Workplace 28 - Kafe Rinse and Repeat

This may be just me but I now feel that anywhere that writes café with a ‘k’ should be a place to be avoided. You won’t find fun, quirky people there; you’ll find people that want to be fun and quirky but are instead insanely annoying. And, in this particular case, just thought it would bring them more money.

Villa and Hut Kafe is out at the DFO near the airport. They make amazing chai and, when I was there at least, pretty good food focusing on unusual offerings and foreign flavours. I liked it. The owner had previously been an IT  consultant but decided he could make more money buying a café. Please see this post for my opinion on owners like this. So the place ran a little weirdly but was pretty good. 

The middle aged owner spent most of his time trying to chat up the younger wait staff or sitting in the corner swearing at his laptop, occasionally coming over to make inexplicable minor changes to the systems.

There was nothing really extraordinary about this place, whenever people asked I’d just tell them it’s exactly like working at any other café, just different coloured uniform. The only thing that really stands out to me was one of the other staff members. She was one of the most annoying people I’ve ever worked with. Just a regular pain in the ass. I’m pretty certain I quit just to get away from her. She went through 4 house mates in the few months that I was there and could never understand why they all moved in, and then out again so quickly.

Anyway.

Just another hospitality job in a café, they’re fun, short term and plentiful. If you like chai, go check this place out.

Workplace 27 - AHG-MEFF

Fresh out of studying, I managed to score the sweetest position possible. Most of the students in my class had seemed to think that working in festivals would be the cream of the events crop and I was offered the job of Crew Manager for Easterfest. I’d volunteered there the previous year so they knew me and when I wrote and asked for work experience, offered me a job instead. Woo! 
 

In February I moved up to Toowoomba for 3 mths, moving in with the parents of some friends of friends. They were away so I didn’t even meet them for the first month.

Working for Easterfest was hectic but fun. That first year I had no idea what goes into making a festival happen and the Crew Manager position was a new one so everything was untested and fresh. A new database system called Tracker had been developed to coordinate the hundreds of volunteers that make up the Easterfest Crew and I developed a few systems of my own to help with stuff that was a little more outside of the box.

Easterfest treat their crew a little unusually from most festivals in that it offers cheap meals and a separate crew area, crew shirts available at a few prices, families get special treatment and there is a range of accommodation options available depending on various factors. It gets complex. I worked for Easterfest for 3 months from February to the end of April and spent a lot of time asking questions, rechecking data from the system and answering hundreds of random emails from potential crew, as well as sourcing and researching new ways to recruit people. But mostly, I typed. I entered hundreds of forms into Tracker, Name, Address, Email…. Five pages of information to be entered for each person and then they got emailed, invoiced for meal/shirt payment, and a whole list of other things for every single person. I can still recognise most of the names of our crew and am so good at typing now!

As festival drew nearer the staff’s days got longer, no one really noticed as 5pm came and went, most nights someone would take a dinner order and bring back food which we ate at our desks, still trying to finish a mountain of work in a molehill of time. Everyone’s exhausted, stressed, and nerves very easily get frayed. It’s a crazy time.

Fortunately, if you’re an event person at least, it’s also fantastic. There’s a rush of adrenaline that happens from the impossibility of it all and small victories or unexpected wins can take on huge significance. You become a vital part of something so much bigger than yourself, the team needs you and you need the team to be the best – even better than the best. It’s challenging and draining and you race through highs and lows like never before, constantly pushing yourself further than you’d ever tried because stopping wasn’t an option. It has to get done and it has to be right. No if’s, buts or maybes.

 So after that serious rant, onto the fun stuff.

The year was 2007. I didn’t know much, I screwed up a lot, probably more than I still realise. But the festival was amazing, the people are some of the greatest people I know and the experience was incredible. (I’m going to have to buy some more adjectives at this rate…)

Working in festivals is a fantastic job but is definitely not for everyone. People who aren’t commited to giving a million percent and putting the job before pretty much everything will only frustrate the rest of the team. You have to do it for the love, not the money. In my experience, getting into festivals involves a lot of 3 months contracts, a lot of moving around, a lot of being unemployed in between gigs and a lot of having no idea what you’re doing. It’s an admin job most of the time then for 3 weeks it will be a tradie job, the only job description is ‘do what needs to be done’.

This is events. The show must go on.

Workplace 26 - Atmospheric

If you’re day at work has never included paying for parking a km away from your work, bomb and bag checks on arrival and abuse in a range of languages then you've clearly never worked in a café at Brisbane Airport.

Let’s go thru the average day:

Leave home – the trip can take anywhere from 15mins to an hr depending on the day of the week.

Arrive at the Staff Parking Area – the carpark requires a security pass to enter and is the furthest away from the airport

Spend ten minutes walking to work.

By now I was usually late, and hot and sweaty from the walk. This ensured that I was picked for the bomb check after I’d waited in the lines for my handbag and shoes to be checked.

Arrive at work, starting set out food and warming up the coffee machine. Deal with the breakfast rush of people, every single one of whom complains loudly about the price. Smile and don’t stab anyone.

This continues for about ten hours, incorporating lunch and dinner.

Walk back to your car, hoping someone else gets there at a similar time because you left the swipe card in your car. Again. Sit outside the gates, contemplating climbing the fence until someone else arrives.

Drive home, hoping peak hour is gone.

It’s a riot. The pay is, like the casino, a bit over average to make up for the inconveniences and the staff turnover, like the casino, is a bit over average because of the inconveniences.

Days off are completely banned over any holidays or weekends, if you’re rostered on – you are on. No exceptions. The group that runs the café owns about half a dozen food/drink outlets throughout the café so you could be rostered on at any of them. Some of the venues were bars and service started when the first flight left, about 7am. Getting people drunk at 8 in the morning was a bit unusual but you get used to it.

The most memorable thing about my time there were the other staff. There was one lady who was a compulsive liar and every shift came in with a fantastic new story of things that she’d done or had happened to her. It made for interesting listening at first but rapidly grew very annoying. No conversation could occur without her topping the topic in fairly unbelievable ways.

Another coworker used to turn up drunk, every morning. I once commented on how maybe drinking a six pack on his morning commute as breakfast wasn’t the best life choice and was absolutely slammed by another employee, defending him as I had ‘no idea what he was going thru’. I stand by my criticism.

 

I didn’t work too long here, maybe a month or two. My downfall at this position came when I applied for a weekend night off to go to a concert I had tickets to and they said no – it’s a weekend ofcourse not. So the next shift I brought in all my uniforms and a spare set of clothes and at the end of the shift when the boss said “See you Saturday afternoon” I said “Here’s my uniforms, I’ll drop my swipe card off later. Bye!” Honestly one of my favourite quits ever.

If you thrive on conflict and love having people yell at you about things like meal size, international exchange rates and Amex transaction fees then this is definitely your favourite job ever. 

If you would like to not be on the fast train to hating everyone, maybe don’t go for this one.