OZ5: Port Douglas (second bit)

There was a stretch during these busy months where I was working so much and eating so little because I didn’t have much time to make food, which meant that I was starting to get skinnier than I needed to be.  I liked feeling so slender again, but I could tell it was a little too skinny. 
I mentioned this to Joe and he said he had been noticing.  At that point he made it a priority to feed me well.  :)  It was really cute of him.  He would bring me food at work as often as he could.

I of course snuck untouched food off of customers plates, though I will vehemently deny it if accused.  :)  They made the best salt and pepper calamari around.

We invited Gary and Sue up to visit several times, including early on for Thanksgiving, which was so much fun.  There was a special on duck at around the right time, so we got duck and roasted it in the oven.  I also made green beans, cranberry and orange relish, mashed potatoes and gravy, candied yams, marshmallow yam casserole, and more.  They were so delighted and honored to be included and we were so happy to have them.  It was easily the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had away from home.

Thanksgiving dinner with Gary and Sue

The woman, Erin, who gave me the introduction on my first day was the head of the Food and Beverage department at the resort.  She was Scottish, a bit overweight, a very intense boss, but a very efficient and kind person.  Even though she expected a LOT from us, she also treated us really well.  Sadly, sometime in the middle of my employment, a new GM started who was rude, demanding, and not at all personable.  He put so much pressure on Erin that she had to start calling in sick because of anxiety.  Apparently this happened about the same time each year and she would be out for a month or two, but she was so good at her job that they kept her place for her, but the new GM was way too intense and I never saw her at work again.  They would eventually replace her, which was their loss.  She recognized and rewarded good work.

About halfway through employment I decided that the way too big uniform they had given me wasn’t cutting it anymore.  I looked like a child.  The pants were a size or two too big, and I had either a short child’s large size shirt or a way too big adult’s medium.  They had given me those sizes because it was all they had at the time, but then I had never followed up on getting smaller stuff.  Erin had given me a dorky belt to keep the too large shorts up.  So one day I went in to work, un-cinched the belt, and pulled the still buttoned pants out to the side where there was enough extra fabric to pull the waistline a good six inches.  She covered her mouth and gasped.  Haha, it was so funny.  She got me the right size uniform by the next day, which was great.  I felt like an adult again.

The Peppers housekeeping job was pretty physical, just like the Peppers job in New Zealand.  The housekeeping department was also strangely run, perhaps even poorly run.  The supervisor (whose arms and legs were tattooed and her roots were very obviously showing that her hair was a mousy brown, despite the flat blond of a cheap dye on the rest of it) was acting as head of the department, since they hadn’t had a head of the department for months.  The last head had been fired because of a scandal.

We almost never took a break like we did at the New Zealand Peppers.  I could count on one hand the number of times that happened there in the beginning.  Plus, when it got to be close to noon, the other housekeepers would look at our boards to see what we had left, deem that we only had an hour or so left, and then declare that we should work through lunch and not waste time taking a lunch break.  So when 14:00 rolled around, I was starving and exhausted.

Another issue that I encountered pretty quickly was how most of the more senior housekeepers would take full advantage of the newbies and make them do the worst jobs.  It didn’t bother me to do bathrooms because I knew I was really good at them.  It was the vacuuming and mopping at the end that was killer.

Days were really long around Christmas time.  I was cleaning for six hours at Peppers, which is probably the maximum number of hours I would want to housekeep on any given day because it’s such surprisingly hard work.  Then after a full six hours at Peppers, I would go home, change, and head to Ramada.  Some days I had a reasonable amount of time, like a half hour at home to grab a bite and head out.  There were several days where I had to jump in the swimming pool fully dressed, strip off and hang up my clothes, then run to my room and put on my Ramada uniform and pedal the two blocks to start a six hour waitressing shift.  Those were long days, but they also felt good.  It was also nice to feel like I had a damn good excuse to lag a bit at the restaurant.  Once everyone found out I was doing double shifts like that, they were impressed, which made me feel good.

