In radio, I had no clue where I was with all these blokes in charge. They seemed to me like colossal f**kwits, but I assumed that, because they had big important jobs and had had them for a while, there must be something I wasn’t getting.
I now know this not to be true. If it looks like a colossal f**kwit and acts like a colossal f**kwit — chances are it is a colossal f**kwit. Often the colossal f**kwits are hired by even more colossal f**kwits, so the fact they’ve all been there for 100 years is really neither here nor there.
Take this sequence of events, for example. One Friday after we had finished our radio show for the week and I was about to go on holiday, the Novelty-Sock Wearer congratulated me with frightening enthusiasm on my skills as a broadcaster. The Ginger was there and heard it all — which I mention because otherwise no one would believe that anybody really talks this way. The Ginger was actually told to tighten his seatbelt because I was the biggest thing to happen in broadcasting, apparently, and we were in for quite some ride. See what I mean? Colossal.
Anyway, I might not have believed that I was all that, but I certainly didn’t believe that my career was about to come crashing down on me either.
I had a lovely week in Sydney on holiday with my BFF, then came back to work where I was called into a meeting with Short And Angry plus Hair Entirely Wasted On A Man. This was not unusual, we had these meetings all the time, but at the very last minute someone from Human Remains (as it was known) slithered in the door.
This, in case you’re unaware, is the kiss of death.
Short And Angry then shuffled his papers, tapped them on the desk and said to me, ‘We’re here to talk about the future of the Radio Station X Breakfast Show, and you’re not part of it.’
It took me a while to work out that I was being fired. The reason? I had incompatible family values, apparently, which I took to mean that I didn’t have enough children. I was not given the option to bear offspring to secure my job, but Hair Entirely Wasted On A Man did say that if I came back the following day he would get the whiteboard and we could work a few things out.
I did not need a whiteboard for that. I don’t think any normal human being with more than half a brain and the right amount of hair would.
Being fired is one thing, but being offered a whiteboard? If I hadn’t been so stunned I would have told him to take a flying f**k at a rolling donut right then and there. The ideas I subsequently had for what he could do with his whiteboard would make a sailor shoot himself for being too pure of thought.
But at the time, I was too busy being transfixed by a scene that was unfolding behind the very CFw*ts who were dumping on me.
As it happened, the outside windows of the building were being washed as my drama played out, but the gantry had become stuck, so, while the CFw*ts were prattling on about how unsuitable I now was for the job they’d poached me for, I was watching three sets of hairy legs scrabble sideways as the suspended platform on which they stood lurched up and down, from side to side behind the CFw*ts.
In the fullness of time, this is what I remember from that morning. And it makes me laugh.
Of course, the fullness of time takes a while. A year, maybe, if not more. Before I could laugh I had to go through a humiliating mediation process.
My lawyer felt we had a strong case to take my employers to court, but after spending one day stuck in a room with them he turned to me and said something along the lines of: ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m losing the will to live. Let’s cut our losses and run.’
Now that is good advice. It was never going to end well, so ending quickly was the next best thing.
Can I point out, while I’m here, that when you get fired from an on-air radio job, it’s hard to keep it a secret. The next time I went to the bank, the teller said, ‘Oh, what happened to you? I used to listen to you every morning.’
It was embarrassing. And as someone who had never even been told off at work, let alone fired, I was deeply ashamed. I hid for a couple of weeks — I couldn’t face even my nearest and dearest — but finally a close pal turned up and insisted we take a long walk on the beach.
‘The people who know and love you don’t give a sh*t,’ he said. ‘To be honest, even though I’m one of your best friends, I never even listened to you on the radio. So don’t worry about it.’
Yeah, screw you and your whiteboard, Dolores. And if there happens to be a rolling donut in the vicinity, well, you know what to do with that, too.
Being fired made me unhappier than I had ever been up until that point. But what doesn’t kill you makes you strongly averse to novelty-sock wearers, and in that there’s progress.
1. When it comes to horrible bosses, trust your instinct.
2. This, too, shall pass — like kidney stones, only not as cute.
3. When it comes to horrible bosses, trust your instinct.
5. The bottom halves of three scared, hairy men are funny.
6. You can buy a pretty nice Never Work For Colossal F**kwits Again diamond ring with your final cheque.
7. No matter what happens, I will always be sh*t at maths.
KNOCK KNOCK WHO’S THERE?
I used to think the whole one-door-closing-and-another-one-opening thing was bollocks, but actually it turns out to be true.
After I was fired from my radio job and was ever-so-slightly out of work, I was offered a job writing about food for The New Zealand Herald. This was an extremely cool thing to happen, even if I was a little inexperienced (for want of a better word) in the kitchen.
Food writers can usually cook.
I couldn’t.
I still can’t.
But I could write.
I still can.
Whether you like what I write or not, well, that’s up to you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it, because I can. I said: I CAN, Dolores!
As it turns out, there are quite a lot of food writers and not many jobs, so I probably didn’t appreciate at the time how annoying it must have been for the real culinary experts to see me swanning about wearing my food editor outfit (which was mostly elasticated).
