the word “recession,” to find a posting asking for one laborer for the next day. I immediately jumped on the phone, and spoke with Michael, a man with his own landscaping business. He was looking for someone to put in one full days work, and was offering $120 in cash. Despite a pick up time of 6:30 am, I was more than happy to accept.

When Michael first rolled up in his truck, I began having second thoughts. He was a fairly serious, quiet guy upon first appraisal, with a shaved head, several tattoos, and an ear piercing. The 45 minute car ride to the rural house he was landscaping for passed almost in silence as I wondered what I had gotten myself in to. Despite my fear of skinheads however, I was still willing to do gardening work for $15 an hour, and in retrospect, it was the right choice. Mike was quiet, but generally friendly, and didn’t seem too interested in Hitler or white power based on my brief conversations with him. I spent half of the day weeding a tediously large section of his client’s garden, and the other half un-potting and planting new plants.

The highlight of the day came in the middle of the mourning, as we were digging holes for the new plants. Mike, being the quiet man that he is, nearly neglected to tell me that he had accidentally dug into the burrow of a funnel web spider. As a self-admitted arachnophobe, being two feet from the worlds most lethal spider was slightly uncomfortable, especially when Mike decided to simply release the spider on the other side of the street instead of killing it.

At the end of the day, I returned to my hostel covered in dirt, smelling like manure, and feeling $120 richer. My introduction to working life in Australia had been about as unglamorous as it gets, but on the bright side, I had a new skill to add to my resume.