High Employment, Low Employment

I am approximately one-hundred-and-eighty feet in the air when I get a phone call from Oddette with news of a job.
“Filing work.” She says, “In a basement, nothing exciting, but it’s a jeans and trainers sort of job which might be a bonus.”
I nod, trying to find a quiet corner of the SkyTower’s viewing deck to hole up in so that I can hear the rest of the telephone call. Not an easy task of course, given that the viewing deck is a large circular room with no corners to speak of, but an awful lot – it would seem – of Japanese students taking it in turns to crawl on hands an knees across the sections of glass floor.
I hold the phone tight against one ear and jam my finger deep into the other.
“Sounds great.” I say, wincing at the cacophony of squealing and screeching of horror and delight from the school-kids who are now jumping up and down on the glass panels. I turn my back on them and try and concentrate on the phone call.
“It does? Wonderful!” Oddette enthuses. “It’s sixteen dollars an hour, and the temps I have working there at the moment have agreed to work from eight ‘til…”
A particularly loud yell makes me look back over my shoulder to where the class are being castigated by a teacher. One of the boys it seems had been pressing a girl’s face against the glass floor panel. Charming, I think.
“Is that okay?” Oddette is asking. “Quite long, I know, but…”
“It’s fine,” I say, “Sounds great.” I think to myself, I can get up for eight, surely shouldn’t be a problem.
“Oh good.” Oddette seems pleased. “I’ll email you with the rest of the details and you can start tomorrow.”
She thanks me and I thank her and we both hang up thankfully. All in all, I admit to myself as I extract my finger from my ear canal, an impressive service given that I only signed up with the agency the previous afternoon.
The Ministry, where I shall be working for the next two-to-four weeks depending on various factors (for example, how long can the job reasonably be stretched out to?) is around half and hour’s walk from Gary and Julia’s flat and I hike down the following morning, the early sunlight splintering through dense and atmospheric fog which lends the city skyline the quality of a ghostly black and white image.
The job involves packing up an office basement, archiving the files therein before a big office move takes everything across town in neat easy-to-find cardboard boxes. The project has been going on for a couple of months already, but Mary – who meets me in reception – has decided that eleven weeks is enough and is off to the Cook Islands the following evening. I’m to replace her and have a couple of days to figure out exactly what it is that she did. It seems fairly straightforward, with the devil inevitably being in the details. Files must be packaged into special boxes, and the boxes labelled with a special label and then left in a special room. A spreadsheet – also special – must be updated and after so many entries, a contact in Wellington (presumably special, I haven't heard back from them yet) must be contacted. Not exactly rocket science, but then the pay is not too exciting either, the sixteen dollars translating roughly to five UK pounds sterling an hour.
“Still,” Mary concedes, “It pays more than bar work, you get weekends to cut loose and the hours are long enough to be able to save properly.”
Oh, that’s a point, I think, I knew I missed something from the phone call.
“When do we finish again?” I ask innocently.
“Six.”
Here, I perform a little mental arithmetic and prove that my degree in mathematics was not a complete waste of time.
“Six?” I squeal, “That’s nine hours!”
“Nine-and-a-half.” Mary corrects me, “We only take half and hour for lunch.”
I think I must have turned pale as Mary offers a consolatory smile.
“It’s not so bad.” She says, “We have a radio.”

The lease of Gary and Julia’s flat is coming up and they are moving into a smaller, one-bedroom flat in the city centre. Despite Gary’s cheerful insistence that the new floor is every bit open to me as their old, I break open the Lonely Planet and scour the hostels section regardless, after all, I do have a job now and one day, I might actually get paid for it.
My decision is eventually made for me once I bring the subject up at work. Mary suggests the hostel that she has been staying at for the last few months, and which she will soon be leaving.
“It’s like someone’s house.” She says, “There’s only twenty beds in the entire building and none of them are bunks. A really nice atmosphere.”
This immediately appeals to me, as does the revelation that the place is unequipped with the a television, which admittedly means that I will find myself missing the rest of the series of The Sopranos, but on the other hand, I am assured that its absence makes the place a lot friendlier as it forces people to actually talk to each other in the evenings which seems ideal.
I call the hostel that evening and manage to secure the last available bed for Saturday night. It is only a short walk from Gary and Julia’s flat, so the following morning Gary and I walk down with my belongings to get them out of the way while the rest of his flatmates pack things up for the move.
The place certainly looks like a house, wide verandas encircling its ground and first floors with views looking out over the parkland which drops away from its garden and affords a picture postcard view of the city skyline softened by the curling branches of the parkland trees.
I ring the doorbell and am met by a rather nervous looking woman who asks me rather shrilly if I have made a booking. I assure her that I have.
“Only we’re fully booked.” She says as though she does not quite believe me.
“I know,” I say, “I booked yesterday. Over the telephone.”
Although I am reasonably certain that this woman knows what a telephone is, almost unconsciously, I seem to be making the universal-sign-language gesture for ‘telephone’ – one hand at my ear, thumb and little finger extended.
Either way, she consults her diary and seems satisfied that the name I have given her matches the one scrawled in the margin. She leads me into a small room on the first floor with four beds arranged tightly within it. Single beds, not bunks, the room looks a little cramped and I suspect that perhaps on this occasion, two pairs of bunks might have been preferable. But the room has at least two things in its favour over some of the other dormitories that I have stayed in over the past few months. Firstly, it seems lived in, but reasonably cared for, in that some effort had been made to straighten the sheets of the three inhabited beds, and the bags are stacked neatly in the narrow gaps between them with an absolute bare minimum of underwear strewn on the floor between them. Secondly, and much more importantly, the room does not stink of the usual cocktail of dormitory odours (equal parts feet, sweat and aerosol deodorant, liberally seasoned with spilt alcohol, a lingering soupcon of tobacco and a pinch of stale semen and/or stomach acid) and this alone is enough to make it particularly appealing.
As she waits for my bank card to burble through the machine, I try to strike up a conversation and mention how the place was recommended to me by Mary. The name strikes a chord and the woman looks at me suspiciously.
“Mary used to stay here.” She says.
“I know.” I say, “She used to work where I do. I took her job you see and now she’s gone travelling again...”
There’s a slight pause, punctuated by the rattling of the card machine the woman holds in her hand.
“You’ve taken her job?” she says in what I swear is a hoarse whisper, “And now you’ve taken her bed.”
The note of accusation is rather bewildering, particularly as the statement is said without – as far as I can tell – any irony at all. Not for the first time in my life, I really do not know what to say, but some answer seems to be demanded and I’m afraid to say that my improvisational skills in this area are very poor indeed:
“Sorry.” I say unnecessarily, but in a small enough voice that I hope it might not be heard.
At that moment, the card machine finishes doing whatever the hell it had been doing and noisily spews out a slip of paper which is presented to me by the woman with a slightly worrying insistence.
“Sign here.” She says as though hidden somewhere in the innocent looking hostel receipt is a full and detailed confession for something unspecific. I hesitate a moment before just signing the thing anyway, proving perhaps that I would fare particularly poorly under interrogation of any sort, and would in fact probably sign my name to anything if a clean, odour-free room was on offer.