Over Christmas and New Year’s was the added benefit of getting Public Holiday pay, which was two-and-a-half-times the regular rate.  Minimum wage was around $16 an hour (woohoo!) but then also because we were casual (meaning hours were not guaranteed and they could change every week), there was an additional chunk added on for every hour.  This was to make up for the fact that as casual employees we weren’t really given paid time off, holidays, etc.  This put the pay up to around $20 an hour.  In a crummy little job at the bottom of the food chain as a waitress and as a housekeeper, I was getting paid more per hour than I have EVER made back at home.  On public holidays, the rate was two and a half times regular pay, meaning that on Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year’s, I was making over $50 per hour.  Can’t complain.

(At Christmas, Joe and I made gingerbread cookies, which is a tradition in the Baxter family that I quite like.  We managed to get a drunk Drew and Tanja to join us, to hilarious results--crumbly, misshapen messes of icing and cookie.)

Funny because Joe is shirtless in this photo.
It was Christmas time, yet it was so hot that it 
was impossible for him to manage a shirt.
Weird to be in the southern hemisphere.

I had been eyeing a new iPhone for months and months, and so every day that I would work for 10 hours making $50 per hour, I would say, “I made an iPhone today,” since they were going for around $500 each.  Joe had been watching for one for a while, but it was difficult to do.  I didn’t want the iPhone 6 because it was just expensive unnecessarily.  I didn’t want the 5S because it was fancy and more expensive.  But as it turned out they were no longer making the 5Cs and it was getting increasingly more difficult to just buy one straight up.

Finally one day I bought one.  It was a 5C and it was beautiful.  So sleek and just damn sexy.  It was in January when I bought it and work was still a little busy so I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands, so setting it up for the first time was difficult because I had no internet at the house, no SIM card that was the right size, and no idea what that all entailed.  Fortunately our friend Freja (more about her later) suggested that she had used her old SIM with her new phone just by cutting it to the right size and shape with scissors.  Strangely, it worked.

I eventually got the thing all up and running and it was like bringing clarity to my entire life.  It did what I wanted it to do when I wanted it to do it.  And every day that I worked long hours I felt more and more confident that the purchase was worth it, especially when I was making as much as I was.

On December 9^th, the anniversary of the day we got engaged, Joe was searching for a gift idea, but he was limited to something that could be done in the morning only, since he had to work at the sushi restaurant starting at lunchtime.  Then it came to him: Breakfast with the Birds!  And what a fabulous time we had.  First of all, the buffet was all-you-can-eat.  Next, there are literally birds sitting all around you as you eat and there are bird handlers that being birds to perch on your shoulders.  Perfect.  The rest of the Wildlife Habitat was amazing as well, with a cassowary, koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, crocodiles, and many others.  Joe and I got the quintessential koala photo.  We thought it was hilarious because where our friends were posting family photos with them and their children, we were posting to facebook a photo of a koala between us, as if it were our own child.  We got a kick out of that.

Buddy on my arm

Joe and the bird look dramatically off in the distance

Cassowary!

Little buddy wallaby

Joe's friend Matt feeding the giant croc

Over time at Peppers I encountered one of the sad side effects of having a high minimum wage.  Because companies have to pay you so much per hour, they begin to expect the unattainable, like cleaner rooms in less time.  It was weird to me that they beat this in to us, one day saying we are too slow and the next day saying our rooms aren’t clean enough.  I began to stew in my head about it a lot.  But unless they could train us in this one magical trick that would revolutionize our efforts, I think the ratio would continue to be pretty direct, i.e. as time spent cleaning goes up, so does cleanliness and as time spend cleaning goes down, so does cleanliness.  What did I know, though?  I was just a minion.  :)

Shortly after I started Drew’s girlfriend Tanja went for an interview at Peppers and got the job.  I was a little affected at first by the news, maybe because I thought I was super special for getting the job when I really probably wasn’t.  But as the days went and Tanja and I were able to gripe to one another about the dim work environment that it was, I became very fond of Tanja.  She was a nice girl, albeit sometimes strange.  Her relationship with Drew was an interesting one, and I remember hearing one of the stories about how they got together and thinking, hmmmm… that doesn’t sound entirely emotionally healthy.  Over time though they surprised me.  He would surprise you with this hint at strong attachment to her and she would surprise you with her depth, but her rather curt intolerance for bull-crap.

