Thursday, May 03, 2007
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God
It's a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, one which definitely speaks to me!
This has been a weird week in Cairns. I was offered 2 jobs in one day - which never happens to me - and then forced to choose between them. One, an assistant receptionist position at a girls-only hostel, was unpaid but would have given me free accommodation, although the hours would have made it difficult to take a second paying job. The other was housekeeping at the hostel I was staying in, for $13 an hour (by way of comparison, office temp work in Australian cities nets about $20 and hour). No accommodation discount, but at least it was cash. So I accepted that and felt a little guilty about burning my bridges with the other place - although when they'd been talking me through reception duties, a horrible argument occurred which made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
Part of our training when I worked in medical libraries in London hospitals dealt with conflict resolution with difficult customers, and very useful it proved to be! Basically, if someone comes in with a raised voice complaining about something, you do not shout back. When you lose your cool, you lose. It's much better to speak very softly and calmly, attempt to understand their point of view, and try to resolve the issues so that neither side huffs off resentfully and loses face. Well ... that didn't happen. It was astonishing how quickly the bad atmosphere escalated.
The backpacker complained that she couldn't call the airport shuttle, and had lost her money in the payphone, requesting that the receptionist call the shuttle for her (a service that most hostels will do for free.) The managers, however, clearly took against her tone of voice, decided she must have been either lying or incapable of using the payphone, and maintained that they didn't have to call for her as it would cost them 50 cents for the phonecall. She claimed that they gave bad service. They responded that they didn't want her type in the hostel, and she could leave if she didn't like it.
This debate woke up a girl who'd been sleeping, saw the backpacker run out in tears at their deliberate unhelpfulness, and lived on as they rehashed the argument repeatedly, saying "You see what we have to put up with?" I felt pretty awkward - had it been me, with my aversion to vicious arguments, at reception, I'd have made the call for her just to keep the peace, maybe asking her for 50 cents to cover the cost. The thing is, she has now gone off and told her friends "You don't want to stay here!" - and maybe even told the Lonely Planet, the lifeblood of all tourist ventures in Australia!
So, I took the cleaning job. After 1 day of training, I was basically I was working alone cleaning the hostel for 4 straight days, delegating jobs such as hoovering to another girl who helped out for 2 hours a day. A couple of times, the supervisor pointed out things I'd missed: a plastic bag hung on the back of a door, or hairballs in the shower drains. So I put on rubber gloves and knelt down to disentangle them from the plugholes, all the while thinking "Yuck yuck yuck, I can't believe that I'm doing this for $10 an hour after tax - with no discount on the $25 a night dorm room!" For all that, though, the shared bathrooms scrubbed daily were still cleaner than the Worst Hotel in New Zealand (TM) where I worked for over 2 months before I got wise. The housekeeping mantra there was, "It doesn't have to be clean, it just has to look clean. With no Hairs."
After my first day off, the manager fired me, informing me that I paid insufficient attention to detail, and that the job was not for everyone, and not to feel bad about it. Of course, I felt truly horrible! But I talked it over with my dorm roommates, and they thought it unfair that someone had spotted mistakes but hadn't told me, so I could fix them, instead complaining about me behind my back to the manager. Interestingly, in the morning when our dorm was cleaned, I said "Morning!" to the supervisor, who just grunted and couldn't even meet my eyes. Seeing him later showing my Replacement around, I thought I heard an Aussie accent. So my conspiracy theory is that I was kicked out to make way for a local, probably a friend of his. Locals are better because they don't just up sticks and move to a new town when they're put upon. As for me ... I'm flying to Darwin!
My day off was awesome, though. I went to the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Centre to see singing, dancing and fire-making as well as about 20 turtles who gathered under a bridge a small girl was spitting off (why would they be attracted by human spit? They rose from the depths of the lake to cluster around it!) and over to the pretty town of Kuranda via SkyRail, a unique cable car that swings you over 7km of rainforest canopy. Looking down over Barron Falls was truly spectacular, but the sweetest thing was a bright turquoise morpho butterfly that fluttered around the treetops just beneath me. Kuranda itself was quite touristy, although I liked their ironwork street furniture with little animals and birds. Coming back to Cairns on the little tourist train through the mountains was grindingly slow and fairly noisy - there was a commentary but we couldn't really hear it due to the squealing wheels. Apparently it hasn't run for several months due to a landslip, so although I felt excited to be on a train again, I'd only recommend it to real railway fans!
I'm staying in a much friendlier (and cheaper) working hostel, Shenannigans, going to Reef Teach tonight, and sailing out on a Great Barrier Reef snorkelling trip around Green Island tomorrow. I will be fortified with the strongest sea-sickness tablets available and a large bottle of ginger ale, in addition to one of those motion sickness preventing wristbands, if I can borrow one from somebody at the hostel (yes, I'm covering all the bases with folk remedies as well as medical ones!)
