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10 Years Of Work | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #130 | · The Christian Reeve Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Christian Reef
• 0:05
  podcast and it feels good to say that actually, that's weird.
• 0:11
  Even though it's only been a week or whatever.
• 0:15
  Or well, I suppose, it will depend when this episode drops.
• 0:18
  And I should know that because I am the author of this podcast
• 0:21
  and I do create it, but I'm getting busier and busier and I
• 0:27
  always say that busy is good. I think busy as always.
• 0:30
  Is good. Always a good thing, always a
• 0:31
  good to be busy because that means things are happening.
• 0:33
  Things are in motion, but at the same time, trying to keep a
• 0:40
  podcast going continuously week by week is hard and you know,
• 0:48
  we're up to 130 episodes. Now, 130 if you'd told me when I
• 0:53
  started this, that we'd get 250, I would have told you, you were
• 0:58
  crazy. Here we are, 130 episodes.
• 1:02
  And as I've said before my approach to podcasting is always
• 1:07
  changing and developing as I think many things that we do in
• 1:12
  life changes over time for better or worse.
• 1:17
  But I like to think this is for the better because I'm trying
• 1:20
  different things. So that the episode you saw last
• 1:24
  time was I guess like a kind of a hybrid.
• 1:26
  I was trying to kind of combine a bunch of things together.
• 1:31
  Mostly for the purpose of advertising.
• 1:34
  My two guests that I'd had on the show much earlier in I
• 1:39
  believe 2021 possibly 2020. I don't know life's of blur
• 1:43
  right now but I wanted to Showcase them because I thought
• 1:46
  that, you know, they were both very talented individuals and
• 1:50
  they deserved that platform and even though the quality of those
• 1:55
  recordings wasn't so good because they were done on
• 1:58
  Instagram. That's besides the point.
• 2:00
  Isn't it? So yeah, if I ever do those live
• 2:03
  episodes there will be the live interaction which is a good
• 2:07
  thing for those who see it live on Instagram, but when they
• 2:10
  eventually get uploaded, the quality is not going to be
• 2:13
  great, unfortunately. But I think I will continue to
• 2:18
  add extra content onto the beginning of those episodes, so
• 2:22
  that, at least you get a kind of.
• 2:25
  I suppose, I could double podcast in a sense.
• 2:31
  Do you always get, you know, this kind of standard quality
• 2:34
  episode in some shape or form? I don't know.
• 2:38
  In my head it makes sense for the for the small gaggle of
• 2:43
  people. If that's a thing gaggle of
• 2:45
  people that are listening and watching the Christian, we
• 2:47
  podcast. I thank you.
• 2:50
  I'm trying all of these things for you.
• 2:53
  If you ever have any ideas or anything that you want to hear
• 2:55
  me, talk about or speak about or anything else, any particular
• 2:58
  guests you have in mind. Let me know, throw them my way
• 3:02
  and I will review them and I'll get back to you in some shape or
• 3:08
  form. Today's episode comes a little
• 3:11
  bit late, technically the work anniversary of 10 years,
• 3:18
  actually occurred in August, 20 21, and there's a couple of
• 3:26
  Astrix has on this caveat. I don't know how to explain
• 3:30
  them. I'll call them as they come,
• 3:33
  but, yeah, in officially in August of 2021.
• 3:41
  That marked the 10 years work anniversary, 10 years of me,
• 3:45
  working in an official capacity with the contract, Etc.
• 3:51
  Now that might not sound like a big deal to most people because,
• 3:54
  you know, I'm sure many people listen here of worked.
• 3:56
  Many more years than that. And work is just something we
• 4:00
  all have to do so who cares, right?
• 4:03
  But the unique situation with me is that in that 10 years, I have
• 4:08
  done many. Many, many different types of
• 4:11
  jobs and that maybe is not. So usual, normally, you know, I
• 4:18
  mean, I don't know any, I suppose in corporate business
• 4:20
  and such, it's pretty common, common to jump from job to job
• 4:24
  and that's something that's changed in the last.
• 4:26
  Probably, 50 years in the sense that, you know, it used to be.
• 4:29
  You stick with a company 50 years, you get your, I don't
• 4:32
  know your golden, watch at the end of it.
• 4:35
  And you leave, I don't know something like that, right?
• 4:38
  But times change society. Ages.
• 4:40
  And now the expectation is that, I mean people can hop anywhere
• 4:45
  from 6 months up to two years between companies, sometimes
• 4:48
  less than that in a bid to gain all the skills and knowledge
• 4:53
  they need and to progress their careers.
• 4:57
  And obviously some careers expected to stay on for longer
• 5:01
  other careers, not so much. it just so happens that a lot of my
• 5:06
  different types of jobs have kind of Been influenced largely
• 5:12
  by what's been going on in the rest of my life.
• 5:15
  So obviously being at University is a big factor in that and
• 5:17
  we'll get to that later. But I guess I just wanted to
• 5:21
  kind of tackle this subject because I thought that it was an
• 5:26
  interesting thing to reflect on over the past 10 years, it's an
• 5:31
  interesting anniversary. I think for me just reflecting
• 5:35
  on what I've learned through that time.
• 5:40
  What kind of key lessons tend to link between each job?
• 5:45
  Which is interesting because sometimes different types of
• 5:48
  jobs can be very similar and you can find similarities and
• 5:51
  completely different fields. And I think that's very
• 5:53
  interesting again. This is me saying that I'm
• 5:56
  interested. Like I don't know if you'll find
• 5:58
  it interesting but for me it's interesting.
• 6:02
  I guess that's a key theme with my podcast doing isn't it as I
• 6:06
  venture to do more of these discussion?
• 6:10
  Episodes but no I guess I just want to take you back on a bit
• 6:14
  of a journey, share some stories.
• 6:16
  And what I learn some of these, I've never actually spoken
• 6:19
  about. You've never heard me speak
• 6:21
  about them probably because they're just not very relevant
• 6:26
  or it's just never come up in conversation.
• 6:29
  I don't know. But yeah, I don't know, it might
• 6:32
  be interesting. So here we go, 10 years, work
• 6:36
  anniversary, 10 years of work. I wasn't really sure what to
• 6:38
  call this episode. I think.
• 6:40
  Will be 10 years of work anniversary or something like
• 6:43
  that. Now technically I actually had
• 6:49
  my first job when I was about 11, 12 years old but I don't
• 6:54
  tend to counter I mean it's on my CV.
• 6:58
  It's on my LinkedIn so my CB it somewhere LinkedIn listed as
• 7:03
  work experience. But I mean technically it's not
• 7:07
  like it isn't it isn't so let me explain.
• 7:11
  I used to work in my dad's shop. My dad is a barber by trade.
• 7:16
  And as a kid, I mean, he's had this store probably like, 30 or
• 7:21
  two years at this point, but back, then, this was in the
• 7:25
  early 2000s, I would have been about 11 or 12 years old.
• 7:30
  And for one year, I worked in my dad's barber shop as a Saturday
• 7:35
  Boy, Saturday assistant and it was a very straightforward job.
• 7:40
  You know, I'm at my dad's kind of approached me about it like
• 7:43
  hey you want to earn a bit of extra money on the weekend?
• 7:46
  And I was like, sure, you know, mostly because I just like the
• 7:49
  idea of spending more time with my dad because I didn't often
• 7:53
  see him. So, I thought, oh, this might be
• 7:55
  nice work together seeing more obviously, I didn't realize
• 7:59
  quite how serious it would be. I mean, it's his life's work.
• 8:02
  So, you know, it's going to be taken very seriously from his
• 8:07
  end and obviously now I was introduced to it.
• 8:10
  Not only dad the dad, but Dad the dad, dad the father but that
• 8:17
  the manager and that was different.
• 8:19
  And also I had to get used to other people, sort of being
• 8:23
  Points of Authority. And we'll delve into some of
• 8:25
  these stories because I've got some interesting stories about
• 8:28
  this particular role but the reason I wanted to bring this up
• 8:32
  is that it actually taught me a lot about work from a very young
• 8:36
  age. So I was not completely shocked
• 8:40
  when I got into my First official job, many years later.
• 8:43
  And this actually happened before I even got work
• 8:45
  experience at school because as you may remember in the UK, I
• 8:49
  don't know if they still do it, but typically you have a work
• 8:52
  experience period of about two weeks when you're about 14 or
• 8:57
  something. But this happened two years
• 8:59
  prior when I was about 11 or 12. So it started as a Saturday job
• 9:03
  thing, I thought it was gonna be a few hours but it actually
• 9:08
  turned out to be a full day's work.
• 9:12
  I think it was like eight to five or nine to five, but we
• 9:16
  inevitably would start earlier, and prepare the shop, and such
• 9:19
  and stay afterwards to close down.
• 9:22
  And it was hard, work, physical work, you know, it sounds really
• 9:27
  easy, right? You know, you just sweep up hair
• 9:29
  and clean things but I ended up doing a lot of things.
• 9:32
  I actually arranged client bookings because around this
• 9:37
  time, but that's shopping. Always been like, A walk-in
• 9:41
  service, you just walked in and sat down, as is the case with
• 9:45
  many barber shops, but in this instance, we were booking
• 9:49
  clients. I think my dad was trying
• 9:51
  something different then, and it was kind of, it was just a
• 9:54
  different way of doing things. I don't know necessarily that it
• 9:57
  was any more successful. Not, because we still had
• 10:01
  walk-ins, but I remember they had to sit and wait and the
• 10:04
  appointments would take precedence and it was weird.
• 10:08
  I had to get used to Calling people on the phone.
• 10:12
  I always got really nervous about that and I sort of slowly
• 10:15
  developed a phone manner. So I suppose really early on I
• 10:18
  was, you know, becoming familiar with just Telly sales but not
• 10:24
  actually telesales but, you know, I have like a phone manner
• 10:26
  already and have professional sense.
• 10:31
  And my memory of it was that I was I was very good at my job
• 10:35
  even though it was very straightforward, you know, just
• 10:37
  cleaning brushing hair. Because customers just I ended
• 10:43
  up washing clients hair and stuff like that, and, you know,
• 10:46
  I was good at listening and I think that's why I stayed for as
• 10:50
  long as I did, you know, I was there for a year and I ended up
• 10:54
  working both days of the weekend after about two or three months.
• 10:58
  So I seem to recall that I was working Saturdays and Sundays
• 11:03
  for a year and I was all game for it.
• 11:06
  You know, more money, more opportunities to work and more
• 11:10
  Time. Spent with my dad do is just
• 11:12
  kind of win-win win and you met a lot of cool people.
• 11:14
  You know, this was the early to mid-2000s average age of the
• 11:18
  clientele was ranging from pool. I'll be like 15, 16 all the way
• 11:23
  up to Late 30s. You know, she had a range of
• 11:27
  different people coming in which is pretty cool.
• 11:30
  And also, I mean, I think, my did my dad did this by Design,
• 11:35
  but pretty much all the people that work, there were female.
• 11:38
  So I was in my element, a young boy, surrounded by beautiful
• 11:41
  women cutting hair. I was like, this is great.
• 11:44
  I don't get paid for this fantastic and then came the
• 11:49
  inevitable moment. I think I've told this story
• 11:53
  before, but I don't know if everyone's heard it, so here it
• 11:55
  is. This is the first and only time
• 11:58
  I've ever been fired. My Had fired me.
• 12:02
  Yeah, I'm sorry. Dad.
• 12:04
  Sorry to put you on blast, But Here Comes the story.
• 12:08
  Now I don't know if it's, I mean it was a firing but it was it
• 12:12
  was more. What kind of one of those sad
• 12:14
  situations where my dad was just, like, it's time to go
• 12:17
  home, but it was fair enough, you know?
• 12:20
  And with it the weird thing was we never really properly spoke
• 12:25
  about it afterwards. But anyway, I'll get to that.
• 12:28
  Basically, there was a manager that work there who eventually
• 12:32
  ended up getting fired. So, I was right in thinking that
• 12:35
  this guy was a bit of a twat. But anyway, he worked for my
• 12:39
  dad's and seemingly, he was quite a You're good at his job,
• 12:45
  you know, responsive and responsible and such.
• 12:48
  But in this particular industry, there's a lot of turnover
• 12:52
  because people aren't always trustworthy.
• 12:55
  I can't say the same for every store.