But I needed a job and this was a good one, so I got amongst it. I was going to be restaurant reviewing, for heaven’s sake. Getting paid to eat! I was in Heaven.
For a while.
Then Heaven turned to Purgatory. (Is that the place where the unbaptised babies go? Because I don’t mean that one. I mean the other one where the, erm, bad people go who never said sorry before they died but, um, can shoot up to Heaven if they get enough people back on Earth to clap their hands.)
I’ve read all Ruth Reichl’s books; she’s the New York Times reviewer who gained fame and fortune for sneaking incognito into the city’s restaurants. I interviewed her once, too, and here’s what I learned: being a restaurant reviewer in New York, New York, is infinitely more enjoyable than being one in Auckland, New Zealand.
For a start, there are about a gazillion more restaurants for you to choose from in New York, so the overall quality is going to be better, and, for a finish, there are about a gazillion more restaurants for you to choose from in New York, so the overall quality is going to be better.
In Auckland, New Zealand, at that time there were simply not enough restaurants opening to visit a decent one every week.
The good ones were truly great, and some of them are still going more than 15 years later; the O’Connell Street Bistro for one, and Simon Wright’s The French Café for another.
But the disastrous dining experiences far outweighed the highlights.
Take the terrible Italian café in Parnell (please, somebody). After it had been open a few months, I visited this awful place and ate the worst risotto of my life. It was not risotto as we now know it; it was risotto as we might have known it when our mothers made it out of a packet in the 1970s. It wasn’t Arborio rice, but the ordinary kind with tiny bits of diced ham and pea and carrot. Not unlike vomit, although drier. It was served with triangles of white sandwich bread, slightl
y stale, on a wobbly table without a table cloth, and it cost an arm and a leg.
Now, I try not to be mean (try telling that to a Novelty-sock Wearer), but it was pretty hard to come up with something good to say, so I settled on something along the lines of: ‘If you like paying too much money for the sort of tourist fare you might be reamed for in the back streets of a city that probably isn’t Rome, then this is the spot.’
Trust me, that was fair.
But not long after the review came out, I was sitting at a fundraising dinner and people around the table were announcing who they were and what they did. Imagine my delight when the chap next to me said, ‘My name is Signor X, and I am the owner of the terrible Italian café in Parnell that was recently reviewed in the Herald.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Now tell me, Signora, what do you do?’
Awkward!
I thought about saying I was a European princess looking for a short husband, but in the end I admitted that I was the Herald reviewer, at which Signor X went on to tell the table that the morning the review came out he had been woken at his home by the chef, banging on his door, in tears, shaking the newspaper and crying, ‘She has ruined me! She has ruined me!’
The ‘she’ to whom he was referring was, of course, me.
At this point in the proceedings I wondered how I was going to make it out of the waterfront venue without a pair of concrete clogs on my feet and a napkin stuffed in my mouth.
But, saints be praised, it turned out that far from bearing malice, Signor X could not agree with me more. He had brought the chef, a family member I think, over from Italy, and had not been convinced he was doing the right thing in the café, but was now re-vamping it as a seafood restaurant. No hard feelings, eh?
Oh, the relief. But still, did I want to be the source of someone weeping that they’d been ruined?
Not long after that I had an even worse experience.
I’d had the flu (proper, not man), and so was right up against my deadline. I needed to go to the assigned restaurant that night, write it up when I got home, then send the review off straight away, as the paper would be printed the next day. There was no room for error.
The restaurant was a place I drove by every day on my way home. It had a stunning view over the city, but it was slightly oddly placed and there never seemed to be many cars in the car park. This was a clue, but not an accurate one. When we turned up, there were substantially more cars parked outside than there were people in the restaurant. Indeed, we were the only ones.
The menu read like something from a bad dine-and-dance club in a horror film, the very descriptions enough to have you clutching at your throat and hoping for a quick death. The last thing we wanted to do was eat there, but really there was no choice.
I can’t remember what anyone else ordered (thankfully there were three of us, so the Ginger and I were at least saved the torture of feigning romance), but my pecan-crusted chicken was so inedible that I flung it out the window. It missed and fell down between the wall and the heater, which, if it had been on, might at least have cooked the chicken properly, but alas, the whole place was as cold as a Kelvinator.
By this stage I was tying myself in knots not only with hunger, but also with worry about how I could ever turn this into a review that would politely say: ‘Don’t, whatever you do, eat at this place — even if it’s your only choice, you’re near dead with starvation, and Robert Redford has offered you a million bucks. Just. Don’t.’
Then, horror of horrors, the Herald photographer turned up. I did not know the Herald photographer and he did not know me. He simply presented himself to the poor depressed soul running the show, who then bustled over to us, greatly excited, and asked if we would mind starring in a photo to go with a review someone was writing for the newspaper.
The chef, hearing this in the kitchen, then joined us, emerging with all the photographic equipment he carried around with him, because cooking was really only something he had learned in the army and taking pictures was his first love.