This has been a weird week in Cairns. I was offered 2 jobs in one day - which never happens to me - and then forced to choose between them. One, an assistant receptionist position at a girls-only hostel, was unpaid but would have given me free accommodation, although the hours would have made it difficult to take a second paying job. The other was housekeeping at the hostel I was staying in, for $13 an hour (by way of comparison, office temp work in Australian cities nets about $20 and hour). No accommodation discount, but at least it was cash. So I accepted that and felt a little guilty about burning my bridges with the other place - although when they'd been talking me through reception duties, a horrible argument occurred which made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
Part of our training when I worked in medical libraries in London hospitals dealt with conflict resolution with difficult customers, and very useful it proved to be! Basically, if someone comes in with a raised voice complaining about something, you do not shout back. When you lose your cool, you lose. It's much better to speak very softly and calmly, attempt to understand their point of view, and try to resolve the issues so that neither side huffs off resentfully and loses face. Well ... that didn't happen. It was astonishing how quickly the bad atmosphere escalated.
The backpacker complained that she couldn't call the airport shuttle, and had lost her money in the payphone, requesting that the receptionist call the shuttle for her (a service that most hostels will do for free.) The managers, however, clearly took against her tone of voice, decided she must have been either lying or incapable of using the payphone, and maintained that they didn't have to call for her as it would cost them 50 cents for the phonecall. She claimed that they gave bad service. They responded that they didn't want her type in the hostel, and she could leave if she didn't like it.
This debate woke up a girl who'd been sleeping, saw the backpacker run out in tears at their deliberate unhelpfulness, and lived on as they rehashed the argument repeatedly, saying "You see what we have to put up with?" I felt pretty awkward - had it been me, with my aversion to vicious arguments, at reception, I'd have made the call for her just to keep the peace, maybe asking her for 50 cents to cover the cost. The thing is, she has now gone off and told her friends "You don't want to stay here!" - and maybe even told the Lonely Planet, the lifeblood of all tourist ventures in Australia!
So, I took the cleaning job. After 1 day of training, I was basically I was working alone cleaning the hostel for 4 straight days, delegating jobs such as hoovering to another girl who helped out for 2 hours a day. A couple of times, the supervisor pointed out things I'd missed: a plastic bag hung on the back of a door, or hairballs in the shower drains. So I put on rubber gloves and knelt down to disentangle them from the plugholes, all the while thinking "Yuck yuck yuck, I can't believe that I'm doing this for $10 an hour after tax - with no discount on the $25 a night dorm room!" For all that, though, the shared bathrooms scrubbed daily were still cleaner than the Worst Hotel in New Zealand (TM) where I worked for over 2 months before I got wise. The housekeeping mantra there was, "It doesn't have to be clean, it just has to look clean. With no Hairs."
After my first day off, the manager fired me, informing me that I paid insufficient attention to detail, and that the job was not for everyone, and not to feel bad about it. Of course, I felt truly horrible! But I talked it over with my dorm roommates, and they thought it unfair that someone had spotted mistakes but hadn't told me, so I could fix them, instead complaining about me behind my back to the manager. Interestingly, in the morning when our dorm was cleaned, I said "Morning!" to the supervisor, who just grunted and couldn't even meet my eyes. Seeing him later showing my Replacement around, I thought I heard an Aussie accent. So my conspiracy theory is that I was kicked out to make way for a local, probably a friend of his. Locals are better because they don't just up sticks and move to a new town when they're put upon. As for me ... I'm flying to Darwin!
My day off was awesome, though. I went to the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Centre to see singing, dancing and fire-making as well as about 20 turtles who gathered under a bridge a small girl was spitting off (why would they be attracted by human spit? They rose from the depths of the lake to cluster around it!) and over to the pretty town of Kuranda via SkyRail, a unique cable car that swings you over 7km of rainforest canopy. Looking down over Barron Falls was truly spectacular, but the sweetest thing was a bright turquoise morpho butterfly that fluttered around the treetops just beneath me. Kuranda itself was quite touristy, although I liked their ironwork street furniture with little animals and birds. Coming back to Cairns on the little tourist train through the mountains was grindingly slow and fairly noisy - there was a commentary but we couldn't really hear it due to the squealing wheels. Apparently it hasn't run for several months due to a landslip, so although I felt excited to be on a train again, I'd only recommend it to real railway fans!
