How to get a job, S4 style. (Cadets, take note!!)

Muse thoughtfully about looking for a new job next time you are on leave.....

Imagine where you would like to go and what sector you would like to work in.....

Have a cup of tea, and voila! Your inbox will ping and an exciting job offer will have materialized.

With a chunky pay rise.

I kid you not, this is exactly what happened to me about 2 weeks ago. I am, I know, the jammiest little swine in the world, and actually feel slightly very embarrassed at my good fortune, when many people I know are desperately seeking their first job as a qualified officer. However, I have a point to make here, mainly directed at cadets:

WORK YOUR ASS OFF.

As a cadet, you may feel tempted to cruise by, doing the minimum necessary to complete your TRB, workbooks and the dreaded Work Based Learning. Telling yourself that at the end of the day the grades don't matter as long as you pass, it's only the ticket that matters. In a way, this is true. But consider this: once you have your ticket, you are plunged into a depressing search for that first trip job. You are up against all the other people who have also recently qualified and you need an edge.

You may be lucky and be sponsored by a company who say they will take you on once you're qualified. However, this seems to be more and more infrequent. (How many cadets does your company sponsor and how many positions do they need to fill?) Several people I know were told that they would be taken on, only to have this offer retracted when the time came. They may be able to offer some cadets a place, but who do you think they will pick? The guy who cruised by doing the minimum, or the guy who was involved, interested and always willing to help.

It's not just about doing the work, it's how you go about it. Do it on ship, rather than try and write stuff up later when you are home, ask the officers for help (at an appropriate time), and offer your help when it comes to cruddy tasks they need done. Go to your training officer and ask for a time to sit down and discuss how you can cover aspects of the TRB that don't come up all that often. And above all, go about your work with a positive attitude. No matter how narked you may feel inside that you've been sent to chip and paint/count shackles/inspect fire extinguishers/take inventory of a lifeboat when you've already got that task signed off in your book. Get on with it, and when someone comes past and asks how you're getting on, be positive. This is all stuff that has to be done anyway, and it might as well be you. You only need 6 months bridge watchkeeping experience, so don't moan, especially if you are on your first trip. In fact, never moan, if you have a concern, go to your training officer and ask when you can sit down together to discuss your training.

Hopefully, if you do these things, by the time you leave the ship, you will have given the officers on board the impression that you are a hard-working, diligent and pleasant person to have around. Now here's the really important bit: Get their personal email addresses, and give them yours.

People think that the industry is huge, but actually it's quite small, everyone knows each other, and memories are long. When a job becomes available, people will not necessarily put an ad up for it. A lot of the time, they will think to themselves "I wonder if so-and-so is available, I'll just drop them a line, see what they're up to" If someone who's been working for a while decides to change jobs, they first of all contact people the people they used to work with on other ships and find out what's available. So, if you have made a good impression on someone, they might recommend you to a friend; or have a word with the recruitment agency you've just had an interview with, who are saying that such and such company couldn't possibly employ you because you don't have the necessary experience yet; or they might just email you out of the blue with an awesome job offer. Trust me, it works.

Ship life Vs Real Life Part 2: Real Life

I write this on a train; this in itself is quite a novelty for me, as until recently my laptop was incapable of working unless plugged into the mains. Now I have a shiny new little beast that weighs half of what the old one did and has hours of battery life. I love it.

Being on a train however, is not a novelty. It is how I spend a good proportion of my leave. This is real life. And I do not love it.

I am, I know, incredibly lucky to have the friends I have. I have collected an incredible set of people who never cease to amaze and inspire me. They are creative, intelligent, adventurous and crazy and I love them dearly. Unfortunately, many of them don’t really know each other, having only met through me on odd occasions. There are the friends I met when I was young and living at home, there are the friends I met when I lived in Winchester, then there are those I met while indulging in wonderfully silly LRP weekend events across the country, and now there are those I have met at sea too. And none of them live in the same place. 

As soon as I announce that I am coming home, I am beset by the question:  “So when are you going to come and see me?” I hate that question, but then again, it’s nice to be wanted. Inevitably I will, of course, end up travelling halfway across the country to see them, spending hours, if not days, of my precious leave on the train, squishing my belongings into a rucksack and myself in between commuters and cider fuelled tramps. And it’s wonderful to see them, but there is also within me a tinge of resentment, the sullen teenager that resides within me still, muttering, “Why do I always have to come to you, why can’t you come to see me for once?” 

I get 4 months leave a year, in two blocks. And yes that probably sounds like an age to most of you. However, do the maths: 52 weeks in a year, so that’s 104 days of weekends, then add the 28 days  of statutory leave you get in your average job, then add in at least 8 days of bank holidays and you will find that you get 140 days off work every year. 4 months, if they average at 30 days per month, works out at 120 days off in a year.

