Bye Bye, you’re fired!

So, after working 4,5 weeks in Perth Hills at an orchard, we got sacked. It was very unexpected and also a very unkind way in which it happened. I, Line, have never been fired before, so it was a first-timer for me and definitely not how I imagined being fired would be like. It was shocking and very uncomfortable.

Our boss came straight at us when we were finishing up our first tea break, and started yelling out of nowhere that we were too fucking slow and that we weren’t appreciating our privileges (1 hour unpaid break).
I spoke calmly to him and said that it would have been nice, if he had come to us earlier and told us, that he thought we were being too slow, so that we had a chance to improve.
Also, we did not quite understand, why he thought we didn’t appreciate our privileges. When he came over, we had just taken our first break and we had done just above 20 minutes. Apparently, that was an abusing act from our side. He thought it was very important to split our 1 hour break accordingly into 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 15 minutes. In my head, it doesn’t seem like it matters how you split your 1 hour break, but to him it did. Instead of giving us a chance to make that better by making our next break 5 minutes shorter (as we were planning to anyways), that became our last break ever.

Yeah, so we were told to grab our stuff and get out of there, because he had had enough of us. Just to be clear, we barely saw or spoke to him during these 4,5 weeks. We were in charge of our own hours and could clock in/out when we wanted to as long as we did 40 hours a week. Usually, one of his permanent workers came around to see how we were going and this guy never said a word to us about being to slow or being poor workers.

What do we do from here?

Our first thought was “FUCK, what are we gonna do? We are already in so much pressure to finish our 88 days”. So at 9.30 am we drove home, half laughing/half in shock not really sure what to say or do. And as if it wasn’t enough to get fired, I got flashed by a speed camera 5 minutes later. Fucking hell. However, I actually called WA Police and they went through the photos from that day and I am not in any of them. Lucky me.

So, we went back to our campground that we were staying at, took the computer to the kitchen and started searching for jobs, calling heaps of people with no luck. Then I texted this woman on Facebook, that I had been in contact with earlier. She manages a blueberry farm and she had a job for us! It was not the most attractive job, since it is paid by piece, but we had no other choice. We just had to think about finishing our days. So we packed down all our stuff, went around the campground to say goodbye to all the lovely people we had met during our 1 month stay and left.

We had a 1,5 hour drive ahead of us and along the way we had a quick stop to get some fresh air. When we came back into the car, I had a voicemail on my phone. We listened to it and it was a woman calling from a company in the grain industry, that we had been waiting to hear from for weeks. She wanted to offer us a job starting the following day. We got super excited, because this would mean heaps of hours and hourly pay. So I called her back just 3 minutes after she had called, but unfortunately she said “I am so sorry, but I had to call someone else and they got the job”. How could this be true. Shit. Well, we still had a job waiting for us at the blueberry farm, so we got back on the road…

It seems everything happens for a reason

Just five minutes later I got another call. It was the lady from the company again! Paul picked up the phone and she was happy to inform us, that we could actually start the job anyways!! So we turned around and we were thrilled. How crazy is it, that we get fired and get offered two jobs in the same day. To me that’s destiny for sure.

Now we are living in a house for free, working around 50 hours a week, we get paid so well and we work with lots of cool and such nice people. We are very happy to be here and so much more motivated to work. Sure, our job at the orchard was a lot better than picking oranges in Mildura, but anyone must admit, that it gets a tiny bit boring doing such repetitive work as thinning or picking fruit trees.

Anyways, we are still casual in this new job that we have in the grain growing industry, and since this year’s harvest hasn’t been very good, the work is coming to an end. We still have another 3 weeks to go until we have finished our 88 days. So we are crossing fingers, arms and legs every single day that we get to stay in our current position for at least another 3 weeks. Otherwise we are fearing that it might be hard to find a new job in the weeks around Christmas and New Years. And as our visas run out in the first week of January, we have to work in these weeks. So there’s a lot of pressure on us right now.

So far everything has worked out really well for us though. So we keep on trying to believe, that we will make it. 🤞