The Australian Office: Daatar, Telstra and Lessons in Lying

With a heavy heart and a steaming hangover (a.k.a a very grumpy Katie) I caught my flight from Christchurch to Melbourne. Despite my eager anticipation at seeing a Neighbours star on every corner, I wasn't overly enamoured at the prospect of returning to z as it meant the inevitable return of the dreaded 'job hunt'.

I turned up at my hostel in the seaside area of Melbourne called St Kilda to the ironically named 'Coffee Palace' (i.e. there was no coffee to be seen and it couldn't have been further removed from a palace). I found myself in a room of Irish girls that were impossible to understand. However, after deciphering that 'the crack in the hostel' thankfully had nothing to do with drugs, they updated me on the job situation in Melbourne, which thankfully appeared a lot better than it had done in Sydney. The rest of my first day was spent catching up with my friends from Sydney over a distinctly average $5 bowl of pasta. They had all managed to find jobs, but all hated them. Caren was washing rental cars during the week and waitressing at the $5 pasta restaurant on weekend. Anna was selling beauty products on a commission only basis. Julia froze her arse off handing out leaflets promoting clubs in the evenings.

The next day I headed to the internet for some job searching and in desperation I applied for just about everything. That evening I had an email back inviting me to an interview the very next day at a call centre in South Melbourne.So the next day I joined an assortment of Australian finest bogans (chavs), Indian women fresh from India and the odd backpacker for the interview. Perhaps I should have guessed when the second question I was asked was 'when can you start?' that this was not going to be the job of my dreams. Basically the job was cold calling businesses and trying to flog them a new landline package. In premise it seemed like a good deal: unlimited local and national calls, no contract etc. But I found there was something pretty fishy about the whole thing. The main reason was that the company actually had multiple names, one day we were trading as 'Time Telecom' then we were 'Spirit Telecom' and then we were 'Fairtalk'.

In the interview the target of two sales a day was shown to be a piece of cake, when naturally in reality it is far harder. As it turned out, Australian businessmen are actually pretty stuck in their ways and completely unwilling to talk to you unless they believe you're the Australian equivalent of BT, Telstra. Thus we are actively encouraged by the management to pretend we are Telstra. Apparently it isn't lying until you're caught by Ofcom and fined $10,000…

My chest swelled when I made my first sale within twenty minutes. However this fluke turned out to be beginner's luck as I really haven't got very far in the last two weeks. Unfortunately I've found it all too easy to say 'no worries' when someone tells me that they're not interested. My first two weeks were also a probation period where I actually got paid an hourly weight and didn't have to make any targets, which left me extremely unmotivated. Indeed the last couple of weeks had become a time wasting exercise where my time was mostly spent staring at the data sheets (or daatar as the Aussies like to call it), listening in on other people's phone calls, making as few calls as possible and basically just trying to look busy.

Of my original training group of nine, only I am left. In fact when I first started, I was the only one who was a backpacker and the people that I was working with were very odd. In particular there were a group of young, extremely odd Australian girls. Just imagine girls with multiple piercings, shaved heads and skinny jeans half-way down their arse. Yes I had found myself in the midst of a lesbian cult. The management are all aggressive Indian women with chips on their shoulders who do their best to motivate the team, but really they are fighting a losing battle. Let's just say that although they train new people twice a week every week, the team never grows past fifteen. As I was enjoying my first Australian work experience so much I decided to extend the joy to Lauren and Svenja, mainly so I would have someone to talk to besides the weird lesbians. They are of course thoroughly enjoying themselves too…

Besides experiencing the Melbourne work life I have had a little time to experience some of what Melbourne has to offer. It really is a very vibrant city and there is always something going on. April sees the comedy festival come to Melbourne and I was lucky enough to see a 'Best of British', which practically had me peeing my pants. On my first week I made the trip to the St Kilda pier at sunset to see the penguins come in for the night (or to be more precise to see one penguin…). On my first Saturday night myself, Caren, Julia and Anna all got dressed up as school girls to meet up with some Aussie guys Anna and Julia had met in Thailand. It was spent at probably the most boring house party in the history of house parties. I'll let you judge for yourself by the following indicators: the host called Julia incessantly before we turned up to make sure we were coming; they were playing Trivial Pursuit when we arrived; one of his friends immediately started to call me a Pome and make fun of my accent; they were all seriously impressed because I downed one Bacardi Breezer (come off it I'm English!); Caren had one guy believing they didn't have computers in Germany. Needless to say within an hour we suddenly remembered a previous engagement elsewhere and scuttled back to the St Kilda High Street. As you can imagine we attracted quite a bit of attention in our school girl outfits and many guys asked 'where are you girls going??' Perhaps I should have mentioned that I was walking along with three stunning slim girls with long blonde hair. It actually felt like something out of Mean Girls, with me trailing behind, the hang-on naturally.

