Why Are You Here?
Last night, while I was cooking a rather delicious vegetable curry, my housemate asked me,
“Why did you leave your career and travel thousands of miles from home, just to work in a bar? You’re not using your education, you’re not advancing your career, what’s the point?”
She’s right to be confused, of course. Why on earth would anyone leave a career they’re trained in to earn roughly half their annual wage doing unskilled work on the other side of the world? I’ve often asked myself the same question, and while I can answer it with the simple statement “I was a bit bored”, it’s not quite that simple and I think that it’s a fairly interesting story so I thought I’d use words and punctuation to tell it.
Let’s get my situation detailed, to start with. I’ve got a BSc/MEng in Computer Science, and I’ve done a total of 1 and a half years of work in the research end of the IT industry, where I programmed web stuff for museums. I’ve been into computing all my life and I’ve been studying it since I was 16. I’m not the best programmer I’ve ever seen, not by a long way, but I’m alright at it, and I think it’s safe to say my career in IT was on the up when I decided to leave. Most of my friends in the same position as me walked straight into rather well-paid jobs and seem to be doing alright.
So why did I leave that to fly 12,000 miles and work in a bar? Well, it all started somewhere around the third year of university. I was pretty sick of computing, as I recall; I didn’t much like the idea that I was going to work in an office for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t really see myself doing anything else, given my experience and expertise. I decided that when I finished university I was going to go to Australia for a year, travel a bit, maybe pick some fruit for cash, and see how I felt about the whole office thing after that. I suppose that was the original idea: to say that I’d done something other than sitting in front of a computer all my life.
My master’s year came around, and I found myself very busy indeed and completely unable to plan anything for the future. Graduation caught me by surprise as my workload suddenly vanished and I was left broke and unemployed. I was also surprised to find that I’d signed a contract for a house in Southampton which I would be renting with 6 friends for a year. Australia was out of the question. I chilled out for 3 months while I tried to decide what to do with my life. I eventually resolved to get a job and sort out the whole traveling thing while I was supposed to be busy.
While I was working, my imagination had time to run riot, and before I knew it I was planning to a world tour instead of a swift flight to Australia. There were a couple of reasons for this: the first was the money I was making, which allowed me to save enough to skip work for a good few months, and the second was the realisation that Australia is completely on the other side of the world, and if you’re going halfway, you might as well go all the way. A few months later, I found myself walking into a travel agent and proclaiming, “I want to go around the world, but I don’t know how”. I told them I wanted to go to Australia and back again, and some countries in between, and they pretty much did everything else for me. By this point, my reasons for traveling had changed: I was annoyed at myself for not going when I graduated and I guess I just wanted to prove to myself that I wouldn’t back out. In addition, as I’d predicted, I was pretty damn bored of sitting in front of a computer.
Somewhere between booking tickets and arriving in Australia the whole idea of working in a bar formed in my head, and that became a whole other reason: I’ve been a barfly for years and I wanted to be part of the hospitality scene for a while. Wherever I went, people told me that Sydney was the place to go for bar work, so Sydney it would have to be.
Now that I’m here, there’s yet another reason that I’m still in my job, even though I need more cash and I could be earning so much more in an office: I actually like it. In the bar I work hard and I sweat, and when I finish a night’s work I feel like I’ve achieved something. Office workers just don’t get that kind of job satisfaction.
You can have all the reasons you want, but really, I don’t feel much like I ever had a choice in it: I just drifted along and somehow fell into this crazy situation. You don’t need a reason for this kind of stuff, it just happens. Am I looking forward to using my education again and getting back into an office? Hell yeah. You know how much money we earn, right? I’m going to buy a TV bigger than my house.