It was especially nice to wake up early in the morning, send Joe off to work, and then sit in the kitchen and have a chat to Tanja.  Tanja and I would go to work together, sometimes work on the same team, and always gripe at the end of a long, hard day.  It was very bonding.

She helped me stay positive even when our supervisor was harsh and I was fed up.  Every morning as we were pushing the trolleys out of the housekeeping basement she would turn to me and mutter, “You can do it!” 

Tanja was a bright spot in the house

Our supervisor Tracy was probably taking most of the pressure from the general manager Robyn, though she was also doing well at passing it on to us.  Robyn was rude and harsh and Tracy passed down some of that sentiment.  It was never, ever positive.  There was always something horribly wrong with our work.  Too slow, or the floor wasn’t polished enough or there was a single spot on the mirror that we had missed.

I watched Robyn walk into rooms and just frown and say, “Jeeze, look at this floor, it’s disgusting,” when in fact it was actually quite clean.  Don’t get me wrong, we cut corners frequently and sometimes things weren’t perfect.  Would it have killed her to smile and say hello every once in a while instead of automatically criticizing?  Even just lead with a hello-how-are-you and then launching into her criticism would have been nicer.

Tracy passed on so much pressure that one day I went home in tears.  I wasn’t fast enough.  I knew I cleaned very well, but day after day I was told I was too slow.  I wasn’t good enough!  It hit me so hard and I fell apart.  I called in sick for my second job at Ramada that evening.  I felt like I worked so hard, yet obviously it wasn’t good enough and it made me feel like I had no value as an employee.  Honestly, it probably hit so hard because it was that time of the month.

I went back the next morning and bravely faced Tracy and apologized for my slowness, but told her that I knew of no way to go faster and cleaner at the same time.  There was a moment where we had a slight connection because she said the pressure was on her a lot, but that she knew I did a great job cleaning, even if I was slower than everyone else.  I said I was trying my hardest and she believed me.  That day she came around to a room that I was cleaning and tried to show me a few hints on how to be faster.  Some of it was useful, but most of it I already did.  But that day was at least good for coming to an understanding with one another.

To be fair I am overly sensitive, but I am not the only one who felt all the negative energy.  Far from, in fact.  A couple of months into my work at Peppers we had a Korean girl named Vicki start working with us.  She was bright and kind and perky, and within one week she lost her perk, her personality was trampled, and she asked around about the atmosphere, wondering why it was so stormy.

Supposedly the whole rain cloud was caused by the fact that Robyn had something to prove.  She was a very smart business woman, very driven and with high expectations.  But it was too much.  She tried to wring every last penny out of every last corner of the place.  We needed to do deep cleans every time, yet we needed to do them faster than we knew how to do shallower cleans.  She needed to show the board of directors, if that is who she reported to, that her taking over recently was a very good business move for Peppers.  Supposedly the last GM had been fired on bad terms, so she felt like she had to prove that their hiring her was the best deal.

I still felt a little bit of an understanding with Tracy because she had admitted I was a very good housekeeper.  Tracy would have to come find me when Robyn would get indignant about how bad the floors were in my last room (they weren’t bad; she was just a control freak with no grip on reality).  She would deliver the line saying, “Robyn said the floors need re-polished carefully,” but she would look at me and I at her and we would exchange a slight eye-roll, wordlessly agreeing that Robyn was a menace at best.