• 12:57
  I'm sure there's plenty of barbershops where this isn't the
• 12:59
  case, but the thing is because you are dealing with a lot of
• 13:04
  young people. And, you know, it's the sort of
• 13:08
  Industry where you can kind of do it like self-employed or you
• 13:11
  can do it work. Going for your owner, there's
• 13:14
  always going to kind of be disputes over, how many Cuts you
• 13:18
  do, how much money you make, especially how much money you
• 13:21
  make. If you're working for an owner
• 13:24
  and there's like a discrepancy over how much you've made an in
• 13:27
  a given day, you can see where the argument is going to come.
• 13:29
  You know what I mean? In the sense that like, okay,
• 13:32
  I've worked for you for nine hours today.
• 13:35
  I've made it done. I don't know, let's say 20
• 13:38
  haircuts, and I've only made 50 pounds from that.
• 13:40
  But you pocketed, 200 knots and my I did that.
• 13:43
  I'm just saying in general, you can see where potential
• 13:46
  arguments would form. My dad was always fair with
• 13:49
  stuff like that and continues to be.
• 13:51
  But the problem with that is because he had a good nature.
• 13:56
  I think people used to sort of take advantage of that sometime,
• 13:59
  so he had to be harder on these things as time progressed and
• 14:04
  it's difficult, isn't it? Because you build a personal
• 14:06
  rapport with your staff and, you know, you build relationships
• 14:10
  with these people over time because they're working for you
• 14:12
  for so long. A long, but you have to keep
• 14:14
  that professional line. And I always think my dad was
• 14:16
  very good at doing that, but it was never easy like having to
• 14:20
  let people go and I could see that for him and such and this
• 14:26
  anyway, so this particular guy that was working for him who he
• 14:30
  eventually let later let go, I think a year or two later was
• 14:34
  just like really on my case. And the problem was there was
• 14:38
  this whole kind of toxic situation going on then, where
• 14:44
  everyone was very, they were very hard on me in the sense
• 14:51
  that, you know, as imagine I was, this young boy with very
• 14:54
  low self-esteem who, you know, was surrounded by these guys and
• 15:00
  I needed support I needed to kind of And even I needed a
• 15:05
  confidence boost but they would constantly berate me and my
• 15:09
  dad's unfortunately partook in that a little bit.
• 15:14
  And the idea was that you're, you know, they're building
• 15:16
  strength in your, trying to make you more manly.
• 15:20
  And it's like, it never worked. It was just mean, it was just
• 15:24
  really mean but here's the difference, my dad, I can
• 15:28
  forgive that. He's my dad's.
• 15:30
  A lot of people have relationships like that with my,
• 15:32
  with their dads and I knew my Dad loved me.
• 15:34
  And cared for me. Whereas this other guy, he's
• 15:38
  just a dick and he was never nice.
• 15:41
  He was always on my case. And the setup for me getting
• 15:45
  fired is the perfect example of this because to this day as much
• 15:49
  as I take some responsibility for this I don't take full
• 15:51
  responsibility for it and you'll see why.
• 15:54
  So bear in mind 11, 12 years old, very attentive I've been
• 15:58
  there for a year hard-working you know Everyone likes me there
• 16:02
  and there's a lot of trust built up.
• 16:04
  So anyway, I'm preparing a client's hair and washing his
• 16:08
  hair, getting him ready for his haircut.
• 16:12
  And I believe my dad was going to take the haircut while I'm
• 16:17
  doing this. This other manager.
• 16:20
  He's who supposed to be cutting hair, by the way, he's supposed
• 16:23
  to be paying attention. So he's talking to me, whilst
• 16:26
  cutting this guy's hair, and I'm having to do two things at once
• 16:30
  as well. So, we're both in the wrong in
• 16:32
  that we should both just be focusing on what we're doing.
• 16:34
  I should just be watching. This guy's hair, he should be
• 16:36
  cutting the other guys here, right?
• 16:38
  So, we're both in the wrong here, but the difference is,
• 16:39
  he's an adult in charge. I'm a young kid.
• 16:43
  Who really at all time? Should be supervised.
• 16:46
  Yes, I was trustworthy and I knew what I was doing but still
• 16:49
  No more capacity for mistakes and ignorance the and it's
• 16:53
  forgivable because I'm a child. So yeah, I never thought about
• 16:57
  that actually. But yeah, he shouldn't have been
• 16:59
  talking and distracting people. So anyway, he keeps berating me
• 17:05
  about or having a go at me because I haven't cleaned the
• 17:08
  bathroom. Yeah, now it is important but
• 17:12
  this bathroom was kind of like a, it was for staff, it could be
• 17:17
  for customers but really It was like if you're desperate like it
• 17:21
  wasn't advertised if that makes sense.
• 17:23
  Like if people say hey have you got a toilet?
• 17:25
  Then it would be like, yeah, we've got one but it was in the
• 17:28
  back of the staff were hidden away and it was always clean,
• 17:33
  you know, I always made an effort to clean it, but it on
• 17:36
  the list of priorities, it was pretty low down there.
• 17:39
  The priorities were, you know, get the products that we need
• 17:43
  every day. Get people's lunches, clean up
• 17:47
  hair. Keep the the store tidy.
• 17:49
  That was Probably the most important and, you know, book
• 17:52
  appointments, accept calls. Like, I was doing a lot of
• 17:54
  different things, and this is what this guy was seemingly
• 17:57
  forgetting, but he was bullying me.
• 18:00
  That's what he was doing. And it was mean and unnecessary
• 18:04
  and really do she when you consider that the guy was in his
• 18:07
  mid-20s to late 30s and I was just a kid.
• 18:12
  Was like 11, 12 years old. So it's really unnecessary.
• 18:16
  But anyway, He's having a go at me, he's saying ol, why have,
• 18:22
  you know, clean the bathroom yet, you really need to go and
• 18:25
  do this Bubba, Bubba, blah. So I'm sort of half paying
• 18:29
  attention to washing this guy's head now and just going, or what
• 18:32
  do you mean? Like, I have cleaned it because
• 18:34
  I had actually clean it that day, but he's trying to push my
• 18:37
  buttons, trying to, you know, just be a douchebag and he did
• 18:41
  this all the time as well. This wasn't the first time.
• 18:43
  Now, here's the problem. As I've left the tap running,
• 18:49
  it's heated up very quickly because these are really high
• 18:53
  powered pressured washbasins. You know, it's like a shower
• 18:57
  heads essentially, so they heat up really quickly.
• 19:01
  So I turn away and all I hear is a and I'm like what what?
• 19:04
  And basically I Max I've accidentally burnt this guy's
• 19:08
  head, it was really quick, it happened, very suddenly I
• 19:12
  immediately turned off the tap and there was a steam cloud in
• 19:15
  front of And obviously my dad was very concerned.
• 19:21
  He wasn't angry per se, but he was like, what?
• 19:24
  Oh my God, what's kind of what's happening?
• 19:25
  And then, basically the guy that was berating me, I could see
• 19:28
  that there was a smirk on his face.
• 19:30
  Like he found it. Funny shows where people's
• 19:33
  priorities were where my dad was being responsible, adult and
• 19:36
  thinking about customer. And you know what's important?
• 19:38
  The other guys that got a smirk on his face like hahaha because
• 19:42
  he's a douche. So anyway, I was obviously
• 19:48
  really apologetic to the customer.
• 19:50
  I was, I was really worried shocks.
• 19:53
  You know, I've accidentally burn this guy's head like despite
• 19:56
  having both this guy's head, there wasn't any damage or
• 19:58
  anything, don't worry the ghost fine.
• 20:00
  He was really nice about it and I think it's because, you know
• 20:04
  what? I was a kid and you can forgive
• 20:06
  a kid for being ignorant. Making a mistake.
• 20:09
  It's okay. Because I was a kid.
• 20:13
  So, I just want to drive home that point.
• 20:14
  I've never told this story but, you know, sometimes when you
• 20:16
  revisit stories because I've got like a long-term memory, a very
• 20:20
  good long-term memory, but my short-term memory is terrible.
• 20:23
  But when I put my my head into these stories and I remember
• 20:26
  them, I can remember, it's like I'm there.
• 20:29
  I can remember every single aspect of it, and it's weird
• 20:32
  being in this moment and I suppose now it's different
• 20:36
  because I've got hindsight and I can look at it as an adult and
• 20:40
  be like, hmm. That's funny.
• 20:41
  Have trouble, you know, like this is not right and that's not
• 20:45
  right and you know I look at it with very different lenses and I
• 20:48
  look at the whole thing is just bullying quite honestly.
• 20:53
  So anyway, I turned to my dad and my dad.
• 20:57
  Very calmly explains that, you know, this is not acceptable,
• 21:00
  and it gives me a bit of money and he tells me to take a cab
• 21:04
  home and that was the end of me working for my dad.
• 21:10
  And I tried to explain In this whole story to him, I think
• 21:13
  later that day but his mind was made up on it and fair enough,
• 21:18
  you know, it was, it was fair but I remember about a year or
• 21:23
  two later when this other guy who distracted me and was the
• 21:27
  cause of causal factor of me getting fired finally got fired,
• 21:31
  I actually felt like that was the justice that was deserved
• 21:34
  like and he got fired for something really bad.
• 21:37
  He got fired for like I think dealing drugs outside the store
• 21:40
  or something which On the telegram totem pole of mistakes.
• 21:44
  That's up there very disrespectful.
• 21:48
  They yeah. Create just crazy times.
• 21:52
  Crazy times, it was a different time.
• 21:54
  I was just a kid. My dad looked after me very well
• 21:58
  in that position and he had a really good staff.
• 22:01
  I don't want to make it sound like you know as a bad
• 22:03
  environment it was a very good environment.
• 22:05
  I learned a lot through doing that and I just want to say
• 22:09
  actually Dad if you're watching. Thank you so much.
• 22:11
  For the experience, I learned a lot through that and I don't
• 22:14
  think that I would have learnt. I would have been as prepared
• 22:18
  for my eventual first job if I hadn't had that experience.
• 22:23
  One thing I want to add to that actually is I do recall coming
• 22:25
  home exhausted after those shops could shops.
• 22:30
  Let's go say shops, there's can say streams after those those
• 22:34
  days of work because I wasn't I wasn't used to doing that, you
• 22:38
  know, it felt much more intense than school like School felt
• 22:41
  like Easy by comparison but I preferred one sucked to be
• 22:46
  honest because as much as those days were hard at work leaving
• 22:50
  money and I liked the feeling of having achieved something every
• 22:55
  day, having worked hard and people went home.
• 22:57
  Happy that we, we worked well together.
• 22:59
  We did, we did, you know, we were good team and I worked
• 23:01
  because my dad had two shops side-by-side and I remember
• 23:04
  working in both of the shops and working with different teams of
• 23:09
  people and they were always we had a good Poor and everyone
• 23:12
  seemed to get on with me and such and they were I think they
• 23:15
  were impressed with with the way I was at the age.
• 23:17
  I was because normally the Saturday assistance would be a
• 23:20
  lot of years old, and there was a lot of trust in me.
• 23:24
  I think I seem to recall which was really cool.
• 23:29
  Just while I'm remembering while my head is in this sphere.
• 23:32
  I seem to also recall that there was this like random lady that
• 23:36
  used to come to the store and she has different times.
• 23:41
  And so basically she would come through with a big massive bag,
• 23:46
  right? A nondescript, big black.
• 23:48
  Kind of rucksack type bag that you would put over your
• 23:51
  shoulder. I think it's good for bag.
• 23:52
  I don't know it look dodgy as hell but I was a kid.
• 23:54
  I was like, oh, what's that? And the people just all black
• 23:59
  and don't worry. I was nothing too bad but
• 24:01
  basically she come through to the back and she just throw this
• 24:04
  bag on the table. And basically, there was loads
• 24:07
  of counterfeit DVDs, pirate DVDs, and we would just go
• 24:10
  through them and pick pirate DVDs.
• 24:11
  That we wanted to watch because this was back in the early 2000s
• 24:14
  and pirate DVDs were pretty easy to come by and you could get
• 24:19
  like stuff that was in cinema quite easily or stuff that was
• 24:22
  about to be released on DVD quite easily.
• 24:24
  And it was really hit and miss as to whether or not the DVDs
• 24:28
  would be good. Some of them terrible, you know,
• 24:31
  you'd have your classic people jumping up in the cinema and the
• 24:35
  qualities rubbish, or it's dubbed in.
• 24:38
  I don't know, like Hindi or something like it's like
• 24:40
  completely. Norm.