I'm staying in a much friendlier (and cheaper) working hostel, Shenannigans, going to Reef Teach tonight, and sailing out on a Great Barrier Reef snorkelling trip around Green Island tomorrow. I will be fortified with the strongest sea-sickness tablets available and a large bottle of ginger ale, in addition to one of those motion sickness preventing wristbands, if I can borrow one from somebody at the hostel (yes, I'm covering all the bases with folk remedies as well as medical ones!)
Labels: Cairns, conflict resolution, conspiracy theories, exotic fauna and flora, folk remedies, tourism
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Thoughts on interviewing
Today I've had my first interview by email. It's a bit different to meeting musicians in person, where you pick up cues from their interactions, body language, clothes, whether they spend ages ripping up sugar packets, all of which can add interest to the final article. Even in phone interviews, where there's still the flow of conversation, you can ask the interviewee to expand on or explain what they're trying to say, pick up humour and what they really feel from the tone of their voices (or whether, naming no names, it's 1pm and they're stoned off their heads), to spell out the names of the obscure bands they cite as their influences - and they can speak to the moment, like Die Roten Punkte yesterday: "We're in a phone box in Keith, Astrid is doing the robot on the pavement ... there's an old couple walking past giving us strange looks, I guess they don't see many international rock'n'roll stars here..."
Writing out questions for Laura Love made me really think hard about what kind of answers I needed, and also about how I should most respectfully phrase my questions - especially when asking about how a particularly difficult upbringing had shaped her today both as a woman and a musician. One particular story mentioned in her biography is just horrific, and I'd feel intrusive about bringing it up and forcing her to recount such a traumatic memory. Her CD, You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes, is really, scarily good. On the one hand, it's great to be able to say to someone that their music, or art, or whatever they've created, has really touched you. On the other hand, they must hear that a lot, and I'm trying to be professional here (she says, three bags of groceries spilling around her feet in an internet cafe, the milk already warmed to room temperature.)
Apropos of nothing, a phrase that you probably never want to hear resounded around the tree-lined calm of Unley this evening. My housemate Pete has his plaster cast off and is getting back into his professional life ... as a lawyer. And he's relishing it. There are moments when he looks truly piratical, with his dark eyes flashing dramatically above a pile of paperwork, especially when uttering with relish a phrase as sinister as:
"I'm gonna charge like a wounded bull."
Pause, gentle reader, to allow a shudder down your spine.
Unley is a strange suburb. The power blackouts that plague Adelaide never affect us. The council offers increasingly unlikely excuses for these, ranging from the wrong kind of trees inconsiderately dropping branches, to, I don't know, drop-bears. Yet somehow our street lights shine on. Pete's conspiracy theory puts it down to the concentration of dignitaries, high earners, and Freemasons in the area - and if you've read Alan Moore's outstanding graphic novel "From Hell" - I'm not talking about that film remake - you may well believe it. I prefer to attribute it to more positive things, such as a number of powerful leylines running through Unley and converging on the nexus of power for all of South Australia. I am, of course, referring to Haigh's Chocolate Factory.
Writing out questions for Laura Love made me really think hard about what kind of answers I needed, and also about how I should most respectfully phrase my questions - especially when asking about how a particularly difficult upbringing had shaped her today both as a woman and a musician. One particular story mentioned in her biography is just horrific, and I'd feel intrusive about bringing it up and forcing her to recount such a traumatic memory. Her CD, You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes, is really, scarily good. On the one hand, it's great to be able to say to someone that their music, or art, or whatever they've created, has really touched you. On the other hand, they must hear that a lot, and I'm trying to be professional here (she says, three bags of groceries spilling around her feet in an internet cafe, the milk already warmed to room temperature.)
Apropos of nothing, a phrase that you probably never want to hear resounded around the tree-lined calm of Unley this evening. My housemate Pete has his plaster cast off and is getting back into his professional life ... as a lawyer. And he's relishing it. There are moments when he looks truly piratical, with his dark eyes flashing dramatically above a pile of paperwork, especially when uttering with relish a phrase as sinister as:
"I'm gonna charge like a wounded bull."
Pause, gentle reader, to allow a shudder down your spine.
Unley is a strange suburb. The power blackouts that plague Adelaide never affect us. The council offers increasingly unlikely excuses for these, ranging from the wrong kind of trees inconsiderately dropping branches, to, I don't know, drop-bears. Yet somehow our street lights shine on. Pete's conspiracy theory puts it down to the concentration of dignitaries, high earners, and Freemasons in the area - and if you've read Alan Moore's outstanding graphic novel "From Hell" - I'm not talking about that film remake - you may well believe it. I prefer to attribute it to more positive things, such as a number of powerful leylines running through Unley and converging on the nexus of power for all of South Australia. I am, of course, referring to Haigh's Chocolate Factory.
Labels: chocolate power, conspiracy theories, Die Roten Punkte, fearsome things, From Hell, Laura Love, writing
