Working in Newcastle

For those of you who joined early in the program, you may recall the view out our apartment window:Beautiful, right?

If you look the other way out our window, you see our street, Pudding Chare, lined with clubs and pubs, which does get very busy almost every night. I'm actually amazed by how often people are out at the bars (seems loud every night). You can just see the little line forming at Dan's favorite people-watching spot outside our window. By morning, our tiny street has turned into a minefield of the typical frat party residues. It's kind of shocking that so many people go so far overboard on a regular basis.

However, it means that these little guys have steady work. The team of street cleaners here is QUITE impressive. They are out at the crack of dawn making our alley passable. Throughout the day, we see them throughout the city, making regular rounds of all the major sidewalks and pedestrian plazas. If ever there was steady work, this seems like the field. The other very visible jobs in town are retail clerks (people here shop in massive numbers, again every day and all before the shops close promptly at 5pm) and people who advertise for shops by standing in the plaza with signs and arrows.

I've been keeping my eyes out for good jobs because we'd really like to travel while here and that's only going to be possible if we have some sort of income. After going door to door at several temp agencies (there really are quite a few here!), cv in tow, I really hadn't got anywhere. Finally, I saw an internet posting for an agency seeking people to print web tickets, stuff them in envelopes and mail them off to customers. It was the 10pm-7am shift, but would only last a few weeks. The posting came out on Wednesday, I applied on Wednesday, I got a call on Wednesday. Apparently I had interpreted the desperation in the posting correctly and I had an interview scheduled for Thursday. My first day of work was Friday and I worked each day through the weekend. Luckily, the hours were far more kind - 2:30pm-10pm.

The work isn't brain surgery, but it goes quickly. I'm actually quite proud of how few paper cuts I've managed to acquire over the past four days. We blew right through the backlog for which they were hiring temps -- 5,000 orders processed on Friday -- which left a rather quiet weekend. There's a bit of a science to efficient envelope stuffing, so there is a limited amount of brainwork, but I am still hoping to hear back from the museum job I applied to or I'm going to have to apply to some additional postings. I just can't picture doing this for the whole year here. The schedule is horrible for travel because we work every weekend and never have two days in a row off (I currently have Tues and Thursday off). So we'll see how long it takes me to go crazy.