• 24:42
  Watch a boy mess your for, you know, you speak Hindi or it was
• 24:48
  fairly decent, but like off colored or something, like this
• 24:51
  color that maybe it's a shade of green or blue where it should
• 24:53
  just be clear colors, but that was something that happened once
• 25:00
  or twice a month. I think really friendly lady.
• 25:03
  Actually. There's a few of those people
• 25:07
  going around that town doing that.
• 25:12
  But yeah, I don't even think those people pirate DVD still a
• 25:16
  thing. But I mean, I think torrents
• 25:19
  have replaced that really haven't they?
• 25:20
  The people still sell pirated DVDs.
• 25:23
  Those boys, there's really a market for them anymore.
• 25:26
  Maybe there is maybe pirate Blu-ray.
• 25:28
  I don't know. But it was a different time.
• 25:31
  So, that was my first ever I suppose, I suppose you could
• 25:35
  call it non-official job. I don't really know how else to
• 25:37
  call it, really. But I learned a lot from that
• 25:40
  experience. It was Experience it's going to
• 25:43
  briefly touch on work experience.
• 25:46
  So I did work experience for two weeks at a printing place in the
• 25:52
  same town that I had worked with my dad and it sucks.
• 25:59
  I started, I was about 14 at the time, but I came in with a good
• 26:04
  attitude, you know. I was excited to to work and try
• 26:08
  something different. It was, you know, an opportunity
• 26:10
  to be away from School for two weeks.
• 26:13
  So that was good because school was dull as ask from for the
• 26:16
  most part. And I remember the first few
• 26:20
  days, they gave me legitimate jobs, it was mostly just
• 26:23
  organizing and laminating files, greeting customers, which I was
• 26:26
  pretty good at because I'd done that previously, you know, it
• 26:31
  was good and then after a while after maybe three or four days,
• 26:35
  I found myself just sitting at the desk behind one of these
• 26:38
  guys not having anything to do and this is how bizarre.
• 26:41
  Situation was, I remember I came up to the, like the main boss of
• 26:45
  the printing shop and I said, hey is there nothing for me to
• 26:49
  do? Like I'm just sitting in the
• 26:51
  corner doing nothing and then he responded by saying oh well you
• 26:55
  know I just saw you sitting there doing nothing so far.
• 26:57
  I just leave you there and I'm like but I want to work, I want
• 27:00
  to do things and he seemed to light up a little bit more after
• 27:03
  that. But it was like he was blaming
• 27:05
  me for the situation that he created because one thing I've
• 27:09
  never been as lazy You know, even when I was a teenager and I
• 27:13
  had laksa days of called moments, anyone who knows me
• 27:16
  knows. I'm a workaholic and I always
• 27:18
  have been and I hate sitting around doing nothing, I detest
• 27:24
  it. I've always been like that, you
• 27:26
  know, as much as it would be very easy to just sit there on
• 27:29
  my phone and just do nothing. I wanted to do stuff, I wanted
• 27:32
  to learn. I wanted to experience be be a
• 27:35
  part of the team, I don't know. So eventually, I did get some
• 27:38
  more jobs, be ended up, just me and another Person who was doing
• 27:42
  work experience from a different school, just being in the back
• 27:45
  office. And I think the rest of the
• 27:47
  staff were laughing at us because we were just organizing,
• 27:50
  all these old paper files probably hadn't been touched in
• 27:53
  like five years. You know, it's the classic.
• 27:55
  I'll get them to do the job but doesn't matter thing and they
• 27:58
  kept telling us that it was important but we both quickly
• 28:00
  realized that this isn't at all important.
• 28:04
  This is just like It's just a way to get us out of the way.
• 28:09
  So it was overall is a pretty disappointing experience.
• 28:14
  But you know it was an experience and there's some
• 28:17
  memories from it, so I can't give you more my next work.
• 28:21
  Experience was a bit was a bit more interesting actually in a
• 28:23
  bit more on Brandis I suppose as far as everything that I do.
• 28:27
  Now in look just looking back. In hindsight, I did work
• 28:32
  experience with a company called Network, Distributing limited,
• 28:35
  which was a subsidiary. A virgin which I thought was
• 28:38
  really cool. Now the time I was studying a
• 28:42
  btec business qualification which people all are fat but
• 28:46
  back then it actually meant something I'm sure it still does
• 28:49
  but but there's a lot of jokes of means about it these days.
• 28:53
  But back there this is like 2010.
• 28:55
  This particular beater qualification was for business
• 28:58
  so we did loads of course work. The whole thing was coursework
• 29:01
  based and as part of it we got to do work experience which was
• 29:06
  Is pretty cool and I think it was for it's listed as a month
• 29:11
  here, but I think it was two weeks because LinkedIn doesn't
• 29:13
  let you do specifics. It just assumes you did a month
• 29:16
  or that's it. So yeah.
• 29:20
  And basically, I assisted the video in editing Department, it
• 29:25
  was split between two jobs. I remember, I got passed from
• 29:28
  Department to Department that the main stuff I did initially
• 29:31
  was I remember sitting and watching old, videotapes and
• 29:36
  pointing out errors, or glitches and such and then reporting them
• 29:40
  to someone else. And basically, in a nutshell,
• 29:44
  what they were doing was digital restoration of old series from
• 29:49
  like the 50's, 60s, that kind of thing and preparing them for DVD
• 29:53
  and stuff. So it is interesting stuff and I
• 29:55
  started just sitting there kind of looking at the videos and as
• 29:59
  I say, just highlighting the issues and there was a point
• 30:01
  where I was sitting in a room with a guy and we were reviewing
• 30:04
  how he would go about fixing those issues, which was
• 30:08
  interesting. And then the final thing, I
• 30:11
  ended up doing was like paperwork, and I remember like
• 30:13
  someone getting annoyed at me, because I hadn't had the time to
• 30:17
  do this job, that they wanted, even that I know it's like, The
• 30:20
  work experience person to do the job because then I don't have to
• 30:23
  do it kind of thing, but I was genuinely busy doing other
• 30:26
  things. Like they were asking me to do a
• 30:27
  lot of things but that was fine and overall.
• 30:32
  It was a good experience. They were happy with me as so
• 30:37
  much. So that the my main boss
• 30:39
  actually arranged for us to have a quarry as in like the whole
• 30:43
  place to have whole work crew to have a curry together, a really
• 30:47
  nice place like it was in. Ian somewhere like that
• 30:51
  Kensington Olympia. Wow, my memory is pretty good
• 30:56
  long-term. I can't believe that.
• 30:58
  Yeah, the place was called Kensington Olympia and I've been
• 31:02
  there for like school trips before for some reason.
• 31:04
  I think there might be a museum near there or something.
• 31:07
  But yeah, we had a really nice Curry and he celebrated my work
• 31:13
  experience there and said that did a really good job and I was
• 31:17
  really proud of myself. When I went back with Having
• 31:20
  learned something. So that was, that was a good
• 31:23
  work, experience experience. So thank you very much for that.
• 31:28
  Now, the next job. I mean it's not really a job but
• 31:33
  I can't it so screw it when I was in sixth form.
• 31:38
  I also did supervisory stuff was like a classroom assistant for
• 31:45
  the younger years of business classes because I had done
• 31:48
  business for about four or five years at this point.
• 31:51
  So I done business, GCSE level and add a still got the highest
• 31:56
  marks possible. Wasn't just me.
• 31:57
  There was a few others that did as well, one of which being
• 32:02
  Akshay, that growl who's on The Apprentice right now.
• 32:06
  So that's very cool. And then we eventually went to a
• 32:09
  levels and did the a level equivalent of the course and
• 32:13
  during our sixth form years, there was like a scheme that I
• 32:17
  think everyone in sixth form had to Pull in which was it was
• 32:22
  considered extra career curricula and you had to help
• 32:26
  younger years with their classes and it was a natural kind of
• 32:32
  link to put me with the business students.
• 32:35
  And I actually I'm actually remember, helping people is
• 32:37
  actually quite cool, like, it was funny because you'd end up
• 32:39
  talking about things and you know, you get distracted.
• 32:42
  But for the most part, I was good at helping people and
• 32:47
  people seem to learn from me. So that was cool and There was
• 32:50
  weird instances where the teacher would leave and I'd end
• 32:53
  up supervising the class. Bear in mind, I was like 16 17,
• 32:57
  so I guess I was able to, but it felt weird trying to supervise
• 33:02
  people that were only, like two years younger than me, but I
• 33:05
  don't know, they seem to listen, so that was cool.
• 33:08
  And I did that for about nine months and that was that, was it
• 33:12
  really? Then I finished sixth form and
• 33:16
  here's where things start order. This was With this one first
• 33:20
  because it was just very strange.
• 33:23
  So I'm a trained Steward. I have a feel silly saying this,
• 33:29
  I have a btec level 2 award in understanding stewarding at
• 33:33
  spectator events. It was awarded by a company that
• 33:37
  doesn't exist anymore. I mean, it was 10 years ago, 11
• 33:41
  years ago. But when I finished sixth form,
• 33:46
  I wasn't sure about going to University straight away.
• 33:49
  I felt, can you believe this? I thought I wasn't intelligent
• 33:53
  enough to go to university. Imagine that, I mean, I've had
• 33:56
  jokes with friends about this before, but some of them
• 34:01
  stupidest people I've ever met in my life, I've met at
• 34:03
  University, so I find it hilarious in hindsight that I
• 34:07
  thought I wasn't intelligent enough but it speaks to self
• 34:09
  esteem issues. You know, if you have low
• 34:11
  self-esteem, it prevents you from doing the things that you
• 34:15
  can and should do so believe in yourself.
• 34:18
  And if you don't believe in yourself.
• 34:20
  Just try. Just try, you know, if it feels
• 34:23
  right and it feels like something you should be doing,
• 34:25
  just go for it, you know, you never know what could happen.
• 34:27
  But anyway, because of that, my mom was very quick to be like,
• 34:31
  hey, you need to get a job, you need to, you know, start
• 34:34
  working, stop paying your way. And I was like, all right, fair
• 34:36
  enough, I didn't accept it that fair enough, the but I did do
• 34:42
  something about it. I did actually try to find work
• 34:46
  and I found work pretty quickly. But before I got my first, Job.
• 34:50
  I actually went for this stewarding qualification and it
• 34:55
  was supposed to be like a, I suppose on a casual basis.
• 35:00
  I remember had to go to the oval cricket ground in London to do
• 35:04
  my training so it's pretty cool. We got to go to the stadium and
• 35:08
  it was huge. We got to mess around a little
• 35:10
  bit but mostly it was just sitting in a classroom listening
• 35:14
  to this guy teaching us and it was interesting stuff, you know?
• 35:19
  He's just learning, you know what I mean so it's just more
• 35:21
  school as far as I was concerned.
• 35:23
  So, just sat there with notebook, but the difference was
• 35:26
  instead of being full being in the classroom full of people my
• 35:30
  age, it was in a classroom full of people, you know, in their
• 35:33
  20s 30s 40s. Which was really weird.
• 35:36
  And I remember doing Health Training, like I learn how to do
• 35:40
  like CPR and all that which apparently is out of date.
• 35:43
  So I need to get that updated, but I could probably save your
• 35:46
  life because I remember how to do it.
• 35:50
  Anyway, I one thing that really stands out or two things stand
• 35:55
  out from that experience. One is that some of the guys who
• 35:59
  are older than me in their 20s and 30s were running around,
• 36:02
  like kids, and I was obviously like enjoying that and having a
• 36:05
  laugh. But I also remembered the fact
• 36:07
  that they were like 10 years older than me.
• 36:08
  And I was like, huh. So we don't act like adults that
• 36:14
  and the course to of picked up on that because there were
• 36:18
  people that Talking is literally that school, it was so silly.
• 36:23
  There was people that kept talking during the lessons and
• 36:27
  he had to like tell them off and that's fine when you're at
• 36:30
  school and it's a bit embarrassing and six for me to
• 36:32
  be honest or college but this was like telling off grown
• 36:37
  adults in their 30s 40s to stop. Stop talking and let you had to
• 36:43
  so embarrassing and I even me, like 18 at the time I was just
• 36:47
  looking at them. Like what are you doing?
• 36:49
  What what what? So yeah, but I think the the
• 36:55
  lasting impression I have of that experience is that I never
• 36:58
  used it. You know, they gave us
• 37:00
  information about how to do events and I was interested in
• 37:03
  doing it, but it inevitably never happens.
