Dec 23 - Applying for Jobs and Looking for Housing

Got up and at em before noon today, which in itself is something to be proud of. I finished reading my Bill Shatner biography book while Brennan surfed the web looking for someplace we could stay once we have to check out of our hostel on Boxing Day. Any hostel in Sydney has a day or two when they're full (usually the 31st and 1st) and even Katoomba hostels are filling up. So we started looking at Gumtree (like Kijiji) for listings of houses/apartments/flats being rented out or people looking to share. Most were swamped with views, though we did email a couple people with expressions of interest. We both finished off our respective boxes of cereal for breakfast/lunch, I made a couple calls home to chat with the family before Christmas and Brennan sent an email home too I think. When I got back to the room, Brennan had been talking to a guy at the job placement agency, who arranged a tryout of sorts for Brennan doing a data processing job. The call from this guy had actually woken us this morning now that I think about it, then he called again later with details. Anyways, as Brennan got that sorted out on the phone, I hopped on the internet and started applying for the jobs I had found in my searching last night. I spent a couple hours applying for 6 jobs in total; 3 at hotels and 3 in retail. The one shoe store job required me to include a link to a website that showed my personality. I fretted about it for awhile then decided to put in the link to my Flickr photo page. Myer is a department store and had a long process of determining my skills and fit with their organization, while Ben and Jerry's was a real quick, single form submission. In terms of hotels, I did two applications for the Accor group of hotels, namely Novotel and Mercure. I had to make a profile and paste in bits of my resume individually for those, so they took a decent amount of time also. But by far, the most lengthy application was for Marriott hotel. I had to go through points of each section of my resume and take a multiple choice test about how I would handle different hotel situations (all of which I had encountered before at the Radission luckily!) and answer questions to determine my fit with the company. Way way way too intensive of a process for every potential applicant. Sure, it may weed out the good from the incapable, but imagine the hours wasted having to review 35 pages of stuff for every applicant for every position. Crazy. Anyways, Brennan had lined up an apartment we could view that was open to stay in from the 23rd til Jan. 3rd, but just before we went to go see it, the girl said she had leased it already so not to bother. People amaze me every day.

Shortly after 5, Brennan got dressed up in his fancy clothes and walked over to his typing test for this data entry job. I continued to look for places to live. I had burgers while he was gone, then he had burgers when he got back. Burgers just aren't the same when they're pan-fried... Apparently the test/interview thing went well and he starts work tomorrow at 9 AM. I get to sleep in and continue to be unemployed. Each role has its perks. I cracked open my next book, a Craig Ferguson biography (I'm on a biographical spree presently) and Brennan read a bit of Robinson Crusoe and looked for apartments. Eventually we had been inside for too long and went out for a walk to Darling Harbour to hopefully glean some Christmas spirit. We headed over and there were a few people out and about, but it was relatively quiet and Christmas cheer was noticeably absent. It's just not the same here. Wandered around the city for awhile then headed back to the hostel. On the way we picked up breakfast for tomorrow. Chocolate milk and cereal for B, strawberry milk and ingredients for grilled cheese sandwiches for me. It still doesn't feel right making a grilled cheese with white cheddar cheese (they have no orange cheddar cheese slices here) but it'll have to do. Read a bit more and called it a night. One of us has to get up early tomorrow and put some food on the table.