on the job

i waitress for a staffing agency. this involves going to different functions in different venues, meeting different people all the time.... in short, there is huge variety. key word, different

minimum shifts of 4 hours. huge potential for mundaneness, especially if in the event of glass-polishing or waiting around with nothing do

but tonight i worked at the tate modern, and was duly reminded of why it's not really all about the money (despite my moaning and groaning and insistence otherwise). not only were we allowed to go home early, but furthermore we were permitted to go onto the über-cool carsten höller exhibit (a.k.a. "the big slides"). it has to be seen and experienced to be believed. i quote:

"The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

it was awesome, to say the least. something so simple yet so exhilarating! the clandestine nature of our exploit (in the sense that we were meant to be "working" there, yet we'd transcended the guest-employee boundaries and become art patrons, so to speak!) made it even sweeter, however subtly

it also made me take stock of some of the more unusual, cool experiences i've had over the last 1.5 years while on the job...

• meeting the british p.m. and offering him drinks (he asked for a beer... though i'm not supposed to mention any of this, so shhhh!)
  
• working at the madame tussauds wax museum and seeing matt lucas and david williams ham it up in their various little britain roles and "interacting" with the guests (e.g. think a chavvy vicky pollard going "yeah but no but yeah but...", or a falsely wheelchair-bound lou grabbing my canapé tray. hilarious!)
• cool venues i've worked at include the royal albert hall (which looks amazing inside when lit up!), kew garden (always a joy when surrounded by nature!), someone's incredibly bohemian, beautiful townhouse in primrose hill (it had to be seen to be believed), tower bridge (the offering panoramic views of the thames - lovely)
  
• running into cliff richard and cilla black, offering boy george canapés, topping up graham norton's glass with champagne, hearing bon jovi play LIVE (they are AMAZING performers) at a private concert for some corporate dinner (and seeing bon jovi snort lines backstage, but that's something i'd rather not have witnessed!)

i've also met a whole range of characters, including students on gap-years, uni students, catering managers with all sorts of personality quirks... it's taken me more than a year, but i've learnt how to strike up random conversations, how to say anything for the sake of saying something, how it's not actually such a bad thing to talk crap if it means bridging the intangible gap between strangers

so 2 more shifts this month @ my favourite venue, where i can nowadays joke freely with the managers and know my way around almost entirely. the going is tough, but some day in the future i will gaze back fondly upon these days of low-paid part-time casual work and reminisce not about how many hours of waitressing i had to endure, but about the numerous once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-blue-moon experiences i randomly, and fortunately, fell into

:)


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