• 37:06
  So I had this qualification that I never used and probably now is
• 37:10
  defunct at that. I doubt I could use it, maybe I
• 37:13
  could have a Top-Up. Maybe I could still be a steward
• 37:16
  for those who don't know what it is, I would have basically just
• 37:18
  been one of those people that wear.
• 37:19
  The fluorescent jackets and basically, you know, the
• 37:23
  overalls basically just stands at like football grounds and
• 37:25
  just tells people where to go and stuff.
• 37:27
  Oh, I don't know. Would have been easy money,
• 37:30
  probably quite an easy job but ya never never really happened
• 37:34
  and around the same time I did a qualification which I don't even
• 37:39
  think. It's a real thing.
• 37:40
  I did a itq course. It was officially an information
• 37:44
  technology internship for a really shady dodgy company that
• 37:48
  I think. They either still exist or they
• 37:52
  went into Administration. I can't remember.
• 37:53
  I never actually officially received my qualification even
• 37:56
  though I completed it. But one of the things I remember
• 37:59
  straight off the bat is in the first week.
• 38:02
  I learned that at least two of the people in the class had
• 38:05
  recently come out of prison and they were my age.
• 38:08
  They were nice, but that was a bit nerve-racking to know.
• 38:14
  And also after the first day, literally 50% of the people
• 38:19
  left. Never came back because I think
• 38:21
  they were smart enough to realize this is a crock of shit.
• 38:24
  What are we doing? But I was there like 10.
• 38:27
  I'm gonna get this qualification.
• 38:28
  I'm going to do this thing you know, because they were paying
• 38:31
  me. So how are ya?
• 38:36
  But it was it was really weird. I remember there was a very Luxe
• 38:40
  again lackadaisical teacher who really didn't care and then
• 38:44
  there was one that did sort of care and they were teaching us I
• 38:49
  guess it stuff. I can't really remember if I'm
• 38:52
  honest but I just remember that. The whole point of it was that
• 38:57
  they were going to help us get this qualification and then help
• 39:00
  us get work. That was the point of doing it
• 39:04
  and they didn't do either of those things.
• 39:06
  I didn't get the qualification. I never received it and I
• 39:08
  inquired and I never received it and I never got a job.
• 39:12
  And I remember that the particular office that I went to
• 39:15
  was very lazy in response, but then, they had another office.
• 39:19
  Like Hammersmith which was in London, which was really strict
• 39:24
  and it seemed like oh they get stuff done here.
• 39:26
  And I remember sitting down in a boardroom, it was really
• 39:29
  nerve-wracking. Just talking to these people and
• 39:32
  telling them what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with my
• 39:36
  career. I mean, I didn't know what I
• 39:37
  wanted. 18 come on, but you know I gave them an idea.
• 39:41
  Like I want to work in business, I want to do this because I was,
• 39:43
  I liked business. I was excited by business.
• 39:45
  I'm still excited by business. It's just different now, you
• 39:49
  know, I'm a creative business entrepreneur, I suppose, but
• 39:52
  back then, I was just like, I want to be a businessman.
• 39:55
  I want to do something, I don't know.
• 39:57
  Yeah, I just didn't know what I want is wanted to do as most
• 40:02
  people, don't at the age of 18, but there you go.
• 40:07
  So I kind of just didn't get anything out of it really, and
• 40:12
  it kind of just ended like a fart, you know, the very
• 40:15
  disappointing farm and that was Of it really.
• 40:20
  And then not long after that. I think a month or two
• 40:22
  afterwards. The yeah, literally a month
• 40:25
  later. I started my job working at
• 40:28
  supermarket for three years. I've spoken about this before I
• 40:32
  have many stories on this which I'm sure I could share in a
• 40:38
  specific episode but let's give you the cliff notes version.
• 40:42
  So I got this job originally I was going to go for like a
• 40:46
  part-time position, but I was offered full-time.
• 40:49
  Time and I was like, I just jumped to the opportunity should
• 40:52
  have thought that through. Really I should have gone
• 40:53
  part-time and just did over time.
• 40:56
  But you know, back then I was like, oh, I need to get work all
• 40:59
  you know, I need to pay rent, I need to do this.
• 41:01
  So I was a bit scared, I didn't know what to expect.
• 41:05
  So lesson learned, don't be scared plan things out.
• 41:12
  So anyway got this position which was about an hour and a
• 41:16
  half away from where I lived by train which again was a mistake
• 41:20
  but you know I would find this out later.
• 41:24
  And at the time I was, I was in a heavy metal band.
• 41:28
  So I was working this in this place five days a week with
• 41:33
  alternating days which meant that, you know, I'd have one
• 41:37
  weekend off and then the next week I'd have like a day off
• 41:40
  during the week and then I'd work the Saturday and have the
• 41:44
  Sunday off. Sunday, was always the best day
• 41:46
  to work, because it was double pay.
• 41:48
  But then the full time has never got that.
• 41:50
  But one thing we did get is that which I think everyone got Is
• 41:54
  this cool thing where you could work, your bank holidays, get
• 41:57
  time and a half, and then save them up because obviously
• 42:01
  legally you're allowed to claim them.
• 42:03
  So if we wanted to say, no, we're not going to work, we
• 42:05
  didn't have to work but we would technically open and I would
• 42:10
  save them up and get like an extra week holiday.
• 42:13
  So, this is pretty awesome. And during that time, you know,
• 42:15
  I worked through the Olympic period when the Olympics came to
• 42:18
  London. Gosh.
• 42:22
  Yeah, a lot happened during that time.
• 42:24
  I I was in a long-term relationship for about three
• 42:27
  years which ended during my time there.
• 42:31
  It was also during that time that my band ended after three
• 42:35
  years. And then I didn't know what to
• 42:37
  do with myself because I was I just been dumped and my band had
• 42:41
  ended and everything seemingly was going down the toilet.
• 42:44
  But I'd started this college course because I had this
• 42:47
  intention of going back to University.
• 42:51
  Funny story about the college course.
• 42:53
  So I paid like two or three grand to do this college course.
• 42:57
  Because one year I'd found a university in clearing and had
• 43:03
  said, oh hey. So I have these qualifications.
• 43:08
  Can I get into University? I had a star, a star D to a
• 43:13
  stars in business and like Addie and psychology.
• 43:15
  And they said that the D in Psychology was not good enough.
• 43:18
  And I'd have to do this particular course which they say
• 43:21
  Suggested in order to get into University that was rubbish and
• 43:26
  I'll get to why in a second. But I took their advice and I
• 43:29
  did this course and I got about three months into the course
• 43:34
  because obviously during the course of the course, they give
• 43:39
  you advice about how to get into University.
• 43:41
  And there's this whole part of the course where they help you
• 43:44
  get into that. And so during that time, I was
• 43:51
  calling different universities and applying for different
• 43:53
  universities through a UK s and I called my eventual,
• 43:58
  University, Royal Holloway University and I'd said to them.
• 44:03
  Hey, so these are my grades and then this is my predicted grades
• 44:07
  for the course I'm currently doing and they said, oh, based
• 44:10
  on your grades from a level, you're sure.
• 44:13
  Bet you're in already and also wait, what?
• 44:16
  And then I literally remember making the connection as like
• 44:19
  hang on. There's this lady at the end of
• 44:21
  the phone, I was like. So you're telling me that this
• 44:24
  course that I'm doing right now, I don't need to do.
• 44:27
  I do need to finish this course and she said well I just started
• 44:31
  backpedaling and saying, wow, you know, I mean you should
• 44:33
  probably still finish the course, you know, it's good for
• 44:36
  your personal development, but basically, yes, basically, the
• 44:39
  course was pointless and I just laughed and it took so much
• 44:43
  weight and pressure of me to know that I was definitely going
• 44:46
  to get into this University and Things were going to be okay and
• 44:52
  just bring it back to work, I had dropped to part-time during
• 44:56
  during that time. So it kind of Was a big relief
• 45:04
  because I didn't like working there, and it had got a lot
• 45:07
  better when I had gone part-time compared to full time, because I
• 45:10
  hated it when I was full time, but at least, when I was full
• 45:13
  time, you know, I had the band going on.
• 45:15
  I had something in my life, I had a relationship.
• 45:17
  I had things going on in my life, but I was so miserable and
• 45:22
  the only person that could change.
• 45:23
  It was me, but I felt trapped to be honest, whereas when I went
• 45:27
  part-time, I felt like I had a lot more control over my life,
• 45:31
  and I ended up Working more actually falling off because I
• 45:35
  did loads of overtime but it was on my terms and that was the
• 45:39
  first time that I realized that work can be on your terms.
• 45:42
  And when it is it's often more enjoyable which is one of the
• 45:46
  reasons why I'm now freelance, our work, as a freelancer.
• 45:50
  And I think that's like a really important thing to keep in mind
• 45:53
  is this idea that you know you don't have to just go for like
• 45:56
  your standard 925 or shift work like there are contracts, there
• 46:00
  are freelance options. You can work as a subcontractor,
• 46:03
  that's what I do. It's a lot of different options.
• 46:07
  You know, you've always got options.
• 46:08
  You just have to go and explore, and not be scared, or worried
• 46:11
  about what, you know, or feel like you're backed into a
• 46:15
  corner. And you've got no Escape because
• 46:17
  you have got an escape, but bear in mind.
• 46:19
  I was 20 years old, and scared, and worried, and didn't know
• 46:24
  what I was doing. So that in a nutshell was kind
• 46:28
  of how it was when I was at the supermarket as Say, I think.
• 46:34
  What, what might be a good idea off the back of this episode?
• 46:38
  Is if you have any questions for me after this episode, send them
• 46:43
  my way. And I will do like a an episode
• 46:47
  where I just answer your questions based on everything
• 46:50
  I've spoken about. I think that's a good idea
• 46:51
  because I don't know what to focus on.
• 46:54
  I share stories here and there that I feel are relevant or, you
• 47:01
  know, the come to mind obviously some of the stuff I've already
• 47:03
  spoken to. I've never spoken about before
• 47:06
  so you've never heard those stories but I think a lot of
• 47:08
  people in my community have heard me talk about my time
• 47:13
  working at, waitrose the supermarket.
• 47:15
  So I don't know. I don't want to repeat myself or
• 47:18
  talk about things that might not be interesting.
• 47:23
  So yeah, feel free to ask me questions about about that or
• 47:26
  anything else that I've spoken about in this episode and we'll
• 47:30
  do a sort of a Q&A episode after the fact that I think that will
• 47:33
  work quite nicely. I woke I will talk about a
• 47:38
  couple of things now though in this Supermarket job so I did
• 47:41
  try to go like a team leader position.
• 47:46
  I worked very hard bear in mind. I was like 18, 19, 20 during my
• 47:51
  time there, I left Just as I turned 21, it was an awesome
• 47:55
  year. I quit my job.
• 47:57
  I finish college and I started University and I went to America
• 48:01
  and toured around England with my friend who was in a band, it
• 48:04
  was a good year. It started terribly with a
• 48:07
  breakup and it ended with me partying in Prague for New
• 48:14
  Year's. So I think that shows you just
• 48:16
  how much can change in a year but yeah it was it was a, it was
• 48:23
  a job where I I remember when I first started the job about
• 48:29
  three months in, there was a woman that was a South African
• 48:32
  lady that was working there and I think she was in her 40s or
• 48:36
  something, really nice lady. She worked on the wines section
• 48:42
  of the store and she knew a lot about wines, obviously being
• 48:45
  wine specialist, but really nice, lady, smart lady, and
• 48:49
  obviously being that I was younger, the adults older people
• 48:53
  in the store would give me advice or they would be sure.
• 48:55
  It's Terrors there was a lot of shit steroids, but she was one
• 48:57
  of the good ones. And one of the first things she
• 49:00
  said, which was a life lesson, she turned to me and she said,
• 49:03
  you need to stop working so hard and I took that badly because
• 49:07
  I've got that classic. You know, work hard mentality
• 49:10
  and you know, I'm not lazy. What do you mean?
• 49:13
  You know, I'm going to work my butt off and, you know, I guess
• 49:16
  you you must just be one of the lazy ones.
• 49:18
  I didn't say that, but that was kind of my attitude, right?
• 49:20
  And she said you're going to burn out.
• 49:23
  And if you set the bar too, Hi basically, you'll never be able
• 49:28
  to meet that. Like they'll expect you to meet
• 49:31
  that high expectation every single time.
• 49:34
  And she was right. Basically the in a nutshell, the
• 49:37
  lesson there was you should work hard for other people, but bear
• 49:43
  in mind that, you know, whatever is the first thing that you set
• 49:48
  as like, how you work when you come into a place.