So, to add insult to injury, we then had to play the part of innocent bystanders being snapped deliriously enjoying our delicious meals at a restaurant that in an ideal world would have been blown into the stratosphere with not so much as a suggestion of deep-fried camembert with boysenberry sauce left in its place.
I wrote the review and was as kind as I could be, which was probably not very.
Weeks later, the restaurant closed. This was the right thing to happen, but I did not want to be the person responsible for deciding that. Behind every failed foodie venture, after all, there is a very nice person following their heart, seeking their own happiness, and who am I to shatter those dreams? Nobody. But I don’t want to choke to death on their hideous slop defending them either.
When I was made redundant after two years, I was sorry not to have a job, but I was not sorry to say goodbye to restaurant reviewing. And as yet another door slammed hard on my *rse, a whole new, wonderful world was about to open before me.
Dear Sarah-Jane
My fourth assistant twice-removed has skimmed through your novel, The Uncommon Courtesy of Sugar Honey Wallace, which you sent to us to consider for publication.
Did you know that there is practically no sex in this book at all, just a lot of yearning, a smidgeon of self-realisation, some nonsense about keeping a civil tongue in your head, and a hive full of bees?
Until someone far more clever than you invents the insect porn genre, I am afraid that we will not be publishing your book.
But in the meantime, in line with our new ‘green’ publishing initiative, we will be using your manuscript as toilet paper.
Best
Jandy-Mark Lynskey
Working in a COAL MINE going down, down
Once I had left the magazine, been fired from the radio, and made redundant by the newspaper, I realised I was running out of career options. Or rather they were running out on me. Either way, my CV was starting to develop large holes that might take a bit of explaining should anyone else want to offer me a job — which no one did.
Luckily, after only a few weeks of unemployment, the Ginger was offered work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The trilogy is a series of extremely long films about a dwarf and Orlando Bloom and, um, there’s a mountain and some fire and, er, of course, a ring. I guess. I never actually stayed awake through any of them.
All I knew at the time was that it would be a year’s work — a rarity in the Ginger’s field — and so I decided that I’d had enough of horrible bosses and wanted to see if I could be one myself, just of me. So, while the Ginger was stringing sausages around the necks of the hobgoblins, I declared I would write my first novel, Finding Tom Connor. I’d had the idea, but never imagined I would have the time to do anything about it.
Now I would, and so I did, plus I’ve written a bunch more since, and I write my columns, and guess what? I really like my job. It makes me happy. And I’m a really nice boss. Mostly. Let’s not forget that in the pursuit of happiness we’re unlikely to strike 100 per cent fulfilment.
Yes, I love writing, but I doubt there’s any such thing as the perfect job. A lot of what else goes on is a giant pain in the *rse. Dealing with publishers can be fractious, book-writing actually doesn’t pay that well, a lot of social media networking is now expected of you, and I am not a natural when it comes to that, plus sometimes people say mean things about what you do. F**kers. But the actual writing? Now we’re talking. Well, I’m writing and you’re reading, but actually that is us talking.
I feel very lucky that in my life I have discovered a thing that I love doing, that I feel good at, and that I have been able to turn into a living. But as you may have gathered, it has not exactly been handed to me on a silver platter. I’ve had my butt kicked from here until next Tuesday, and it has been a weeding out of all the sh*tty things in my career garden that has helped me focus on that which blooms.
Now that I am travel editor of Woman’s Day, it blooms even brighter.
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I was coming back from London the other day via Hawaii (she says, modestly), when the American passport officer asked me what I did for a job. I told him I was a travel writer coming back from London via Hawaii, and he leafed through my passport looking at the stamps. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘What an amazing gig. How did you get to do that?’
‘I waited,’ I said. ‘And I’m old.
He looked at my passport again, clocking my date of birth.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Good for you.’
‘What? You? 50? Get outta here’ would have been good, too. But this is where 50 has got me and, as I said, I am not a dang fool, and only dang fools would complain about their age when it’s only because of it that they have got to do what they love — and get paid for it.
So, if it’s hard to make a dollar out of writing books, then how have I ended up being able to manage it, therefore achieving a level of happiness you don’t get when you are stuck in an office with a whiny boss whom you want to roll up into a ball and kick into a steaming pile of burning donkey droppings?
By living in a small world.
Some people think that’s a bad thing, but what can I say? Sometimes it works out.
Finding Tom Connor was written while on the road with the Ginger as he worked with the dwarves and Blooms. Parts were written in Queenstown, parts in Wellington, parts in Ohakune, parts in Auckland, and parts back in Ireland, where I first realised that research trips were the icing on the cake of being a novelist.
One of my best friends, Yetti, lives in Dublin so I never miss an opportunity to visit her. Over the years I’ve got to know some of her friends, including Anne Herlihy, who went to school with her. They now live across the road from each other, and although it’s Yetti whom I dearly love and keep in touch with, it’s actually Anne Herlihy whom I can thank for my living.