more about me!

I hated high school. It wasn’t so much the being picked on or the fights (I got into a few fights – I’ve had anger issues a few times in my life). I was bored. A lot. High school really didn’t interest me that much. In part, maybe because my subject choices were wrong. Anyway, I bombed out in my senior year. I did really badly even to the point where I surprised myself (you would think I saw it coming, you would think so…). But I was disappointed. I couldn’t even get into the University of New England in Armadale (which used to have a reputation of being the easiest university to get into). So I decided to repeat Grade 12… at the same high school. Not one of my better ideas – really it wasn’t. So I had to deal with all the issues I dealt with all through high school. I got really, really, really bored this time round and I lasted a term before I dropped out and started looking for work.

I’m not really sure how history is going to record the recession “we had to have” – but being an uneducated, young school leaver trying to find work during a recession was hard - ridiculously hard. I got a piece of advice from an interview I went for; I can’t even remember what the job was. But the interviewer told me to go get an education. Get myself into university anyway I could. So I went and sat a matriculation exam to see if I could get myself into University, I was really nervous after I sat the exam that I changed my preferences from University to TAFE (to only find out later that I could have gotten into a University course with my results).

As I had about a 6 month wait till my TAFE course started I decided to pick up a couple of subjects to just give myself something to do. This basically started my career as a student… 4 years of full-time studying, 2 years at TAFE studying marketing and then 2 years at the Queensland University of Technology to get my Bachelor’s Degree. I decided at the end of my degree (with some urging from your Oma) to relocate to Western Australia (there’s another blog post in that!). We’ll chalk up another disaster. So I moved back to Brisbane after a couple of months and did some temping work while trying to start my career. I decided to go back to University to get my Honours in Marketing – for 2 reasons, 1 to prove to myself that I could do it (this became the more important reason) and 2 to give myself a point of differentiation in the workforce. There weren’t many marketing graduates running around with a Honours Degree. I can look back at it now and I think I understand why! I really enjoyed my Honours Degree – I enjoyed the discipline and the research (so much that one of my favourite jobs was being a corporate researcher – although my job title was Marketing Information Assistant, a bit of a generic title really).

In my entire working life I have never successfully gotten a job through an external interview. It’s always been a question of luck and the right temp assignment at the right place. Every job I have really enjoyed, I never interviewed for! The ones I hated were the ones I had an internal interview for and got. Weird hey? I’m sure this may change when I look at going back to work in a few years.

Eventually I ended up working for the directory people. I was there for nearly 8 years. Again started in what was a temp role - which was meant to be for 6 weeks. I had some reward roles and some really shocking roles. The first was probably the funniest – I was a Personal Assistant to a State Sales Manager. It was a love/hate relationship, she fired me three times and I quit three times (never mind at that point I really needed the money from that job). I needed a permanent job as temping was getting a little too uncertain and they had kind of made my job permanent – I just wouldn’t be answering to the State Manager anymore. This move to permanency also gave my move to Melbourne. I took the permanent job even though it meant less money and about 9 months in – my then boss offered me a transfer to Melbourne. I thought about it, I asked around for people’s opinions and I decided to do it! I loved Melbourne, absolutely loved it! I’d been down for training with work a couple of times and just found it amazing. It funnily enough felt like home – it just took me a couple of more years to truly find my home. I think part of the reason why I liked Melbourne so much is that as an outsider, you don’t feel like an outsider… Melbourne’s full of them!