• 49:52
  That's how they expect you to work at all times.
• 49:58
  The way I've learned it is is to kind of go into every job now.
• 50:03
  Get your work done, get your work, finished in a timely
• 50:07
  fashion. I do your job but like, don't
• 50:09
  overexert yourself don't kind of go above and beyond choose your
• 50:14
  moments when you do that. So it's you can go and above and
• 50:18
  beyond, but don't do it. Every second of every day, do it
• 50:21
  at opportune moments when, you know they're watching or, you
• 50:24
  know, stuff like that. That's how you do it.
• 50:26
  That's A jerk something. A lot of people going to
• 50:28
  disagree with me on that and look the thing is this comes
• 50:32
  from experience. I've grinded in jobs both
• 50:35
  corporate and customer service and it led, it got me nowhere.
• 50:41
  It just meant that I was bernau exhausted and I quit.
• 50:46
  Ultimately and that's the wrong way to go about things.
• 50:50
  Like as as harsh as it sounds, a lot of the time hard work is not
• 50:55
  what gets you Positions are opportunities, it's more about
• 50:59
  your mindset, your attitude. How well you play with others,
• 51:03
  you know, your politics, you know how well you play the game
• 51:05
  at it. Sounds stupid but more often
• 51:08
  than not, that's the case. And this was definitely the case
• 51:11
  as ridiculous as it sounds in this Supermarket job.
• 51:14
  It was like It's there shouldn't have been any politics should
• 51:19
  have just been stocked. The shelves, get on your job.
• 51:21
  Here's a promotion. You've worked hard.
• 51:23
  That's how it should have been. But it was like, I kept getting
• 51:27
  promised this, this team leader position and it kept getting
• 51:31
  passed over. And sometimes they would just
• 51:33
  tell me. Yeah, it's coming out, it's
• 51:35
  coming. We're gonna pick on the course.
• 51:36
  We're going to put you on the course, then made throw it back
• 51:38
  in my face and say I've not worked hard enough even though I
• 51:41
  trained a bunch of people and I don't often took responsibility
• 51:45
  and and was like Improvising anyway in La.
• 51:48
  Where managers weren't around. That's the thing like they treat
• 51:50
  you. As a manager but then they don't
• 51:54
  give you what you want and I had a bad attitude back then
• 51:59
  because, you know, I busted my ass for so long and go back to
• 52:02
  what that woman had said. After six months, I actually
• 52:05
  turned round to her and said, yeah.
• 52:06
  Yeah, you were right. You know, you were spot-on with
• 52:10
  that and she laughed. And we had a laugh about it and
• 52:13
  I just bit, it was kind of like a Bittersweet laughs.
• 52:16
  It was like, yeah, you're right. But it sucks that you're right.
• 52:19
  It's kind of thing and she understood and, you know, it was
• 52:22
  just a life. Listen straight away.
• 52:25
  And I remember just kind of being frustrated, you know
• 52:29
  having people coming I remember towards the end before I quit
• 52:34
  about maybe six months before I quit.
• 52:35
  There was a guy that came in who I trained and then he started
• 52:40
  trying to supervise me and I was like, what is this bullshit?
• 52:44
  Like what? Because you've just chosen him.
• 52:47
  Suddenly he's my boss. Like I was like insulted by
• 52:51
  that. You know, because I'd shown
• 52:54
  again and again and again that I was Definitely Mac like
• 52:56
  management material is definitely worthy of being a
• 52:59
  team leader. It's just a did want to give it
• 53:01
  to me because they didn't like me because, you know what, I
• 53:05
  did, say what I thought and I was outspoken and maybe I did
• 53:09
  challenge managers. Not like, in a annoying way
• 53:13
  like, you know, I'm not going to get the job done but inner like,
• 53:15
  no, you can't be rude to me. No, you can't be a dick to me
• 53:19
  like, I would call people out on their bullshit because that's
• 53:21
  how I was raised. My mom would have been proud of
• 53:24
  me in those Ian's because a lot of it was bullying and just
• 53:29
  nasty managers. And you know, not everyone,
• 53:32
  there's a lot of people that work for that were very decent
• 53:35
  people and I stand by that to this day.
• 53:37
  But there was a lot of people that made my life a living
• 53:41
  nightmare in particular. There was a few managers that
• 53:44
  just made me miserable and like it was the sort of thing where,
• 53:48
  and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this.
• 53:50
  Where you come into work and based on whoever is the manager
• 53:55
  that That's how your day is going to be.
• 53:57
  And that's the thing, we haven't even spoken about customers.
• 53:59
  But like, the management ultimately were the thing that
• 54:03
  made the job unbearable because the customers, you know what,
• 54:06
  like, for the most part they were fine.
• 54:08
  You get a few rude people here and there, you know, but you're
• 54:12
  a team, you know what I mean? Like, you're in it together.
• 54:15
  So you don't really notice. Like, if you get a rude
• 54:17
  customer, you can just laugh about it with another member of
• 54:19
  staff and it's okay, you know it didn't faze me too much, there
• 54:25
  were times. Times when they'd sometimes
• 54:26
  treat you just like, you know, you're stupid and treat you like
• 54:30
  you're just a bit, a piece of dirt on the floor and that got
• 54:32
  even worse when I got into Hospitality.
• 54:35
  But when I was working in the supermarket you know what, it
• 54:38
  wasn't that bad they really wasn't.
• 54:40
  It was just kind of like yeah, I had bigger problems dealing with
• 54:44
  these managers but I will remember later on certain
• 54:50
  managers came into the into that hire managers came into the
• 54:53
  store and they told me I didn't have the right attitude.
• 54:55
  And I remember telling them, why do you think I have this
• 54:57
  attitude? It's because you keep promise
• 54:59
  me. Promising, me things, and then
• 55:01
  lying to me and then giving it to someone else or giving it to
• 55:04
  no one. You know?
• 55:05
  That's the problem that I can take it, if you, if you say I'm
• 55:08
  not good enough and you say, these are the things you need to
• 55:10
  do in order to get good enough, fair enough.
• 55:12
  But they weren't saying that they were just like oh your
• 55:15
  attitudes wrong and it's that will course.
• 55:16
  My attitude is bad because you keep lying to me.
• 55:19
  You keep telling me that I've got an opportunity and then you
• 55:22
  pull the rug from under my feet. Remember what I said, Earlier
• 55:26
  about remembering how it was. I'm there.
• 55:28
  Right now, I'm there. And I'm getting annoyed Eli.
• 55:31
  I'm just like, oh yeah, I could go on all day about my time at
• 55:37
  waitrose the supermarket. And as I say, if you have
• 55:41
  questions, if you have ideas things, you want me to talk
• 55:44
  about, let me know. But ultimately if I had to sum
• 55:48
  it up because I need to just kind of give a rough idea of
• 55:51
  each role and what it taught me Supermarket.
• 55:54
  Taught me how To it, reinforced how I dealt with customers
• 55:59
  because while I had that experience in that Saturday job,
• 56:01
  I've done before, this was the first job I've ever had with a
• 56:06
  contract. That's something very important
• 56:08
  to mention actually first job with a contract pension even
• 56:15
  there were bonuses that I got every year as a very cool scheme
• 56:18
  that I don't believe we chose does anymore but waitrose and
• 56:21
  John Lewis used to have like a bonus scheme.
• 56:23
  So you get like extra money every April.
• 56:25
  Oh, so instead of like a grand, you'd have like 3 Grand a month.
• 56:29
  It was insane. I actually use the money in my
• 56:31
  final year to go to America, so thank you, waitress for that.
• 56:35
  Let's go to America because of you.
• 56:38
  But yeah, you know, I mean it was I think I think overall it
• 56:42
  was a good job. It taught me how to deal with
• 56:45
  customers in the right way, which you know, I carried those
• 56:48
  techniques into other customer service positions.
• 56:50
  So you know, I learned a lot from them.
• 56:53
  I learned patience a couple. My fingers, how many times I
• 56:57
  lost it at customers. Inevitably going to lose it.
• 57:00
  Sometimes when people that rude and disgusting and just
• 57:03
  horrible, but I think maybe like three times I lost it.
• 57:09
  I lost it more in my managers, to be honest.
• 57:10
  But the good thing is that people were very forgiving as
• 57:14
  well. So long, as you work hard, I
• 57:17
  think that's kind of what people respond to the most.
• 57:20
  They don't like laziness and I was never late.
• 57:23
  I was always hard hard work. Never never.
• 57:25
  Lazy because I couldn't be, it was not in me to be lazy.
• 57:29
  I had moments where I was disillusioned and annoyed and
• 57:33
  frustrated at the structure of things, but I was never lazy.
• 57:38
  Another life lesson that I learned probably in the first
• 57:41
  month of working, was that there was a manager that at the time
• 57:47
  he would have been a supervisor. But eventually, he was an
• 57:49
  assistant manager, and he was closer in age to me and I
• 57:51
  thought he was trustworthy, but he turned out not not so much to
• 57:55
  be But he turned around to me once and he said, and it was the
• 57:58
  weird sort of thing where he was giving me this advice, but you
• 58:02
  could tell he was that protecting himself as well.
• 58:06
  He basically, because I think he was telling me because I was
• 58:08
  young, he turned around to me and he said, always watch your
• 58:12
  back. And what he meant by that is
• 58:15
  like everything that you do. Make sure everything that you do
• 58:19
  is okay and you've covered your tracks and you've made sure that
• 58:22
  you're in charge and owning everything you're doing, like
• 58:25
  you have a good track record, like everything that you do is
• 58:29
  good. He said I'm saying, like, you
• 58:32
  make sure that you're fully just in charge Of everything I got
• 58:39
  sound. So I'm losing my words.
• 58:41
  It, basically everything that you do looks good and that
• 58:45
  you're never caught slacking. Basically, that's kind of a nut
• 58:49
  shell. What he was saying, and that was
• 58:50
  a useful bit of advice and it was funny because later on, I
• 58:53
  remember that guy. I remember when he told me that
• 58:56
  it sounded very ominous like, I need to I guess I need to be
• 58:59
  careful man. This guy like that advice is
• 59:01
  useful but this, you know, it sounds like he could potentially
• 59:08
  be quite a combative guy and funnily enough about 2 years
• 59:11
  later. He got someone fired.
• 59:15
  Someone apparently, he'd known. For many years at this point who
• 59:22
  had they, this person had done something wrong.
• 59:25
  I think they stole something from the store or something,
• 59:28
  which is not acceptable, but he snitched on this person, he got
• 59:32
  them fired and he threw them under the bus and he was a
• 59:35
  manager at that point and I just thought like it's like I know
• 59:40
  how ridiculous this sounds in the context of a supermarket but
• 59:43
  power corrupts. Absolutely.
• 59:47
  It was literally that kind of Mine says like okay, he's got a
• 59:50
  bit of power. Now, it's gone to his head and
• 59:52
  now he's throwing anyone under the bus, to save his own skin to
• 59:55
  make himself look good. I don't think you can ever look
• 59:58
  good. Snitch on another people.
• 59:59
  I just, you know and it wasn't even he did it twice, he got
• 1:00:02
  another guy fired who. There was this stupid thing at
• 1:00:07
  waitrose where and other supermarkets do this too?
• 1:00:12
  I don't think they do this anymore, but at the time they
• 1:00:16
  would tell you that you weren't allowed to Take food that was
• 1:00:19
  being thrown away. So, bear in mind, you had to
• 1:00:21
  waste food off, count it as losses that was like going out
• 1:00:26
  day or something like that, and throw it away, but they told you
• 1:00:29
  that once it was to be thrown away, you couldn't take it for
• 1:00:32
  yourself, even though it's been written off.
• 1:00:35
  And it's just going in the bin, right?
• 1:00:37
  They would say no, you're not allowed to take it and this guy
• 1:00:40
  I think he took some right. Lettuce or something to give to
• 1:00:46
  like some turtles that he had as pets at home, and he got fired
• 1:00:49
  for that. And this was a guy in his 60s or
• 1:00:51
  something and that manager that I told you about got this guy
• 1:00:56
  fired and I was just shocked by that.
• 1:00:59
  I was really blown away, like why?
• 1:01:02
  Why would you do that? Like, you know, there are
• 1:01:06
  certain things that you can't turn a blind eye away from like
• 1:01:09
  things that are genuinely illegal.
