The search for work...and new flatmates...

Now that he was gone, Paul took the bed that Joel had been using but as he wasn’t there during the week, we all chipped in a bit of money so Frank wouldn’t give the bed to someone else. A Swedish girl called Sofia then moved into the small bedroom at the back. Yes, she was really good looking but she was seeing an aussie guy the whole time we were there so no, she wasn’t with anybody from the house.

Things were going well again, but there was still the problem of no job. Jimmy had run outta money completely so I was subsidizing him for a few weeks. The job then phoned us again and told us that there was another delay for another week. This was pretty bad but didn’t really give us enough time to find something else. We got one days work doing furniture removals. It was really hard. We were clearing a 2nd floor apartment in 35 degree heat. Then moving it to a first floor apartment on the other side. We nearly gave up half way through cos we were sweating so much. We got paid 120 for that days work so it was pretty good and tied us over for a few days.

Then Stephen arrived. This was another Irish guy who had decided to take the other bed in our room. He was 32 and he was a butcher. At first we just thought he was a bit quiet, but it turned out that he was just a bit strange. He used to sit in the living room with his portable DVD player with big head phones and watching Manga on it. He would laugh out loud from time to time while watching what to us looked like children’s films.

He had been living with us only a few days when Jay decided his snoring was too much. Jay had been in bed early as he was working and I hadn’t so I didn’t have to put up with it yet. It was unbelievably bad. I suffered it a few nights but there was absolutely no way you could sleep through it. Another night while we were all in the living room, Stephen had polished off a full bottle of Vodka while watching the cartoons on his DVD player. He was really pissed and then he changed the cartoons for Porno. While sitting at the dining table, he was pitching a tent in his pants. We were all feeling pretty uncomfortable about this so we decided we would move over to the table to play poker as this should make him stop. But it didn’t. He kept going and he was now gyrating in his chair, and saying things like “Yeah, stick it in there, give it to her good”. We were all laughing our heads off but still it was seriously weird.

So again, we decided it was eviction time in the house and it was Stephen’s turn to go. We sat him down the next day and told him that what he was doing that night was seriously wrong but that it was his snoring that we couldn’t stand and that he needed to find somewhere to live. He didn’t take it very well but after Paul had a drunken go at him, he decided he was going to leave. He found himself a one bed apartment about a week later and he moved out.

It was just in time too as Jason’s dad was arriving that week and we needed the bed for him. I had been working in BEAT for 2 weeks at that stage, well one weeks training. It was a call centre and I was only given four hour shifts which I wasn’t happy about so I was thinking of leaving the whole time I was there as I had been promised 40 hour weeks. The Melbourne festival was starting the following week and I wasn’t happy in the job so I packed it in and decided I wasn’t going to look for more work until after the races.