Working on Holiday

Uhhhh….yeah gidday. A working holiday is a vacation where you work at seasonal jobs to supplement your income while traveling. On my working holiday, I have had two jobs so far. One was cleaning hotel rooms, which I have described in earlier blogs. Now I work at a warehouse. A warehouse for a store named, The Warehouse. It’s like a Kiwi version of K-mart or Wal-Mart. I work at the South Island distribution center for The Warehouse. Basically my job consists of different forms of stacking boxes. Sometimes I stack boxes slowly and sometimes I stack them quickly. It depends on where they place me for that particular day. It is sort of a game; I think it has to be in order to keep your sanity. Here’s what goes through my mind during most of the day. “Stack the boxes, stack the boxes, stack the boxes…” The boxes come down a conveyor system and I stack them on a pallet based on the number on the box. It’s pretty complex stuff, definitely not as easy as it sounds. Oh wait…actually it is as easy as it sounds. It takes no thought. Just stack the boxes. I do this for 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. Luckily I am only working here for 2 and a ½ weeks. So far it has been 1 1/2 but it feels like a month. I can’t imagine working there everyday for a year. I would probably flip out.

An interesting side note: I get to work with some guys on work release from jail. You can pick them out from the institutional stamp on their clothing. Most of them are nice enough. I figure they must mostly be drunk drivers or something. Otherwise they wouldn’t be trusted to come back to jail at the end of the day. No fights so far, but there have been a few close calls. After talking to a few of the guys though, they seem to have a pretty good deal. They get a free place to stay, free food, and a job. They don’t have to pay for shit and they work 9 hours a day. I wish I were incarcerated. Wouldn’t be too hard I guess. Just get liquored up and go for an evening drive at 90 mph through downtown. Should do the trick.

Also in a noisy warehouse it is even harder to understand Kiwis when they speak to me. One weird guy with a few missing teeth is completely incomprehensible; he’s from jail. Sometimes it makes me feel like busting out my most ridiculous Kiwi accent just to join in the fray. The hardest to understand are the ethnic Kiwis, the Maoris and other Pacific Islanders. My supervisor is from Samoa and I can barely understand his guttural English. “Yuh gonna beh hehr on Sat’day, mate?”

“Uhhh…I think so.”

Another strange thing is everyone here thinks I’m Canadian. I never thought I had that bad of a northern accent. I think it is because they expect every American to sound like they are from the South. Sorry to disappoint.