• 1:01:10
  Like if you see abuse or someone get salted or something like,
• 1:01:14
  yeah report that shit, you know, do something about it, but when
• 1:01:17
  someone's like taking a bit of food that is going to be thrown
• 1:01:20
  away. Anyway, that's come on, man.
• 1:01:23
  That's, you know what I mean? It's just, it's just like a
• 1:01:27
  really douchey thing to do. Yeah.
• 1:01:30
  It was a lot of crazy stuff that happened there.
• 1:01:32
  I think it really is set the template for me, working in
• 1:01:36
  future customer service positions.
• 1:01:38
  And also just understanding work politics people.
• 1:01:41
  People at work, the good and the bad.
• 1:01:43
  What to avoid? What to how to work.
• 1:01:46
  I think in a nutshell. So, it was a good experience,
• 1:01:49
  but it was hard and I wouldn't want to do it again.
• 1:01:54
  Now, during my time at University, I had a lot of job
• 1:01:59
  roles both. Inside University and outside
• 1:02:03
  University. I'll skim through some of these.
• 1:02:06
  So I worked in a hotel for about five months before.
• 1:02:11
  Not many people know this. So those I actually worked into
• 1:02:13
  hotels. The first hotel I worked in.
• 1:02:15
  I was only there for five months.
• 1:02:17
  I thought I was there for less time than that.
• 1:02:18
  Apparently, but yeah. Five months.
• 1:02:20
  Okay, there's a very straightforward job.
• 1:02:24
  I was only there like once or twice a week.
• 1:02:27
  Normally, just once a week for like three four hours in the
• 1:02:30
  morning to do like the breakfast.
• 1:02:32
  Loving and laying of the tables for the afternoon tea services
• 1:02:36
  and such. It is a very Posh Swanky hotel.
• 1:02:43
  I think the building was like 15, 16 Century building like
• 1:02:46
  very like in a state. You can imagine.
• 1:02:48
  Like, you know, really Posh Gardens, very Posh place because
• 1:02:52
  it's very Posh areas in their gum which is where my University
• 1:02:55
  was which is where all of these hotels were For our, I should
• 1:03:00
  say. And I mean, there were again,
• 1:03:05
  there was one manager or supervisor, I should say that, I
• 1:03:08
  had some falling out with again, if you want to know more about
• 1:03:12
  that, I can cover that in a follow-up episode.
• 1:03:15
  So I'm going to, I'm going to skip that but what I will say,
• 1:03:19
  there was one weird thing about the way that you'd get paid.
• 1:03:23
  Like normally I'd get paid with just standard payslips like just
• 1:03:30
  Not even write my hours somewhere or unlike a slip or
• 1:03:34
  they would be inserted into that pre-agreed via email or
• 1:03:39
  something like that. But this place you had to do
• 1:03:42
  like a time card. I think you have to sign the
• 1:03:44
  card and then put it into just like a tiny little attachment on
• 1:03:50
  the side of a wall. Well, I thought this isn't
• 1:03:52
  secure enough. How am I ever going to get paid
• 1:03:53
  properly, but you know what? I got paid correctly every
• 1:03:57
  single time. So, apparently, that system
• 1:03:59
  works. And works perfectly and I won't
• 1:04:00
  be surprised if they're still using it.
• 1:04:02
  And I was working on a casual basis, which I think when you're
• 1:04:06
  at University, definitely go for that.
• 1:04:08
  Its maximum flexibility. The contract you're not even you
• 1:04:15
  don't even really know anything. I mean the danger is that you I
• 1:04:19
  never promised hours but the kind of the flip side of that is
• 1:04:23
  you don't have to work either. So it's quite a flexible
• 1:04:28
  position to her. And I think the more you show up
• 1:04:31
  the more, they'll use you really in a positive way.
• 1:04:36
  And other than that manager, that I mentioned, who was, or
• 1:04:40
  she wasn't even a manager. She was a supervisor other than
• 1:04:42
  the supervisor being a douche. Everyone there was really nice
• 1:04:46
  and I ended up meeting a lot of them in the next hotel job.
• 1:04:49
  I had because they left that place.
• 1:04:52
  But, yeah, it was an okay place to work for the most part.
• 1:04:55
  Nice, kitchen staff, really, good food that they did the And
• 1:05:00
  met some interesting people. As well, I very briefly worked
• 1:05:03
  at Brunel University which was funny because I have a family
• 1:05:09
  member that works there. So that's how I was able to get
• 1:05:12
  the end. So you know, nepotism just kid.
• 1:05:15
  I got like a little I'll explain the positions in a second but
• 1:05:18
  basically it was funny going back there when they refused me
• 1:05:25
  in clearing and I went to a better University anyway that I
• 1:05:28
  was at at Royal Holloway when I did this, like, I suppose you
• 1:05:34
  could call it like, internship or whatever, at Brunel.
• 1:05:36
  So that made me laugh. I was like, yeah, well, I met
• 1:05:39
  somewhere better now, so they're there.
• 1:05:41
  But this experience was pretty good.
• 1:05:43
  I was there for two months in the build-up to their graduation
• 1:05:47
  week in 2015. I worked as an usher at their
• 1:05:51
  graduation, so that's pretty cool.
• 1:05:54
  I helped with Student Records, like printing, the Student,
• 1:05:57
  Records fixing Student, Records are used various different
• 1:06:02
  computer program. It's the, I can't remember how
• 1:06:05
  to use now, but it's mostly just for certificate stuff and just
• 1:06:09
  helping out on the office and making people T.
• 1:06:12
  So that was cool. Also, I got to work with my mom,
• 1:06:15
  which was called, never worked with my mom before.
• 1:06:17
  Although I didn't work closely with her we worked separately,
• 1:06:21
  but it was cool. Still to work with my mom.
• 1:06:23
  That was cool. And I did a very brief
• 1:06:26
  internship Samsonite and it was a marketing internship.
• 1:06:31
  So I was very excited about it. But, unfortunately, it's always
• 1:06:36
  been kind of dampened by a bad experience that I have to
• 1:06:42
  mention. So, basically, I've got this
• 1:06:44
  through family friends, and it seemed like a really promising
• 1:06:50
  experience. You know, I was excited to
• 1:06:54
  finally get an internship in the field that I was going into
• 1:06:58
  because I was studying management with marketing at
• 1:07:00
  University. So, I got an internship at the
• 1:07:03
  headquarters of this company, great rights ticks, all the
• 1:07:05
  boxes. Now, before I was about to start
• 1:07:08
  this, I came back to England after having been in Estonia
• 1:07:13
  with my then girlfriend for like a month during summer and I came
• 1:07:19
  to start this internship and And on the day that I arrived back
• 1:07:25
  in England, I received a call that one of my, my great grandma
• 1:07:29
  had passed away and I was obviously like really sad about
• 1:07:32
  that. And my dad said, page, you want
• 1:07:34
  to go what? And he said, will you accompany
• 1:07:38
  me to the funeral? And we'll make a sort of a road
• 1:07:40
  trip of it because it would take like, three hours to get there
• 1:07:43
  or something? And we did it.
• 1:07:44
  And it was, it was a good experience.
• 1:07:46
  We've got to see family, got to say goodbye to my great-grandma.
• 1:07:49
  It was a good experience all around.
• 1:07:52
  Now, the reason that that's relevant is that I was supposed
• 1:07:55
  to start this, this internship on like a Monday, but, you know,
• 1:08:01
  I was going to go to this funeral.
• 1:08:03
  Now, I didn't expect this to be a problem because it's a
• 1:08:06
  bereavement. And okay, I've not actually
• 1:08:08
  started with this company, but I didn't expect a bereavement to
• 1:08:13
  be an issue. I thought, you know, if I call
• 1:08:15
  them and say, hey, so basically, this is what's happening.
• 1:08:20
  I've had a family, But pause. So I won't be able to start
• 1:08:23
  straight away. I didn't think I'd be an issue,
• 1:08:25
  but what I was met with was the person on the other end of the
• 1:08:28
  phone, who was a marketing manager at the time, telling me
• 1:08:32
  who was the basically, she was there.
• 1:08:36
  She was the partner of the family friend who had helped me.
• 1:08:39
  Got get this position basically. She basically just turn around.
• 1:08:44
  To me and said, all this is unprofessional.
• 1:08:46
  This is really unprofessional. You can't be acting like this.
• 1:08:49
  You should have started on this day and I was like, I've just
• 1:08:51
  Just had someone die like. Are you kidding me?
• 1:08:55
  And I was like that. I will start on this day and
• 1:08:57
  I'll see you then and then they sort of begrudgingly said, yes.
• 1:09:01
  And then when I started the internship, I turn up and they
• 1:09:06
  I'm sat down with with this woman for about an hour and
• 1:09:09
  she's basically telling me that firstly because I don't actually
• 1:09:14
  work for the company as a full-time employee bereavement
• 1:09:17
  apparently doesn't count like it's a good thing.
• 1:09:20
  I'm not naming this person. I'm in them.
• 1:09:22
  But you know, if you are watching this, I hope you do
• 1:09:25
  realize, like just how sickening your behavior was like just
• 1:09:29
  unprofessional and distasteful, you know, forget I'm
• 1:09:33
  professionality, it was just distasteful behavior.
• 1:09:36
  And I really hope that they learned from that and just don't
• 1:09:41
  treat anyone else like this, because this was sickening.
• 1:09:45
  So, basically, I'm in this room sitting down and I'm getting
• 1:09:50
  lectured about About how, you know, the bereavement doesn't
• 1:09:54
  count because I don't work there as a full-time employee.
• 1:09:58
  If I worked as a full-time employee, it would be
• 1:10:00
  understood. So apparently that's horseshit
• 1:10:03
  isn't it? And then they said, you know,
• 1:10:06
  it's really unprofessional. Like I should have started on
• 1:10:08
  time but I started two days later and that causes problems
• 1:10:11
  and it's like, I was just listening to all of this and
• 1:10:15
  then eventually she stopped. And I said, yeah, okay, look,
• 1:10:17
  I'm sorry even though, I didn't mean that because someone just
• 1:10:21
  died in my Family. And I literally turned round
• 1:10:23
  Tower at one point. I said your you being serious,
• 1:10:25
  like my grandma just died, and you're telling me that it's
• 1:10:29
  unprofessional to like start this internship.
• 1:10:32
  Like two days later. Oh my God.
• 1:10:37
  It just rolls me up. Even thinking about it, and then
• 1:10:40
  we sort of just agreed to like continue or whatever.
• 1:10:43
  And then right at the end, just as I'm about to leave the
• 1:10:45
  office, she turns around and she says, I'm in Christian, sorry
• 1:10:50
  about your grandma. In the most insincere way
• 1:10:53
  possible. And I just I can just picture it
• 1:10:56
  to this day and I'm just like, I can't believe this person.
• 1:11:00
  And the funny thing is after that internship ended because it
• 1:11:03
  was really disappointing. They, the only thing that was
• 1:11:08
  really worth doing during the internship.
• 1:11:10
  Was I got to sit in and hear some, my branding meetings, with
• 1:11:16
  the head of marketing and someone who was working in
• 1:11:19
  connection with the company from a different company that
• 1:11:21
  Recently, just merged. So that was interesting from a
• 1:11:23
  marketing perspective and I took notes and stuff, but most of the
• 1:11:26
  time, I was just sitting there doing data entry which I
• 1:11:30
  expected to do a little bit of that stuff, but ultimately I
• 1:11:35
  didn't get to do anything marketing related.
• 1:11:37
  It was just a waste of time and a disappointing experience and
• 1:11:41
  left. A sour taste in my mouth because
• 1:11:43
  of, that really unprofessional meeting.
• 1:11:46
  I'd had with that person but Ma, can you do that.
• 1:11:49
  What can you really do? So, moving on, I was a Christmas
• 1:11:54
  temp at TK Maxx, although I didn't actually work Christmas,
• 1:12:01
  I quit before Christmas and I had too much going on in my
• 1:12:05
  personal life to do it, but I'd also I just wanted a better job
• 1:12:10
  to be honest, it was okay. There's not really much to say.
• 1:12:13
  I got up really early in the morning, I walked to work which
• 1:12:16
  took me about 35 minutes. I must have been insane.
• 1:12:18
  I don't know. I just didn't get the bus but I
• 1:12:21
  guess I To save money really early in the morning doing stock
• 1:12:25
  replenishment all the stuff for fine.
• 1:12:28
  You know very kind of just relaxed environment.
• 1:12:31
  Very different to my time at waitrose it was relaxed to the
• 1:12:35
  point that I don't know, like There's always too relaxed to be
• 1:12:44
  honest, but you know, it was fine.