Last weekend was Easter, which naturally meant an amazing four days away from work! Good Friday was spent in Melbourne's Botanical Gardens, snoozing. It was really nice to catch up with Steve for a few days too. Although I didn't get to spend that much time with him because of work, it was still nice to see him doing well and enjoying travelling, but scary to think of him coming to the end of his trip. That evening Julia and Caren decided they had had enough of stinky backpacker places and the time had come for us to go to a 'real' club. So we dolled ourselves up in our finest gear (i.e my grey dress got its gazillionth outing) and headed to Chapel Street to a really nice club. As us backpackers always find a way to find a cheap night (and most likely because I was with pretty girls), we managed to bypass the usual $20 (12 pounds) entrance fee. It immediately became apparent that this was where all the ridiculously good-looking people were hiding, but thankfully the club lacked pretension because of the classic 80s and 90s music. Despite getting in for free, we still couldn't get resist trying to get some more bargains. Julia and I quizzed the barman about a rumour of $5 (3 pounds) drinks, but he merely looked at us and laughed. Instead my single Vodka and Cranberry juice set me back $9.50 (7 pounds). Needless to say I went home remarkably sober that night!

The rest of the weekend was mainly spent snoozing, before we eventually dragged ourselves out of bed to go the MCG and experience an Aussie Rules game. The stadium was absolutely massive, holding over 100,000 angry football fans. The game was the Geelong Cats vs the Hawthorn Hawks. Having no preference for either team we did the girly thing and chose the one with the hottest players, who naturally were the worst team. I won't pretend I had any idea what the hell was going on, but it was a very exciting game as there was so much scoring and lots of fights. I still don't quite understand how some tackles are fowls, but punching someone in the head or dragging them along the pitch by their foot is unacceptable. One player dislocated his finger and his coach snapped it back into place and he went right on playing. That is the Aussie way.

Despite only having a four day week this week I still found myself counting down the hours until Friday. I was also particularly excited for our girly evening on Friday night. Armed with a collection of five-year old magazines, extortionately overpriced chocolate and the cheapest face masks we could find, we settled down on blankets and beanbags on the floor of our room and had a really nice evening. As it was Anna's birthday the next day, we presented her with an amazing chocolate cake at midnight. Last night we donned our finest 1980s clothes and had a hostel karaoke party. Wearing a rather sexy gold-sequined off-the-shoulder number, grey leopard print leggings and my freshly highlighted (OMG it was so good to get rid of five-months worth of root!) hair backcombed into a side ponytail, I bared more than a slight resemblance to Cyndi Lauper. We began the night with a bottle of Passion Pop (a sickly sweet passion fruit flavoured wine, much beloved by backpackers sick of goon) and before we knew it we were up on the karaoke machine belting out 'Wannabe'. The night ended with the police shutting down the hostel party, apparently me yelling out 'Wahay strippers!' was not helpful. We progressed to the worst club in Melbourne 'Tongue and Groove', where the argument we had with the doorman went something like this:

'$10 please'

'What we have a deal with this club?'

'$10'

'But I work at the hostel'

'$10'

'But we were in here earlier'

'$10'

'I don't care $10'

'This is ridiculous'

'Oh ok then, go in.'

I didn't last long after getting mightily annoyed with the barman who refused to give me a glass of water. Shouting 'this is illegal, I did my RSA (responsible service of alcohol), I know these things!!' I went home to bed. About ten minutes later I was disturbed by Lauren bringing Anna home. She refused to go to bed, instead preferring to fall over our bin and tell everyone how much she loved them. All in all it was a pretty sweet night!