MY WORKING LIFE IN A SHORT

EMMA-JANE PRUNING THE VINES AT S. KIDMAN WINES, COONAWARRA, SA, AUSTRALIA

NB: Originally posted on 11th August 2015 - Reposted due to an error

How often have you ever wondered why I’m doing this job?

I have.

I will tell you.

My working life in a short began right here.

My first job as a hairdressing apprentice, taught me to wash hair, rinse perms, mix colours to squirting water on men and boys hair for the boss. Then in those gaps in-between the clients I rushed around sweeping the floors, washing and folding towels, banking, cleaning mirrors, chairs, skirting boards and plants. Yes, plants and I still remember wiping the dust off with cotton wool balls and milk.

Although, I loved this job, it was a job that you take home and because I would lie in bed awake wondering if I had made the right booking due to my hearing. Each time the phone rang my body would set like concrete with eyes on me to pick up the phone. As you may have guessed, I’m talking before the days of mobile phones and the Internet.

Things would be very different if it were today.

Then I quit.

Next, came something I never expected. I got a job in the vineyard picking grapes and my dad surprised me.

            ‘You won’t last one day,’ he said sternly.

             ‘You watch me,’ I replied.

Then I spent the next 11 years working outside travelling all over the countryside wherever I could land a stint that lasted from a couple of weeks to a few months work.

But one thing that struck me from the beginning was how the people around me took me under their wing and gave me the life lessons I had come here for. Working and laughing with those older women are the best part that shaped my future. It stays with me, no matter what I’m doing. Those women and some men gave me the foundations to building blocks to the work in my later life.

Then after 11 years of planting vines, jiffy clipping, picking rocks, hand hoeing, gardening, driving tractors, vine training, picking grapes and pruning. I never stopped dreaming of working inside one day.

I left the countryside jobless and headed for Melbourne.

Within two weeks, I landed a job in a pizza place making pizza bases, spreading sauce on the bases, bread maker, register work, cutting and boxing up the pizzas, washing dishes, chopping up veggies to making bucket loads tomato of sauce.

At the time, due to my over active thyroid, I was in constant overdrive with my hands constantly rolling round perfect balls for bases to be feed through and machine at top sped and I thrived on the Friday night rush ‘pressure.’

It was a crazy and I could never do at that pace again.

Even though, in the early stages of the pizza job, I worked a short stint in a large liquor store.  Then several years later I moved into a house down the road from it and wrote this post.

Although, we never wore name badges at the pizza shop, everyone knew my name and I knew nearly all the orders the minute I saw them enter the door. At times the customers change the order names to trick me! And walk in grinning…

After a year at the pizza shop I landed a permanent role as a Catering Assistant taking over the role of a woman that was moving to another site. Although, she trained me, we ended up working along side of each other several years later.

How rare is that?

Pretty amazing I think.

To be continued…