^^ The only, I repeat, ONLY perk to being at the train station before 7:00am.
First of all, this story ends well, so don't even for two seconds let yourself think I got fired as in weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was more like, you're great. Here, hold my baby.
I'd agreed to start working at this office on Saturdays only, which was before I'd gotten my full time job just around the corner, or I probably wouldn't have agreed to the job in the first place. It was back in the city, actually just out of the city, and it was on a Saturday which is kind of a hassle to get to via public transport. PLUS, I'm waking up at 5:00am every day of the week, Saturday being my only day to revel in the luxury of waking up past 8:00am. Saturdays, guys. Saturdays.
First, the buses don't run frequently enough on the weekends, so my mom drives my to the train station. (Bless her) The train then stops a couple stops out and announces that there's been an accident on the tracks and we'll all have to get off and good riddance.
Just kidding. They called a "special" bus for us (these buses have a giant SPECIAL displayed on the outside of the bus so everyone knows something is wrong with the people inside) and the bus took us all the way to North Melbourne. THEN, I take the North Melbourne train to Parliament Station and soon find myself alone on the tram to Brunswick street. Just me and tram driver lady. No words were exchanged.
The whole ordeal took an hour and 30 minutes. Bleh in my mouth.
I arrived only four minutes early and the second I stepped in the door, it was a mad house. Which is funny because there were no patients. The dentist talked very fast about everything. She was explaining procedures and what I was going to be doing that day, but I just felt like she was telling me that there was going to be an explosion soon, k? and we need to clean all the teeths before it happens. It was frightening.
The hygienist there, after closing the door to the patient room, told me in a hushed voice that sometimes the dentist gets a little stressed and when she does she sometimes says rude and offensive things but you just have to brush it off and understand that really she does love you.
At this point I really felt like a bomb was going to go off very soon.
On with our story. I assist the hygienist, then the dentist asks to speak to me in the other patient room. (Thoughts running through my head at that point in time: there has got to be a bomb here, I hope I am not close to it, maybe it's a small bomb, something is going to explode, this place is making me feel like something is going to explode. Oh look. Her baby. How old? 4 months? How cute.)
Apparently, since I work just around the corner at St. Vincents, she felt this was a conflict of interest (she said that exact phrase, conflict of interest, many times) and thought that it would be best if I just stuck with them and she would be happy to find someone else to work Saturdays, since it was also such a hassle to come all the way up here just for one day. I agreed (after the hectic manner in which the morning had gone, I had vowed to call them up on Monday and let them know that this was not going to work) and she paid me for the time I was there.
I got there at 8:00. It was now 9:30.
So she technically fired me, although it wasn't as brutal as the word implies, and then she says, "Here hold my baby." But really it was more like, will you hold her while I finish filing a few papers?, and I was like sure I like kids. So I take this small child from her and THANK THE HEAVENS ABOVE it did not cry. But as soon as I picked her up, I just knew, I was like, this baby is probably going to spit up on me. And wouldn't ya know. She did.
So I'm walking around the back office, carrying the baby of the dentist who just fired me, who's spit up I am cleaning off my shirt, and I was so hilariously surprised at the strangeness of it all, I hardly cared.
Well, filing leads to other things and the dentist ending up seeing a patient before retrieving her child from this strange american woman (me) 45 minutes later. I told the baby that we'd meet up someday, probably in heaven, and we'll talk about this ridiculous day where we met and she threw up on me.
So that was my first and last day at my new and old job.
MP
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