I can say for a definitive fact that I now have my tickets and my passport. I have yet to officially acquire a job but my tentative contacts appear to be moving in the right direction which is a reasonable start.
The one main problem I have been having is a distinct lack of money... about three months ago we had a “management adjustment” which to all that actually live in the real world, unlike our CEO, is better known as the venue manager getting pole axed. Since that fateful event took place my hours dropped to a pitifully low amount, I was averaging 35 hours a week before the change, I dropped down to 15, which is barely enough to live on, let alone save the thousands that I intended to have before I leave.
Fortunately this is beginning to change back to the positive, I managed 35 hours the other week, and the week ending Sunday I managed to score my largest week to date – a Massive 56.25 hours, that is 10 hours more than I have ever managed to get before and is going to make my bank balance that little bit nicer.
Now comes for the fun bit, the description, my last week was a combination of bar shifts which are always fun....and for the most part preparation for a massive end of season/grand final celebration for a local sports team.
The entire inside bar was going to be a members area which could attract up to a thousand people if they all turned up, the outside section had four beer outlets and a wine/spirits station along with two pie/pasty/sausage roll van’s and a barbeque/ hot-chip outlet.
This is mostly shown in the picture below.
For all of these nice venues that we were putting on we got a little bit of alcohol and other drinks.
This is better known as:
_
• 7 entire pallets of beer, with a pallet holding about 80 cases and a case holding 30 cans
• 2 pallets of spirits, not certain on the numbers, but they were flat packs which held 24 each and there were at least 110 flat packs in all.
• An entire pallet of soft drink cans, 30 cases of Coke, 20 boxes of PowerAde, another 16 cases of other assorted other soft drinks.• A separate pallet of water which was picked up from the supplier after the fact, which was a solid 60 cases.
• An additional 20 keg’s of our ranges of beer, on top of the roughly forty we had sitting spare already and the 17 already tapped into the system.It should be noted that none of this includes the alcohol that we already had on premise which was quite significant.
But I was still kind of freaked out that I signed for about $50,000 - $70,000 worth of stock over the course of three days.
The big day came on Sunday and it was a long day for me, starting at 8 am after finishing a 10 hour day at 9 pm the night before. As per usual for a day like that all of the massive things had been done already so my morning jobs consisted primarily of small run around jobs that needed to be done, four hours later I was done for a while and had a break for an hour and a half. Upon returning I was quickly put to work with my offsider who is getting primed to take my job and we rearranged a couple of the outside venues and then moved the mobile cool rooms into place, after that (two hours later) we slowed down and took the chance to watch the game that was being televised, we WERE playing well at that point, we did some more run around and then they were playing like shit.
Then the fun times began as our external staff began to arrive and we had the joy of priming them on what to do that was specific to our venue. I took this time to go to MY canteen and get it ready to run, even if my staff were half an hour late. I delegated the role of cook to the first person to turn up and ran it from there as my staff quickly turned up over the next 15 minutes, only including one person who I had worked with before. Got them running and then I did what I had intended to do the entire time... I walked away to go do other stuff.
The night dragged on, the team lost and the ten thousand that we had catered for on the chance that they were going to win, turned into a fucking pathetic two and a half, we ended up closing half the external venues early. Eventually the major presentations and the bands had done their part and we closed all of the external venues sorted it the way we wanted and did what we could elsewhere....it was now 11.30 at night and the day was over. I got a stubby of beer and left, I had to be back at 8 am the next day –another day another dollar.
In all it was fucked, almost all of the beer was untouched and had to be brought back and unloaded today, I don’t even want to think about how bad the wages for the night was going to end up, while inside may have done a booming trade...the outside was a fucking joke and a money hole.
Glad I won’t be here if it happens again next year...
Tired and drained but still raring on.
-CJ
