by Steve Deeks
“Well there was no way those tossers were getting another dollar out of me after dishing out that fine,” I declared angrily. “Besides what are the chances of them getting on and getting me again?” But as we pulled up at the next stop I was forced to rub my eyes at what I saw. To my total horror it was the same two inspectors. And just like before they climbed on board and started asking for tickets.
Fraser and I looked at each other, both silently gobsmacked. I couldn’t take in what was happening. After a lengthy pause Fraser found some words to sum things up, “Looks like this ride to Bondi could have been cheaper by limo.” I sat there quietly having an out of body experience, as I struggled to face up to the apparent certainty that a single journey to Bondi was going to cost me $240 when it should have been $3.50. I waited glumly for the inevitable formalities like someone preparing to face a firing squad. After a tortuous few minutes the inspector pulled up alongside me and after some awkward eye contact, offered me a strangely friendly nod of the head. “Alright,” he smiled, and to my utter shock, and relief, then moved on to the next person. I could scarcely believe it, especially after I’d ripped him apart. Obviously he must have assumed I wasn’t foolish enough to not get a ticket this time. How wrong he was. “Lady luck was smiling on you then,” Fraser announced, still sniggering at the chain of events.
“Somehow I don’t feel lucky.” But although my dwindling funds would be further obliterated, I had to remind myself it could have been even a lot worse.
I breathed a massive sigh of relief as we finally got off the bus. As we made our way toward the beach, Fraser, sensing my ongoing internal agony, tried to put things in perspective for me as he recounted a spot of bother he had landed himself in a few months previously in Queensland. After reaching double figures in beers one evening he thought it would be a good idea to go out for a spin in a rented car. Driving through Brisbane city centre he reached a crossroads. “I thought it would be fun to try a wee handbrake turn in the middle of the road,” Fraser recounted. “Unfortunately I ended up rolling the car and came to rest on a verge. What made things worse was that a stationary police car had been watching the whole thing. They came over and gave me a piece of paper and said, ‘You have to go to court tomorrow’. I said, ‘But I’m leaving tomorrow’. They replied, ‘You’re required by law to be there’. I added, ‘I can’t, my flight is booked’. I was good for my word and didn’t show up at court. And I’m still walking round a free man.”
I had heard from various backpackers with considerable experience of such matters that nothing happened if you didn’t pay a fine. Apparently the Australian government were so overwhelmed by court orders and fixed penalty notices that they simply didn’t have the resources to chase up all the outstanding bills. In any event, most backpackers, in stark contrast to myself, would not give out their real address – or if they did it would no doubt have changed by the time the fine was processed and sent out – and proper identification. If they did have your identity confirmed and you failed to show up at court or pay a fixed penalty notice then you would apparently be banned from the country for either three or ten years depending on the severity of your crime. If, like Fraser, you had no intentions of coming back, though, it did not matter a jot.
As soon as we got back from an afternoon of the most expensive sunbathing imaginable I immediately went to an internet café and paid my penalty notice off. At least my conscience, as well as my bank account by now, was clear.
Chapter 11 - Labouring
While it seemed to be a regular feature of backpackers running out of cash and having to get by on $1 noodle packs, I had not envisaged myself falling into that trap. Yet here I was coming towards the end of my overdraft limit. I had been advised by veteran travellers how things can quickly unravel with your finances. “One minute you’ve got a few grand in the bank then you’re down to your last few dollars,” l had been warned by one experienced campaigner. And how true it was. The routine of partying and getting shit faced often led to many a scratch of the head when studying the contents of your bank account.
Essentially the backpacker has two choices: be like Veiko, the Finnish peasant, and bury your head in the sand until the day comes that you view sleeping on park benches or in hostel television rooms as some form of luxury. Or find work. The drawback, though, with most backpacker jobs in Australia was that you needed an expensive - and totally pointless, it must be said - licence to perform the most simplistic of jobs, normally costing you around $100, which was about $100 more than I had.
In a desperate bid to claw my way out of my worrying predicament I began trawling through endless websites, hoping I could get something where I didn’t need a licence. It was a painstaking operation, not helped by most jobs being for labourers where you needed a white card: a licence you proudly achieved after being lectured for a day on the basics of how to use a dustbin, pick things up and sweep up. As useful as it would be for me to spend over $100 to learn about how to sweep a floor properly or how to put rubbish in a skip, I had a sneaking suspicion that such courses might really be to provide the government with some much needed cash.
Even for bar work I discovered you needed to attend a one-day course on the fundamentals of serving a beer. In any case, I reasoned, the course couldn’t be very good as I thought back to significant numbers of bar staff across the city who still hadn’t mastered the art of serving a drink, often leaving no froth at the top of a drink that had given me no choice on countless occasions but to demand a top up complete with a head. Even with the course’s “responsible service of alcohol” criteria, many bar staff would happily continue to serve the biggest pisshead in the bar while refusing someone they didn’t like, who hadn’t even touched a drop. It was clear there were many flaws with training to become a bona fide barman. But thankfully I knew that serving the general public booze was not an option for me, having hated every second of working behind a bar for two weeks when I was a teenager.
