This post was written on April 14th 2010. I have had only intermittent internet access since then so haven’t been able to publish any blog posts. So get ready for a flood of articles…
Today was my first proper day of work in over a year. Strangely, it didn’t feel like actual work. It was a day of problem solving and logistics. To be honest, it was kind of fun!
I awoke at 6.57pm, exactly three minutes for my alarm was set. I’m not exactly sure why, but perhaps it was some kind of excited anticipation. The four of us (all seasonal workers) were living in the same house. It was in pretty poor shape but we had our own rooms and all the essentials we needed to survive. After some toast, we were off in our Ute (Australian Utility vehicle) to fix up an empty house on the farm.
I spent 30 minutes getting rid of the cobwebs, mainly by walking into them to my head. We then proceeded to get something called a loader to knock down some trees. It was basically a kind of digger machine.
The roof had caved in on some giant storage tank and we devised a plan to use the loader and a chain to pull it all out. After a few failed attempts, our modified plan succeeded and we scrapped the metal roof. It was really very satisfying to accomplish something tangible and I received a well earned hit of dopamine from it.
After a good ham and cheese sandwich, with super thick farmhouse bread of course, we were back to work. The afternoon was spent painting the inside of the house. Being out in the middle of nowhere, you can’t really pop down to a hardware store and pick things up. There were a number of challenges in just finding the right tools for the job. Everything is supposedly upside down in Australia, and even opening one of the paint cans proved tricky due to some fancy locking system.
Five hours of painting later and we were nearing the end of our first day of “farming”. Not too difficult, even for a city boy like me. What struck me most is how similar it was to my first day at an office job. Full of technical terms, abbreviations and strange ways of doing things.
Just like my first day in the office, I can tell you for sure I do not want to do this as a career. However, I am very much looking forward to spending a couple of months on the farm as a means to further my travel plans. I actually love the job from that perspective as every hour or two I work gives me another day or so of travel.