So my time off is precious. And I try to spend it wisely, but when one has just spent 4 months working solidly, 10 or more hours a day, 7 days a week, then what I really want to do, initially a least, is cocoon myself away and just not do anything. I want 4 months’ worth of weekends: I want my lazy lie ins with my lover, I want my late nights getting drunk on good wine in front of the tv, I want to go to the supermarket and buy the food I have spent months thinking about, in short, actually,  I want to revel in domesticity. 

I long for a place of my own, but as yet there are insufficient funds in my account. And while I officially reside at my parent’s house, I probably spend more time at my boyfriend’s house. He also lives with his mother, and I find myself amused regularly at the exchanges between them; he, at 34, sounding like a petulant teenager, and she the put-upon mother. Sometimes I think they sound more like a bickering old married couple. But when I return home to my parents, I find myself hearing the petulant teenager in my own voice, and feel the very physical sense of annoyance that wriggles under my shoulder blades when I am told to do something. For example, when I had my own place, I always did the washing up in the morning – why end a lovely relaxed evening with work? And I always found that having done one task, I was spurred on to do more. But at home my mother insists it is done that night, so I am dragged from my comfortable seat on the sofa to come and help with the drying up. Likewise with other household and garden tasks, I have no issue with doing them, in fact, I quite enjoy them, but I would like to be allowed do them when I decide, not be given instruction. I realise run the risk here of sounding exactly like the petulant teenager I gently mock my boyfriend for sounding like. I do try and help as much as I can, I do my laundry when I get home from sea (although my skills in this department pale into insignificance next to my mother, who insists upon soaking almost everything first, and irons when I would simply hang up to dry and be done with it). I sometimes cook, but my mother usually has menus planned out for the whole weekend, which narrows my contribution down to chief chopper of vegetables and stirrer of saucepans, and that is a poor substitute for actually cooking. 

My main contribution, as I see it, is in the garden. We have a large garden, which is a struggle for my parents to keep up with as they get older. Over the last 32 years that my family has lived in our house, my mother has slowly, painstakingly, and with the aid of a lot of compost, sand, manure and sheer bloody determination, taken a wasteland of weeds and overgrown shrubs growing on 500 ft of blue clay, and turned it into a garden. It is a work in progress, and when she makes a concerted effort to attack one area, inevitably, another area runs amok and the docks and nettles and grasses move in. I am their nemesis. I leave the planting and nurturing to her, but there is a huge amount of satisfaction to be gained from ripping up weeds and depositing huge heaps of them onto the bonfire. And while it is satisfying, it is also useful and helpful and lets me live happy in the knowledge that I’ve done the donkey work and they won’t break their backs trying to do it. 

As I said, though, I spend more of my time at my boyfriend’s house, and have to admit I probably do more there than I do at home, but I get to do it on my own terms: I wash up, I cook, I buy groceries, including all the fancy things I feel eating in the shopping basket. I even do his laundry sometimes, when I’m doing my own. I tidy his room, put his clothes away and make the bed. Sometimes. 

So I get my longed for domesticity, I get time with the family, and I get time with the man I love. But this gets broken up into little segments of a few days at a time, because there are all these other people demanding my time too, people who live in Devon, or Winchester, or Bristol. All of these places are too far to pop over for a pint, and as I may only get to see them once a year, they want to see me for a day or more, not a few hours. And I go, I spend hours on the train (the learning to drive new year’s resolution has not yet come to fruition) and I am glad to see them, in the hopes that at some point they will reciprocate.

Now, I threw a party earlier this leave. I decided a long time ago that as I turned 30 in March and I had never had a proper party I would have it in the summer. A full weekend if people wanted to stay, plenty of space in the garden of all to camp. Lots of food, lots of booze. I sent out messages in February asking what dates suited people the best. I had a few responses. I set a date and sent out invites. To about 70 people. I had to send invites via facebook because I was on the other side of the world (which is a pretty good excuse for not sending paper invites I reckon). I subsequently sent out about 5 messages to the invitees asking them to please RSVP. In the end, about 30 people said they could come. Not bad I guess. And then they started dropping out. The injuries, illness and sudden discovery of being newly pregnant I can forgive. Shit happens. But it still felt like a kick in the teeth when only 18 people actually turned up. This included my parents, sister and boyfriend. And the neighbours. The number of friends who made the effort to drag themselves across the country was depressingly low (injuries, illness and sudden discovery of being newly pregnant notwithstanding). I love my friends, and I know they love me, but after 3 and a half years of being in this job, there’s some things they still just don’t get.