As if by magic, though, my torture was shortly ended when a friend said his old job was up for grabs as he was leaving the country. I rang the number and got called in for an interview the next day. It was my lucky day. With a fully working pair of arms and legs I was duly awarded the job. I would be helping out with setting up conferences. It certainly wasn’t flash but at least I would earn some much needed cash.
But before I could start I was told I needed a pair of metal-capped boots as part of the health and safety requirements. After being advised to go to the warehouse shop over the road I naturally looked for the cheapest pair I could find. With the cheapest pair costing an astronomical $60 I was convinced I was in the wrong section, prompting to find a member of staff. “Excuse me, can you show me where your cheapest boots are?” I asked politely.
“Those boots there are the cheapest,” the assistant replied, pointing at the $60 pair with depressing inevitability. For a pair of crap plain boots this seemed well over the odds but with it being a fundamental requirement for the job I agonisingly handed over the cash.
The next day was my first day in the exciting world of conference erections. I made the walk from my hostel to Central station before getting on a ludicrously expensive 20-minute train ride (my destination just so happened to be on the privately funded, therefore extortionately priced, airport line), followed by a further 15-minute march to the warehouse. Finally, after over three quarters of an hour of toil I reached the base with sweat pouring down my face where, after quickly signing in, I was helpfully informed I would be attending a job in the city – about a five minute walk away from my hostel where I had just come from. I let out a giant volley of expletives toward the frog faced female supervisor for her stupidity. Well, in my head I did at least, as she seemed like she had all the people skills of a crocodile. It struck me that logic and communication might not be at the forefront of the company’s ethos as I climbed aboard a truck taking me back to where I had just come from.
After a 40-minute drive we made it to the conferenc
e centre in Darling Harbour. Following a quick calculation, I figured it had taken me over an hour and a half, plus $15 of cash that I didn’t have to get back to where I started. When I walked into the giant centre and eventually located where I had to be I felt like I had already put in a decent shift.
My first particular job didn’t really require the use of my hard-earned degree, as I was directed to clean a panel of giant windows using a small cloth and some detergent spray. It was a good thing that I was left to my own devices as more stains were left on the glass after than were there before, such was my talent for window cleaning. Things were looking up, though, as next I had to transfer tables and chairs to specific grid locations across the giant conference area. The most enjoyable part of this was pulling the items along on a trailer style object and intermittently jumping on board for a ride.
As someone not overly renowned for my handyman skills, putting tables together proved to be something of a gargantuan effort. With all the fiddly bits and the different parts jamming, I was often left overcompensating when trying to engage some pieces, resulting in my fingers getting smashed repeatedly. To add to my woes I was only wearing ankle high socks and my new boots had started to rub on my heels. Soon enough I was walking like I had a major deformity, with macho members of the team beginning to give me quizzical looks.
Unable to go any further without addressing the excruciating pain, I pulled up and purveyed the damage after pulling my boots off. To my horror all I could see was ripped bare flesh and blood that had drenched my socks. “Always best to wear soccer socks with a new pair of boots,” an Aussie worker, spotting my pain helpfully pointed out.
“Thanks dick face,” I muttered, wincing from the unbearable torture I was feeling. I pushed the boots back on over the holes where skin used to be and bravely continued lugging around bits of office furniture for a good few hours. Eventually, to my eternal relief, I had finally completed my four-hour shift, only to then find out that I was meant to be doing six hours. Mouth wide open at the sudden extension of my shift, my supervisor, perhaps realising I had the mobility of a beach whale, reluctantly decided to let me leave early.
Unluckily for me, the nature of the job meant you had to work all kinds of hours and on my next shift I was told I would be starting at 11pm and going right through the night to early morning. After making the arduous journey to base for the graveyard shift I was told to wait outside by a truck. A scruffy looking man in his late 50s with a cigarette permanently attached to his mouth eventually limped round the corner and introduced himself as Pete. Worryingly, he was in charge of the shift. I was dealt a further blow when he warned a busy night lay in store. So without further delay we loaded the truck, before I was unexpectedly handed a stop sign. “There you go,” Pete snarled. I looked blankly back at him. Sensing my severe confusion, he took a large inhale of smoke before offering the briefest of assistances, “Watch my back getting out.” After a lengthy pause I translated this as meaning I had to go out onto the main road and direct traffic so Pete could reverse the huge truck out.
Never in my life had I performed the role of lollipop man and never did it once cross my mind that I would be forced into such a role. But life takes you on some strange and unexpected journeys. After psyching myself up, I strode purposefully onto the road hoping some maniac wouldn’t run me over while I attempted to direct traffic. I don’t know what came over me, but like some kind of seasoned traffic controlling veteran, I miraculously brought traffic to a standstill having expertly held up the stop sign to one oncoming motorist, while forcefully holding my left hand out to two cars coming from the other direction. I then confidently waved at my patiently waiting subjects in acknowledgement of their efforts as Pete backed onto the road, before I hopped aboard as we sped off like the A-Team - with my door still wide open. I must have looked like a vastly experienced trucker such was my expert execution, I proudly reflected as we raced down the motorway.