As my time went on at Peppers, I learned more about housekeeping.  As I mentioned, the head of housekeeping had been fired for some reason (I think she and the houseman had been rounding up the left-behind alcohol and taking it home for personal consumption, something EVERYONE did, but tried not to talk about).  They had been looking for a new department head for months.  Tracy had applied for it, but been turned down because they didn’t think she was ready.

Yet for all those months that they were looking for a new head for the department, the responsibility to keep the whole department running fell squarely on one person’s shoulders.  Tracy.  She enjoyed none of the benefits of being head of the department, but was expected to perform all of the duties as if she were the head.  Not only that, but she also had to have Robyn breathing down her neck at all times, telling her that the department wasn’t good enough.  Robyn, the woman who would not hire Tracy as the actual head of the housekeeping department, yet would force her to take on the responsibilities of the role, and the woman who urged Tracy to attack us, one day for cleanliness and the next for speed, was entirely estranged to me.

On a couple of occasions on the way home from work with Drew and Tanja, they teased me gently about my wrinkled uniform.  The uniforms were dreadful already—dorky high-waisted long black shorts, and an ill-fitting heavy white shirt with slightly rounded collars—so since I had no iron and neither did the house, I didn’t worry about it.  No matter how wet the shirt was when I pulled it out of the washer to hang-dry it and hopefully let the wrinkles loosen themselves out in the process, it always ended the same—wrinkled and looking even worse.

Each day we would come home, gripe and complain about the whole operation, and then change out of our stupid uniforms.  We would relax (or I would go to my other job) and by the time the next morning came, we would be a bit more positive, at least long enough to make it into the rooms and start on the day of cleaning.  This kept me going back, even though in reality I hated it.

I still felt a little bit of an understanding with Tracy because she had admitted I was a very good housekeeper.  Robyn, the woman who would not hire Tracy as the actual head of the housekeeping department, yet would force her to take on the responsibilities of the role, and the woman who urged Tracy to attack us, one day for cleanliness and the next for speed, was entirely estranged to me. 

We would get little chats about how we weren’t good enough at least once a week.  Maybe it is a symptom of being too educated for my position, or at least THINKING I was too educated for my position, but I felt like they treated us like children.  As if we were just learning what clean meant and a good scolding would teach us the quickest.  I did my best to not roll my eyes at this.  By the end of the day I could shrug it off entirely somehow, even if in the moment it made me mad as hell.

I was not able to shrug off criticism on one day in particular, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Before we started that day Tracy led us up to room 101, where she stood and looked at us like we were children too dumb to see their obvious mistakes.  What she started out with was, “We’ll address the item that is right in front of me; Emily, do you NOT own an iron?”  It caught me so off-guard and it was spoken so cruelly.  It was meant to shame me.  No, I didn’t own an iron.  She said I needed to get one because the wrinkles were disgraceful.  Robyn stood at the back of the little group and nodded her head as if to approve of what she had no doubt urged Tracy to do.

I’m a backpacker.  I carry everything I own on my back.  Why on earth would I be carrying an iron with me?

Tracy then proceeded on to the scolding of the group as a whole.  Disgraceful and its synonyms were used in quantity.  This was the day she would scold us for cleanliness, where the next day would be about time, and the pattern would repeat, day in and day out.  Not clean enough!  Not fast enough!  Not clean enough!

Then at the end she demanded that everyone go start on their boards, while I remained in the room to iron my shirt, and don’t let it happen again.  Everyone gave me sideways glances and filed out of the room, leaving me to shed a few tears and detach my spirit entirely from the place.  I felt numbed.  I cleaned for the rest of the day, but only half-heartedly.

Just as well the hours started markedly going down.  It was really nice for money at Christmas time when I was working 60 hours per week, but then a lull hit afterwards and I was getting three hour shifts at Peppers, then I would go home, wait around, and then do maybe three or four hours at Ramada.  Three hours at Peppers was not enough to be worth it because of the bike commute as well as the unpleasant atmosphere, though at the time I was quite pleased that I didn’t have to spend as much time at Peppers as before.

One more down and more installments to come...