Up and down, story of my life or what? One day I'm lamenting a universe-bestriding lack of appreciation and wallowing in more than a little customised pity, the next day I can't stop thinking how damn wonderful this little country down under really is.
Some other people's lives are also characterised by what you might call up and down, but these are that other sort of bastard, who I envy constantly, who implement a more literal and vastly less family-friendly manifestation of the theme. One day soon I might get my act together and meet a nice girl, but until then I'll just have to keep up the tangential references until someone complains me into letting up. Can't see either happening soon, personally.
The reason I'm renewed in my chirpiness, especially considering it's now 3:30 in the morning over here? Well, obviously, I've had a couple of beers. No surprises there. But moreover it is because my one source of steady work here, the local installment of the Shooters Bar chain where I have worked for a little less than 8 weeks, has seen fit to put me through the duty manager program and wants to, among other things, pay for me to get a New Zealand manager's license and some other booze-related piece of papery bling so I can work like a donkey over Christmas and be able to look after the place whenever the rest of the management crew are either too dangerously spannered or lethally hungover to operate anything so complex as even a flush toilet, let alone a licensed premises for to poison the next installment of pleasure seekers.
Perhaps there is more to my being known as `superman` than a mere geeky appearance and shooting laser beams from my eyes.
But the thing that, besides all the above nonsense and lies, makes me happy? The sense of community I now appreciate and notice among the bars in town. Although it is still a pretty lowly post in the big scheme of things, the DMs of all the bars in town (except perhaps the two scummy places in town, not incidentally both of which I am no longer welcome in due to a hazardous night out some weeks back where I had to be ejected by force, as so often happens to both myself and her Royal Highness the Queen) share a common sort of clubby relationship where everyone sees to it that they every other duty manager who visits on a night out, or needs something while on duty, or any other reasonable little boon gets looked after properly. This invariably leads to much friendliness between all concerned at every door (front of the queue if there is one) and bar (kudos, respect and much social gratification to be had all round) and a certain drastic blindness when it comes to actually charging money for drinks required. Without naming names I happened to see given away no fewer than 36 double shots of some of the more expensive spirits and liqueurs to just one person on one evening, and that was just for the left side of Mr. Jagger's formidable cakehole.
Anyway I'm possibly more pleased with the sideline benefits of the job, particularly the even more friendly dealings that we (I get to use that kind of `we` now, too!) shall share from now on. Frankly it was hard to imagine most kiwis being even more pleasant than they are by default, but these deeply loveable people have somehow managed it yet again. The thing that probably kicks it into the happy house is that the idea was offered to me because I had, apparently, been seen to work pretty hard and were capable of all the stuff asked of me, and I couldn't help but notice during these past weeks that I was doing quite a few more things than anyone else from the pool of regular bartenders. It is, in other words, how I imagined a job would be when I started work at the age of sixteen and thought that as long as I worked hard it would be noticed and rewarded.
Sadly, very sadly, that is not how things work in England, at least not in any unqualified jobs and not even in my own field of quite hard-earned expertise.
New Zealand is a little like how the world should be, according to some subconscious text of wishful thinking. That definition makes it a little bit like a dream, I suppose. And I would not be the first person to have said that.
