I’ve only ever had one job and it didn’t last long. It was 1979, I was 16, in school and studying German for the Leaving Certificate.
A relative of my best friend organised a job for us as Zimmermädchen in the tiny German town of Inzell. The school gave us leave to go, so off we went.
The work was hard, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as cleaning rooms, but it was fun and we were quite the celebrities in the village as few had ever met anyone from Ireland.
The landlady, Frau Striet had a cleanliness obsession making us scrub out wardrobes with a scrubbing brush even if the guest stayed only one night, and the kitchen had to be thoroughly cleaned each evening including utensils used or unused.
Neither of our families had phones and since there was a postal strike ongoing in Ireland we had zero contact with home. My friend Flea was so homesick she cried every night and after a month or so was desperate to leave.
We told Frau Striet. She was incredulous. What had she done wrong? She reasoned, she cajoled and when eventually she cried I gave in, while Flea held her ground. Even as I uttered the words agreeing to stay I knew I couldn’t do it, but I have this problem with the word no and I’m a coward to boot.
We secretly arranged with Herr Plenk the taxi man to take us to the train station at 4 am and sneaked out under the cover of darkness. By the time our perfidy was discovered we were on the train to Munich, two 16-year-olds with about 80 Deutsche Marks and not a travel arrangement between them.
From Munich we caught a train to Paris, another from Paris to Calais, a boat from Calais to Dover and a train from Dover to London, where we arrived on a Sunday morning with no British currency, no Bureau De Change open and no way to get from London to Dublin.
We’d met a lovely French lady on the train to Paris who showed us how to use the metro and, as luck would have it, on the Dover to London train we encountered a group of fellow punk rockers. They took us to a place in some rough-looking part of town where a man with a turban in a corner shop changed some of our Deutsche Marks for Pounds. We were saved! A train from London to Holyhead, a boat to Dunlaoghaire and a train to Dublin and two days after our escape, we were home.
Since we’d no way to let our families know we were on the way, it was quite a surprise to my parents, who’d rented out my room …Only kidding.
This proved to be quite the pivotal event in my young life, bringing me to the realisation that I could never work for anyone and would have to be my own boss. Thus the trajectory of my future was altered, which was just as well since teaching or librarianship, which was my plan, would not have suited my increasingly misanthropic disposition.
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Posted in response to @galenkp's Weekend Experiences prompt asking' Have you ever resigned from a job? Did the process go well or badly and was it awkward; did what you moved on to work out? '
Unfortunately I don't have a single photo to offer from that time since we simply didn't have a camera.