We seemed to be in a hurry as Pete consistently accelerated toward red lights and around sharp corners like we were in a rally car, not an 18 tonne truck. I got the impression this gruff individual didn’t have much regard for life and double-checked that my seat belt was on. I was forced to take great consolation from the fact that if we did hit anything the chances were that we would come off significantly better. To add to my dismay I noticed that Pete had a bog eye and any misplaced confidence I had stupidly placed in him to begin with had soon evaporated as we narrowly avoided smashing into various parked cars and the rear of vehicles after screeching to standstills at the very last minute. All this was taking place while he pumped out his heavy metal, thudding his foot to the beat like a lunatic. Driving, it seemed, was very much his secondary focus as we winded our way through the dark city streets.
After some awkward small talk, Pete then oddly launched into a discussion on the difficulties of leaving the country with large sums of money. “It’s not easy these days you know,” he began mysteriously, before sucking in another chimney’s worth of smoke. “The problem is they want to see where you’ve got the cash from now,” he growled with disgust. I looked at this strange creature of a man out of the corner of my eyes and wondered what the hell he was going on about. “That’s the big brother world we live in I suppose,” I replied hesitantly, hoping this counted as an appropriate response. I scoured my brain for logical reasons why someone would come out with such a comment but after much thought concluded I couldn’t find any, apart from that Pete must have been planning an armed raid.
When we arrived at the hotel for the job I breathed a huge sigh of relief that, firstly, I had made it alive and not been coerced into a robbery and, secondly, that I could get away from such close proximity to Pete, who also had a suspicious odour wafting from his direction. After mentioning to one of my colleagues about the interesting journey I had just had, he looked at me like he had just seen the devil. “Pete drives like a lunatic, that’s why I refuse to go in a truck with him,” he explained, his face going white, before coldly adding, “He’s had a few smash-ups from going too fast and one time he hit and killed someone. No one knows to this day how he got away with it.” My ears pricked up to hear such a tale, but having been subjected to his own special brand of driving I could not say I was surprised. I had never felt keener to start work I hated so much, grateful of still being alive and having use of my limbs.
I hardly saw Pete that night, which was no bad thing, and quietly went about my work the best I could. However, yet again I did feel as though a monkey plucked from the wild could have comfortably done a better job than me. But as long as I remained busy and visible, then no one could complain about my endeavour. Fortunately the shift ended without incident and, much to my relief, I was given a lift into the city by someone other than Pete.
Over the course of the next few days I began to notice that while I was getting work from the company, it was sporadic and often only four-hour shifts in the middle of the night in some hovel miles away from civilisation. Despite wanting more hours to increase my income I struggled to hold back my sheer delight when a job finished earlier than planned. As hard as I tried to conceal my happiness in front of the supervisor it was all too abundantly clear that I hated the job. But then what right-minded person wouldn’t?
The work, as you may have realised by now, didn’t come naturally to me and instructions, delivered in strange jargon or with a vague point of the eyes, would often fly right over my head. “Do that will you bro?” they would say expectedly, like it could be done with your eyes shut.
“Do what?” I would reply, having assessed a variety of possible things they may have been suggesting before concluding I had no idea what they were on about. They may as well have been speaking in Arabic to me, yet strangely some of the team leaders actually thought I knew what I was doing. Did they not know who I was? With a huge work staff it meant I was often working with different supervisors each time, which I’m sure didn’t help my plight. But the company communication was so ba
d that they were probably under the misguided impression I was a regular, not some Neanderthal learning the ropes in need of a steering hand.
When given a task that was proving beyond my capabilities – which was quite often – sometimes, if I was lucky, someone would help out having spotted me labouring on the same thing for an eternity, or sense my frustration when booting a shelf as a last resort in hoping it would help click a table or desk together. “Fucking wanker stay together,” I would urge the disobeying shelf before booting it again, only for it to fall apart once more. I knew one thing for certain: that my future career did not lie in the erecting and dismantling of exhibition objects. But, in any event, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be long in the job.
Having heard nothing from the company for days I finally got a call asking if I could do a shift later that night starting at 1am in some ridiculous place in the middle of nowhere. I had already made plans to go out for someone’s leaving do, which it’s obvious to say had infinitely more appeal than carting exhibition furniture around through the night. But in need of the money I decided I could do both. Also, I knew that as a “casual” employee if I turned down work the chances of them using me again were remote at best, especially with my limited skill-set in the industry. I came up with a compromise solution whereby I could have the best of both worlds: I would join the hostel group for some drinks first and then get a taxi to work at 12.30am. I just hoped the taxi driver had a rough idea where this place was because I certainly didn’t.
We started off with a few beers in the kitchen before making our way down to hostel bar where I continued to refresh myself as if badly dehydrated. Although I had planned to leave a good while before getting my taxi I remember thinking it a shame to stop and leave the party before it was absolutely necessary. I blocked out that I had work until it was time to get the taxi by which point, as it was repeatedly highlighted to me, my voice was now echoing the length of the room when talking.