• 1:12:47
  You know, there's really not much else to say to because the
• 1:12:50
  only thing that sticks out actually it was they had a
• 1:12:54
  punching in system because it's an American company.
• 1:12:57
  TK Maxx is the English version of t.j.
• 1:13:00
  Maxx. I believe is the American
• 1:13:02
  company. So they have this punching in
• 1:13:08
  hand scan system that they have. It's like a thing that's or like
• 1:13:13
  a system box that's outside of the staff room and you're
• 1:13:19
  supposed to basically punch in and punch out by scanning your
• 1:13:23
  hand to indicate when your break start and when your shift starts
• 1:13:27
  and ends. But people obviously forget and
• 1:13:29
  stuff but it was like a really weird way of getting paid and
• 1:13:33
  I'm not sure that I even did it correctly.
• 1:13:37
  But yeah, that's something that stands out from that time.
• 1:13:41
  Lots of students working there as you'd expect it was a student
• 1:13:44
  Town quite close to where my uni was and it only lasted about
• 1:13:48
  three months and I stopped before Christmas.
• 1:13:50
  So they go I very briefly worked as a senior contributor to give
• 1:13:56
  me Sport and I wrote opinion pieces and speculative pieces
• 1:14:00
  and even speak properly, been speaking for an hour and 17
• 1:14:03
  minutes, so that's probably why. But yeah, I wrote opinion pieces
• 1:14:07
  and articles for give me sport on professional wrestling.
• 1:14:10
  So that was Fun. Some of my articles, got a
• 1:14:15
  decent amount of views and interactions, so that was pretty
• 1:14:18
  cool and that was kind of it with with regards to that job
• 1:14:22
  very short-lived. I worked as a kitchen Porter or
• 1:14:27
  dishwasher for six months at a pub and that was probably one of
• 1:14:32
  the best jobs I ever had. To be honest.
• 1:14:35
  It was only about three or four hours of work.
• 1:14:37
  I'd come in. I'd get free food.
• 1:14:41
  I just Wash the dishes cleaned. The surface has occasionally
• 1:14:46
  prepared, like some salads and I'm not the floor before I was
• 1:14:50
  done and that was it. Brilliant job across the road
• 1:14:56
  from my University. So not far.
• 1:14:59
  I still found time to moan about that position.
• 1:15:01
  I think I was just at that point, I was just getting lazy,
• 1:15:03
  which I know I said I was hard working, but bear in mind, I was
• 1:15:06
  at University working several jobs.
• 1:15:09
  I was getting a bit like, you know, but you know, it was a
• 1:15:13
  very easy job that people will find nice people and it was a
• 1:15:17
  pub. Nice friendly environment, Easy
• 1:15:19
  Money, easy job. So yeah, sometimes let it be
• 1:15:23
  like that one of the jobs I had at University working for the
• 1:15:28
  University because I'd often have Unis jobs and then jobs
• 1:15:32
  outside of the uni at the same time mostly because the you need
• 1:15:35
  jobs didn't happen every week, they happen, the kind of
• 1:15:38
  sporadically. So I was a alumni fund cooler.
• 1:15:43
  So basically I would call up alumni of the university and ask
• 1:15:48
  them for money. Basically, to give you some
• 1:15:52
  context, I would ask for donations.
• 1:15:56
  Usually, from existing people who were donating to the
• 1:15:59
  university and that money would be used to support services of
• 1:16:03
  the university in like, for the curriculum.
• 1:16:07
  So, for students students, helping students essentially, or
• 1:16:10
  former students, helping students it's pretty
• 1:16:13
  nerve-racking. I was calling a lot of different
• 1:16:14
  people. I had quite nice conversations
• 1:16:16
  with people. I also gave them information
• 1:16:19
  about upcoming events. I've been like, oh, did you know
• 1:16:21
  that the 1970s were Union is happening soon to be like that
• 1:16:23
  kind of thing. It was cool.
• 1:16:27
  Yeah, it was it was a good little position.
• 1:16:28
  I liked my boss, she was really nice.
• 1:16:31
  I think I had to just end it prematurely after about a year
• 1:16:34
  and three months because I was just getting busier and busier
• 1:16:37
  with second or third year but yeah just a good job all around
• 1:16:43
  really I very briefly did I worked as an IT support
• 1:16:48
  assistant? For like a week during freshers
• 1:16:51
  of second year and I had like stools, if you could call it
• 1:16:56
  that like a table with it assistant and people would just
• 1:16:59
  come up to me and mostly just ask me like what's the Wi-Fi
• 1:17:02
  password or like how do I get onto the Wi-Fi?
• 1:17:05
  That's mostly what people, ask me, gave them advice giving free
• 1:17:08
  sweets and that was it. And I got paid for that if you
• 1:17:10
  believe that and I've got, I think I got like points for that
• 1:17:13
  or something like some sort of some sort of scheme that they
• 1:17:18
  called it. But award scheme and I got an
• 1:17:20
  award for it. It was for extra extra
• 1:17:23
  curricular activities and I would mostly collect points from
• 1:17:27
  my workers which I'm going to go onto as a student ambassador, as
• 1:17:30
  a fund caller and anything else that I did that was helping the
• 1:17:35
  uni in some way for 2 years and 9 months, almost three years.
• 1:17:41
  So my whole time at University I was a student ambassador for
• 1:17:46
  Royal Holloway University and the Management Department, I
• 1:17:52
  helped construct, and promote a buddy scheme for new students.
• 1:17:56
  People adjust into University life and their first month.
• 1:18:00
  So that's pretty cool. Gave information and advice to
• 1:18:04
  parents and students I remember showing around potential
• 1:18:08
  students who later then actually join the university.
• 1:18:11
  So that was cool because I went out of my way I you know, I give
• 1:18:16
  people the tour and then sometimes there won't be enough
• 1:18:18
  time to show them. Around and I'd offer to show
• 1:18:20
  them around afterwards anyway. And then they came to the uni
• 1:18:22
  afterwards, so that was cool. But yeah, mostly I just helped
• 1:18:28
  out on these open days, really help them.
• 1:18:31
  You know, I be in the assemblies, I'd be there.
• 1:18:34
  Mostly giving tours, giving advice, there was a few times in
• 1:18:39
  the later years where I actually did, like, lectures talks on why
• 1:18:43
  it was a good idea to join the university and our management
• 1:18:47
  department and that was a lot. Fun.
• 1:18:49
  I really enjoyed that. It was very nerve-racking, but I
• 1:18:52
  seem to be good at it. They treated us very well.
• 1:18:57
  We got paid well and it was just nice to be part of something.
• 1:19:02
  It was nice to represent the university in that way and I was
• 1:19:05
  really proud during that time of that.
• 1:19:07
  Like I got a lot of opportunities representing the
• 1:19:10
  university and representing the school of management and such.
• 1:19:14
  And it was, it was a good thing to be a part of and I was very
• 1:19:16
  proud of that and there's a good team of people that we work.
• 1:19:19
  With, so it's good stuff. Good stuff.
• 1:19:23
  One of the main events my time. The I won't say the name of the
• 1:19:27
  place but there was a hotel that I worked for for about one year
• 1:19:32
  and five months. And during that time, I worked
• 1:19:36
  as a waiter bartender, gosh events assistant, I did Silver
• 1:19:44
  Service, I did catering helped out the kitchen.
• 1:19:49
  Is I worked in a la carte restaurant.
• 1:19:52
  I worked in the buffet restaurant I worked in the
• 1:19:54
  lounge. I did it all same in in, this is
• 1:19:57
  one thing I didn't mention about this Supermarket job.
• 1:19:59
  I was trained in all areas of the supermarket and it's the
• 1:20:03
  same with this job. I was trained in all areas of
• 1:20:05
  the hotel mostly with the exception of the think, The Spar
• 1:20:11
  and places like that. But all the food serving drinks,
• 1:20:16
  serving areas After say, working as a waiter was very hard work.
• 1:20:22
  Very thankless the staff. They're brilliant really, really
• 1:20:26
  good staff. Very good team very well.
• 1:20:28
  Run, place there were times it wasn't so good, but that's just
• 1:20:34
  the step that the state with any place.
• 1:20:36
  I left with a good taste in my mouth off to this position.
• 1:20:39
  I'll always sing the Praises of this particular Hotel because
• 1:20:42
  they were really good to me. They gave me work when I
• 1:20:44
  desperately needed it? Yeah, this shock mount the
• 1:20:47
  running Meade's Hotel. Runnymede on Thames hotel in a
• 1:20:52
  gun if you're ever there. Go check it out.
• 1:20:53
  So excellent Hotel. They really treated me.
• 1:20:56
  Well, if you're studying Royal Holloway University, I'd
• 1:20:59
  recommend getting a job there, just on a casual basis.
• 1:21:04
  They'll look after you, I'll give you work, they give you
• 1:21:06
  opportunities. As I say, I got to work in every
• 1:21:08
  single part of the of the hotel and they treated me like a
• 1:21:13
  full-time member of Staff because I actually ended up
• 1:21:15
  working like 50 60 hour weeks on top of my degree.
• 1:21:19
  Three. And after I finished as well,
• 1:21:21
  they treated me like a full-time member of staff and I was always
• 1:21:23
  really grateful for that. Like not to be treated
• 1:21:25
  differently. They always really respectful
• 1:21:27
  and very giving and unforgiving as well.
• 1:21:35
  As I say that the time, spent as a way to his very hard dealing
• 1:21:38
  with customers, it was kind of a flip reverse of waitrose.
• 1:21:41
  So instead of the managers being the problem, it was the
• 1:21:45
  customers that were the problem often and that was the
• 1:21:48
  challenge. Again, good team.
• 1:21:50
  So we work together and we were able to deal with that quite
• 1:21:55
  Quite easily. But the actual part of it that I
• 1:21:57
  really enjoyed was being the bartender.
• 1:22:00
  I loved being a bartender, I was in my element.
• 1:22:04
  I would I would be a bartender again.
• 1:22:05
  That's how much I loved it. It was the one customer service
• 1:22:08
  job that I truly enjoyed. It was fun fast-paced.
• 1:22:13
  You get a weird level of respect from people as well like people
• 1:22:17
  seem to treat you differently. Based on that.
• 1:22:22
  Like they really show you respect as though, bartenders
• 1:22:26
  deserve more respect or something.
• 1:22:28
  I'm not saying that's the case. I'm just saying, I think it's
• 1:22:30
  based on on your level of knowledge because I think there
• 1:22:34
  seems to be this perception that people in the service industry
• 1:22:36
  are not intelligent which is a lie that's nonsense but and also
• 1:22:42
  if you think it's so easy, try it for yourself because they're
• 1:22:44
  guaranteed most people that judge customer service staff.
• 1:22:48
  If you did that job, Bob for even a week, you would fall down
• 1:22:51
  and just cry because it's a very hard thankless job, and you've
• 1:22:56
  got to be. You've got to be very strong in
• 1:23:00
  every sense of the word, like, physically, mentally
• 1:23:03
  emotionally, because it's really taxing.
• 1:23:07
  It really is, and you deal with a lot of frustrating situations,
• 1:23:11
  a lot of pressing moments pressure.
• 1:23:13
  You can't get scared or worried when things get really busy, you
• 1:23:17
  just have to keep your nerve that's why they always say.
• 1:23:21
  In the job descriptions of customer service jobs.
• 1:23:23
  He always says deals. Well, with pressure, what they
• 1:23:26
  mean is pressure from your managers pressure from the
• 1:23:28
  customers pressure from the situation of being in a packed
• 1:23:31
  place. That's got like 500 people and
• 1:23:33
  you're understaffed, you know, you just have to roll with it
• 1:23:36
  and adapt. And that's one thing, hey,
• 1:23:39
  complement in myself. But this is one thing I've
• 1:23:41
  always been good at, is being able to adapt to situations and
• 1:23:45
  just kind of got roll with the punches.
• 1:23:48
  It's something I've been able to To do.
• 1:23:49
  And I'm proud that I was able to do it in this job and the other
• 1:23:54
  customer service jobs that had so, yeah, overall good
• 1:23:57
  experience when I moved, I moved to Estonia after my degree of
• 1:24:02
  finished and this was around the time.
• 1:24:05
  I quit working at this hotel as well.
