First Day on the Job

I began my job today working at the Yellow Pages. I've never worked through a employment agency before so I was kind of confused at first as for whom I am actually working for. Yellow Pages is owned by Sensis, which is part of Telstra, which is like AT&T back home. I am working for Sensis through the temp agency called Julia Ross. So Julia Ross has employed 20 of us on a casual three month contract to add to Sensis's full-time team during their busy time of the year. My paycheck comes from Julia Ross's office, not Sensis. Confusing, I know. I will be making $27.70 per hour, working at least 35 hours per week, Monday through Friday.

We have 4 weeks of training to go through before they put us on the floor. So technically I will be training for 1 out of 3 months of my contract. Today I learned how to open and shut down a computer, how to create a folder, and everything else anybody in the room should already know and not need explaining. We have two girls training a group of about ten of us in the room. We will all be training together for the four weeks, which will be a great way for us all to get to know each other better and to make a few new friends. I am the only American in our group. Our group also consists of some Chinese, Vietnamese, English, New Zealand, and I think, one Australian native.

I can tell the job is going to be very easy for me. It sure beats waiting tables! Our hours have been changed to 3pm-11pm, which is great because that still leaves me with 45 minutes to get to the ferry back to Manly. I had originally planned to move the city closer to work, but after arriving to the hostel where I was going to moving to proved to be the equivalent of living the slums of South Jackson, I hightailed it back to Manly! My commute will be about 50 minutes, but it includes a relaxing 30 minute ferry ride across the harbor where I can do write some journal entries, update my website, read a book, etc. From the ferry, I catch a bus that takes me to my building. Because it was our first day, we got out at 8:15pm.

So far, so good! Loving Sydney, but definitely missing the comforts of home. Perhaps after a month, I may look at a house share in the city. For now though, I am back to painting murals at Manly Backpackers. They were glad to have me back!

Here is a photo of my first mural I did for them. I am continuing this design down the wall a bit and will then plan my next mural.