I forgot to write about this earlier, but Claire and I now occasionally work as ticket office sellers for a stadium in Wellington. Today we worked our first event, which was a rugby game between the Wellington Lions and Northland. Good times!
Given that I've worked for the past four years at a box office, I was surprised by how excited I was to work at the venue. It's just something that I wouldn't have an opportunity to do otherwise. Selling tickets to the largest stadium in Wellington! For a rugby game! With the Wellington Lions!
I was actually supposed to be a runner, which is apparently the name for the miscellaneous harangued people who stand around for hours and then are thrust into repetitive activity for fifteen minutes. It turns out that they had a vacancy in the actual box office so I filled in for that.
The TicketMaster system that they use here in New Zealand (or maybe that they use worldwide, I do not know) is not at all like TheatreManager. It's this massive MS-DOS esque system that works really well once you know it (I assume), but it has quite the learning curve. During training, it seemed rather straightforward, but I had a moment today where I had to shift my expectations away from what I was used to with TheatreManager and the four-year routine at Pick. In addition to very real differences between working in a 1,300 capacity concert hall and a 34,000 capacity sports arena, I have close to no knowledge about rugby and New Zealand sporting events. It turned out to be fine in the end and my supervisor was great, but there was that adjustment period where nothing seemed quite as simple as it did on paper. I like to think that I handled myself with composure, though.
In more I-Am-Still-Getting-Used-To-Things-Here news, I had a strange moment where someone gave me $25 for a $22 order, and I stared down at the $1 and $2 coins in my drawer. The cogs in my brain were working at the speed of mud. I knew that I had to give three dollars back, but there was just a stalled moment where I couldn't quite figure out where the one dollar bills were, and why I couldn't just give three of those back. (Things Kiwis don't have to do before jobs: Sit on the train with change in their hands, memorizing the shape and size of the coinage.)
Oh, it was also cool to work in the Blue Booth*, because that's where the supervisors etc are all headquartered, and I could hear the banter and all of the hilaricrazy supervisor talk. It was very much the kind of conversations we got up to in the offices at Pick.
Anyway, there were also a ton of interesting characters in the office itself. In the Blue Booth, our supervisor looked like a hipster Tom Cruise with imperfect skin. He had on tiny black skinny jeans and those stripey black and white sneakers that have a brand name that I can't recall the name of. He was super chill and really great when I was failing at pressing buttons. To my right was a woman from Scotland, who was maybe five feet tall and still sometimes got away with children's tickets on buses, despite being in her mid twenties. I'm not quite sure what her story is, but she said that she "left a mess behind in Scotland" and she's been traveling for going on ten months. She's signing on for a six month lease on Monday, so she's committed to staying for at least that long. Beside her was a university student whose family is from England but she came over when she was thirteen. After work, we chatted on the way to the train station and had a brief nerdy conversation about Inception. I didn't really get to talk to the next two people, but the lady after her had clearly worked the box office for a while and was an absolute pro at helping us navigate the horrible maze of Courier font. She was bright and cheerful and sounded like a big rugby fan. To be honest, I had no idea that there was a person in the booth next to hers, but there she was at the end of the shift, quietly counting up her cash. Oops? Other people whose names I caught included both full time ticket office workers, and one of the two was this awesome Samoan guy who was both flippant and super competent. (Also, prior to talking with him, I didn't know that Kiwis pronounced "Samoan" with two syllables, "sa-mone." Either that or he's whatever a samone is.)
The conversation with him made me realize that I haven't actually written about the demographic of minorities here. There are plenty of Asians around-- much to my parents' relief, I can report that there is an Asian grocery store in Johnsonville, manned by a Korean girl even! -- but after that, things get a little bit different. There is obviously a large Maori influence, and street signs and slogans are frequently doubled up in Maori. (I wish I had any sort of grounding in the Maori language aside from the handful of words I've learned from the museums etc. It's strange not to know anything about the grammar or, well, anything at all.) He mentioned that people frequently mistook him for being Maori and said that he should apply for Maori grants etc. It makes sense, but just hearing that made me re-realize the differences between the States and here. And, in the same vein, the thing that has been pervasively off is that I have not heard any Spanish spoken or seen any Spanish written. I am so used to Spanish being the Language To Know that it's strange that there is hardly any use for it here. (On their version of Food Network --or maybe it was just a cooking show-- there was a commercial for how to make tortill-lahs. Maybe they have tips on how to cook fa-jee-tas?)
Claire has mentioned that it's especially weird for her, given how certain language skills are prized in Quebec. We were working on her CV, and I thought it was really telling that her version from home has her languages listed first. Now, in New Zealand, it's relegated to second page, subsection "Skills."
Anyhow, that was my first cash handling experience in New Zealand. Watch out now!
* The Blue Booth, in case anyone wants to know, is actually red. This is very confusing for people who are told, simply, to convene at the Blue Booth but can only see the Yellow, Red, Red, and Grey booths. Apparently it was repainted recently and the only blue on it is on the door inside the gates. Claire was selected to work in the Concourse, which is this tiny ticketing island which has the dual luck of having eight cramped booths, little ventilaton and no space and gets the bulk of walkup. I think I won that particular booth-off.
No comments:
Post a Comment