• 1:24:07
  So, I was, I think I'd graduated for about three months and I was
• 1:24:13
  looking for work in London, and I couldn't find anything because
• 1:24:17
  it's really hard to find. When you've just finished your
• 1:24:20
  degree, just a heads up on that to get as much of work
• 1:24:24
  experience as you can. And I decided to go to Estonia
• 1:24:29
  with my ex-girlfriends because the alternative of staying in
• 1:24:33
  England and working at a hotel, just didn't seem preferable.
• 1:24:37
  And she warned me that it would be tough and it was but it was
• 1:24:40
  definitely the right choice. So we initially moved there to
• 1:24:45
  temporarily work in Estonia and come back.
• 1:24:48
  But obviously We ended up staying there for about three
• 1:24:51
  years. In the first job I had, I was to
• 1:24:55
  helping her family's Farm. They had like a, they described
• 1:24:59
  it as an organic to tourism forum.
• 1:25:02
  And I did basically, I just helped out cleaning and
• 1:25:06
  restoring would just looking after animals, looking off to
• 1:25:12
  the farm and general cutting using like, tools to cut grass,
• 1:25:17
  like some sort of Common Board. It was A trimmer think it was
• 1:25:20
  called just just Farm stuff. Basically digging lots of
• 1:25:24
  digging and carrying things carrying logs, big, massive
• 1:25:29
  logs, I learned how to carry logs on my on my shoulder which
• 1:25:34
  was amazing. I never thought I'd be able to
• 1:25:36
  do that and one of the biggest jobs I had which I'm really
• 1:25:40
  proud of is, we installed a septic tank also known as a it
• 1:25:45
  within a soak pit. So I had to spend about a week
• 1:25:49
  Week or two in Winter, digging a massive hole that we would then
• 1:25:53
  put this septic tank into, which would then connect to The
• 1:25:57
  Farmhouse and basically provide sanitation or whatever it is
• 1:26:01
  involved with that. And for us, it's basically non
• 1:26:05
  perforated pipes for a sewage system.
• 1:26:07
  I've got it here and that was a good experience of hard work.
• 1:26:11
  It's thankless work, but being on a farm in nature, like it was
• 1:26:16
  good, I was living. In a farm off the coast of
• 1:26:21
  Estonia on an island called sorry, Emma.
• 1:26:24
  And in this particular instance, we were there for six months,
• 1:26:27
  I'd been there before on a holiday for a month or two and
• 1:26:30
  it helped out and stuff. But this was full six months of
• 1:26:33
  living there, whilst searching for marketing jobs.
• 1:26:38
  You know, and it's like, well, if you're here, got work, right,
• 1:26:40
  I'll keep the fun going, but I've never been one to turn away
• 1:26:43
  work. I've always been as I say up for
• 1:26:46
  a challenge, and this was a real challenge.
• 1:26:48
  JH both mind body and soul and I learnt a lot from it and it was
• 1:26:52
  a weirdly calming experience because I was very disconnected
• 1:26:56
  from the world at this point but from a work perspective, it felt
• 1:27:00
  very rewarding. Like I remember on certain days
• 1:27:04
  when we'd worked really really hard, I remember myself and my
• 1:27:08
  ex's father would sit down and have a drink together and it
• 1:27:12
  meant so much more. It wasn't just two guys, having
• 1:27:14
  a drink. It was like two guys having a
• 1:27:16
  drink after a really hard work. They and we would like yeah, we
• 1:27:21
  really achieve something day. We ate well and we lived well
• 1:27:25
  and there's a really good experience.
• 1:27:29
  I recommend everyone at least once work on a farm in their
• 1:27:33
  life or something similar. There's that some there's a lot
• 1:27:36
  to be said for physical labor and getting your hands dirty and
• 1:27:41
  working with your hands. You know.
• 1:27:44
  These days I work with a computer.
• 1:27:46
  It's very different in almost doesn't feel like work And I
• 1:27:48
  laugh about that, a lot of the time, I often say to people,
• 1:27:51
  like, this isn't work, but it's because it doesn't feel like
• 1:27:54
  work in comparison with all those physical jobs, I had.
• 1:27:58
  But anyway, moving it on my first job in marketing was in
• 1:28:04
  Estonia. All these jobs were in, were in
• 1:28:05
  Estonia, was as a copywriter on a small contract and I was
• 1:28:11
  working from home, just as I am now.
• 1:28:12
  So it was my first kind of outing as far as working from
• 1:28:17
  home. And basically, I was creating
• 1:28:23
  content for a digital marketing agency for a client involved in
• 1:28:28
  the online casino industry which I didn't enjoy.
• 1:28:33
  And there was not a lot of guidance if any and I had to
• 1:28:37
  kind of make stuff up a lot and I was good at that.
• 1:28:40
  I've always preferred autonomous work but at the same time you
• 1:28:44
  need a little bit of guidance, you know.
• 1:28:46
  Because I've been it's just guesswork and you never If
• 1:28:48
  you're doing it right or not. But yeah, in this instance, it
• 1:28:53
  was not very well paid but it was experience.
• 1:28:58
  I was grateful for the experience, I finally had a
• 1:29:00
  position, something I could say, hey look, I've got this
• 1:29:03
  marketing experience. Something I could add to my
• 1:29:05
  existing degree and the The Internship that I'd done and,
• 1:29:11
  you know, I mean, it was all the things I needed and wanted to
• 1:29:13
  do. I was writing articles, reviews,
• 1:29:15
  editing, researching proofreading Using Wordpress,
• 1:29:20
  creating SEO optimized articles, I was being very creative so
• 1:29:25
  that was something positive about it.
• 1:29:26
  And I was working from home, which was really cool that job
• 1:29:30
  ended quite prematurely. And then I got a job as a
• 1:29:33
  copywriter for a financial Trading Company and this job
• 1:29:39
  taught me so much. This company taught me a lot.
• 1:29:42
  I had bad experiences there, which I won't go into today, but
• 1:29:47
  I think I've covered Them in, in place possibly on my live stream
• 1:29:52
  before. But if you want to hear about
• 1:29:53
  them, let me know in the Q&A and I'll answer them maybe in a
• 1:29:57
  follow-up episode. But today, we're going to mostly
• 1:30:00
  just focus on the positives. And in this job, they taught me
• 1:30:04
  so much, they lie. They taught me about SEO.
• 1:30:07
  They I got to do email marketing, I got to write
• 1:30:10
  articles, I got to use a bunch of different programs, including
• 1:30:14
  our refs Google analytics, gyro Google Suite Slack.
• 1:30:18
  Offer Confluence and an internal CMS or content management system
• 1:30:24
  so that was a really good experience.
• 1:30:27
  One of the biggest parts of it was that I got to essentially
• 1:30:33
  manage article, auditor SEO article audit.
• 1:30:36
  So it's from my first time managing a full project myself
• 1:30:40
  and being responsible for all the different parts involved
• 1:30:42
  with it. And I was able to basically
• 1:30:45
  completely transform this section of this company's
• 1:30:47
  website. For the better and create a
• 1:30:49
  template for how future articles would be written.
• 1:30:53
  So I was really proud of that, still to this day, very proud of
• 1:30:56
  it, off the back of that work. I was able to get promotion with
• 1:30:58
  the same company and basically, I ended up finishing up by doing
• 1:31:03
  work where I was essentially creating statistical reports
• 1:31:08
  like analytics and insights, which would then be used to
• 1:31:14
  judge how we would do future projects, you know.
• 1:31:17
  So it would kind of I'm like, hey, this is what we should do
• 1:31:20
  moving forward. This is how we should tweak the
• 1:31:21
  content. This is what we should do.
• 1:31:23
  It was basically reviewing our content analyzing it and then
• 1:31:28
  informing the management team on how we should improve things and
• 1:31:31
  there was also like a and b into a B A and B testing involved in
• 1:31:35
  that in order to come to those assumptions.
• 1:31:38
  I also helped on a few projects for teams outside of my team
• 1:31:45
  because inevitably the longer you work in a company in the
• 1:31:47
  more jobs you You the more projects that you end up doing.
• 1:31:51
  So yeah, that's that was a big part of that learn a lot from
• 1:31:55
  their and to this day very grateful.
• 1:31:56
  So thank you very much for that experience.
• 1:31:58
  I got a lot from it. I then my final job in Estonia
• 1:32:02
  was working for manufacturing software company, it was a
• 1:32:07
  start-up and my job was completely different there.
• 1:32:11
  I was doing essentially like B2B sales and Outreach on paper.
• 1:32:18
  I was like a marketing guy but I was more doing right sales,
• 1:32:21
  Outreach and email Outreach. But I also got to do a
• 1:32:27
  manufacturing podcast for about 20 episodes got to record with a
• 1:32:31
  microphone funnily enough. The microphone that I have to
• 1:32:33
  this day so that's cool. I was involved heavily with the
• 1:32:39
  SEO stuff as far as like securing backlinks reviewing
• 1:32:42
  websites from the backend and suggesting websites that should
• 1:32:45
  be used for the future and targeted for the future.
• 1:32:49
  So, there was a lot of marketing involved as well, but mostly, I
• 1:32:52
  was facilitating Partnerships between businesses and potential
• 1:32:56
  influences or people have business interest that the
• 1:32:58
  company could work with. It's very short-lived position
• 1:33:01
  but it was good. And basically, since that point,
• 1:33:09
  I mean, I've been working for the past four months for
• 1:33:14
  actually, I've skipped a little bit.
• 1:33:16
  So basically, after that I was unemployed officially for about
• 1:33:19
  a year and a half, which is an Asterix meant.
• 1:33:22
  I remember, I mentioned at the beginning of this that there was
• 1:33:24
  like an ash tricks on this experience, this 10 years of
• 1:33:29
  work experience because I wasn't really sure if it counts.
• 1:33:32
  But here's the thing while I was unemployed, Never stopped
• 1:33:37
  working during that time or applying for jobs and actually
• 1:33:40
  I've been doing freelance marketing since 2018.
• 1:33:44
  So I was actually creating articles and working during that
• 1:33:47
  time but it unfortunately, it wasn't frequent enough to fully
• 1:33:53
  declare myself, a self-employed. It would be like an article once
• 1:33:55
  every four months. So I would kind of was employed
• 1:34:00
  and I wasn't employed at that makes sense.
• 1:34:04
  And then after about a year and a half of being unemployed void,
• 1:34:06
  I got my current job which I work as a freelancer for a
• 1:34:12
  medical health startup company and I've done a mixture of
• 1:34:17
  telephone sales, Outreach and recruitment.
• 1:34:21
  I'm doing a lot of recruitment right now and just kind of like
• 1:34:25
  idea generation like throwing ideas their way and they kind of
• 1:34:29
  just throw me a lot of different challenges and I run with them
• 1:34:32
  and make them happen. I've also help them with some of
• 1:34:35
  the medical services they are. Fur.
• 1:34:37
  So I've been a bit, it's been a job.
• 1:34:40
  Kind of similar to the marketing jobs I've had before where it
• 1:34:43
  starts as one thing and grows into a bunch of other things,
• 1:34:47
  but it's a really good opportunity.
• 1:34:48
  And I've really enjoyed it so far.
• 1:34:50
  And I love the people I work with, and I love the product,
• 1:34:53
  and I'm not just saying that, because I work there, I really
• 1:34:56
  do mean, it's been a lot of fun, and I've really enjoyed my time
• 1:34:59
  there. Also, of course, I do the
• 1:35:02
  podcast. I do, you know, acting music
• 1:35:06
  content, creating a bunch of other things that I'm slowly
• 1:35:09
  building towards getting money for.
• 1:35:10
  But not quite just yet yet and crack.
• 1:35:15
  It have I if I covered everything I suppose my
• 1:35:18
  self-employed work that I said, I'd I've done since 2018.
• 1:35:23
  So if anyone wants to employ me on that, I offer copywriting
• 1:35:27
  content writing services for a decent fee.
• 1:35:31
  It's negotiable and I've been doing that in a freelance basis
• 1:35:34
  since 2018, And I really love doing that and yeah that's
• 1:35:41
  that's kind of my 10 years of work experience, plus all the
• 1:35:45
  jobs I've had. So I hope you've enjoyed this
• 1:35:47
  episodes as much as I've enjoyed it.
• 1:35:49
  And as I say, if we want to do a follow-up episode and you have
• 1:35:53
  questions, please fro them. My way, send them my way and
• 1:35:56
  I'll do a follow-up episodes to this.
• 1:35:59
  And thank you very much for listening for watching the
• 1:36:02
  Christian Reef podcast be safe, be well.
• 1:36:06
  And I'll see you in the next one.