Hilarious Confessions of a Bewildered Backpacker by Steve Deeks

Author:Steve Deeks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2016-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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