The Craziest Boss I Will Ever Work For

A New Year and another new job for me, this time for a lawn mowing/hedge trimming business. I had met some great characters in my previous four jobs, but nothing that compared to the eccentricity of my new boss:

- He could talk the hind legs off a donkey, and then back on again. His chatter is relentless - to me, to customers, to friends, to strangers, and even, on occasion, himself.

- If he had a swear jar, it would need to be the size of the Millenium Dome. The man has an acid tongue. The F word is easily his most used word, despite the fact that he ends almost every sentence with "ya know what I mean?"

- After a few hours with him I felt like I knew his entire life story. Bought a horse at 12 without his parents knowing, left school at 14 to work at a butchers. Details were not spared either and if I were to go on Mastermind I would consider choosing his now sold butcher business as my specialist subject (locations: 3, employees: 24, best butcher in Sutherlandshire: him).

- He is strongly opinionated on everything, from IKEA (hates) to fish (loves).

- His trusty Toyota has clocked up almost 500,000 miles.

- His husky travels around with him in the van and at one point I fed it coffee.
And at first I found him insufferable. I was bombarded with more instructions than anyone could remember, all very specific.  Then when I got something wrong he was snappy and rude. This didn't make my job easy, neither did his demands to work at a very rapid pace. My first lawn was mowed shoddily and slowly and I wanted the day to end as soon as possible.

However, I soon discovered there was a reason that he was so specific with his methods: they worked. Using as much of his advice as I could recall, my second lawn was cut excellently and quickly. We soon became quite a duo - him with the whipper, me with the mower - we worked well together and flew through the jobs. I liked the work rate and my boss liked my energy, speedy learning, and attitude in general and had gone from "you ****ing idiot" to "it's been ****ing great working with you mate!". My tone had changed too. Once I got used to his ways I grew to like him. He is mad as a hatter, but provides pure entertainment in the van and is actually quite friendly and seems to be very popular around the region. On the face of it, the two of us could hardly of been more different, but we agreed on many topics such as hard work and healthy eating. I worked for him Thursday and Saturday (doing another house removal in between) and will be back for another wild ride on Monday.

There were two aspects of my labour days that had become very satisfying. Firstly, I was taking to new tasks like lawn mowing quicker and using skills learned from previous jobs in new ones. For instance, my experience of handling the two wheel trolley while moving furniture enabled me to shift crates and kegs so effectively ay the festival. Secondly, and this especially pleased me, characteristics developed from all the training I have done for tennis and later for no reason were helping me succeed and employers were now consistently asking me back to do more work. My strength, stamina, intensity, energy, and focus were being translated into hard, fast cash. Well, cash anyway.

***
Friday night I went to a show at a small venue in nearby suburb Miranda. After three decent support bands, headline act Jinja Safari took to the stage and played an incredibly fun set. I knew nothing about the band - one hour before the show a German buddy asked me if I wanted to accompany him as he had been given a couple of free tickets by a colleague, and I saw no reason not to say yes. I can't begin to describe the sound of Jinja Safari's music (according to Wikipedia a possible genre for them is 'forest rock' - what is that???), so you'll just have to listen to the song below. What I can tell you is that they were wildly creative, had everyone dancing - even on the stage during the last song - and deployed a multitude of different instruments with devastating effect, including the sitar!

Lastly, massive congratulations to my sister Charlotte and her boyfriend Ed on their engagement! The good news travelled from La Palma, Canary Islands to Cronulla, Australia and made me very happy indeed.