Monday 14 September 2015

Summertime pub work & the future

Picture a hot sunny day, with not a cloud in the sky, bees buzzing and people with hay fever cursing the days existence.
Think of what you could be doing on such a day, going for a walk, heading off to the coast, relaxing in your garden with a cold drink..endless ways of spending a glorious day.

Instead, I've been spending the best part of my summer holidays working at a local pub. Not the most exciting activity for most of my days. I finished working there about two weeks ago, giving me about two weeks to prepare for uni.
Looking back upon the job, it hasn't actually been too bad. I won't deny that some days after a late finish from a stressful shift i've hated my job, but in the end, those times are only temporary and the next day you've already half forgotten about it.

One of the positive things about that job was that it was so dynamic. On any day I could come into work and see things in the sink that need washing, and five minutes after starting that, I could either be called to prepare vegetables and other ingredients, tidy up some parts of the restaurant, start making starters (Sandwiches, Baked potatoes etc.) ..there is always a job of some kind that needs doing. I liked this as often you'd never be stuck doing a certain task for hours on end, which helped prevent work from becoming tedious..however the downside of this is on a busy day, I would be taking food out to many customers, and at times being asked to do tasks multiple people which would occasionally mean that I temporarily forgot what I was helping a customer with. Towards the end of my time at the pub, this drove me up the wall at some points, because the mistakes I made due to having so many things that needed urgently doing, including customer service, it just made me feel like I was being shit at my job.
On this subject, working at the pub was at times a real exercise in stress management, with situations like that popping up occasionally, maintaining a good face for customers and keeping yourself from lashing out at co-workers. That said, almost all of the people working there, me including had times where we just lost it and went a little bit stir crazy. Any time that would happen, we all understood it wasn't out of aggression, just stress and it didn't change our social standing with the person (not including a few twats that worked there for a while).
Aside from working with stress, the job was also good for learning to prioritize tasks and multitask, which will always be an occurrence in almost any job.

In the end, whether I enjoyed the job or not is kind of irrelevant..I means it's called work for a reason isn't it? I earned a fair bit of money over the summer (I worked hard for it!) and it was just a good experience to have had.

But enough about the summer..that's over and so is my holiday very soon. I will be moving to university of South Wales (Cardiff) tomorrow, to study Audio Engineering. The holiday has passed so quickly, and now i'm half rushing to get everything packed to move out of home. I've had a reasonable clue of what to sort out, but I haven't really sorted that much till about a week ago, with some help from my dad when it came to things I didn't think to sort out.
Aside from my large bedroom and my local friends, one of the main things i'll be missing is going to be my car. It's expensive to keep my car at uni and frankly i'm not really going to have much use for it, aside from the occasional gig in Bristol and getting back and forth from home.

I can't really say anything else other than bring on the future and the next chapter!

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