Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

So, does everyone remember how I moved to a foreign country kind of on a whim? And got a work visa through the one (1) agency that can get work visas for Americans to New Zealand, and they promised they’d help me get a job - in fact, required me to pay them to get me a job offer?

Well, if you don’t remember any of that, it happened.

So, while in Israel with Mikeleh, they sent me a newsletter about COOL JOBS IN NEW ZEALAND!!!1! One of these jobs was working in a grocery store in a town called Franz Josef, which is the tourist town that services the glacier of the same name. (In Maori, it’s called “Tears of the Avalance Girl.” People here are always saying things like “the Maori name of this fish is Keuha. That means ‘Daughter of the Laughing God who Bore Her Husband Fine Warrior Sons.’ No, it doesn’t. Maori needs seven words to say ‘SMOKING KILLS,’ and you want me to believe that they can compress an entire geneology into three short syllables?)

Anyway, I really wanted this job because I’ve studied a lot of Austro-Hungarian history, because I have a fetishistic love of supermarkets (so much food! such orderly rows!), and because of the phrase “Population 900.” A town so small, and so far from other towns, that 4,000-person-strong Hokatika is “town” and Greymouth’s 19,000 souls make it nigh unto a metropolis. I could finally achieve my dream of having my blood alcohol level achieve the population density of a jurisdiction I lived in! So what if the jurisdiction is “Diocese of Christchurch” or “Westland Fire Brigade,” I’ve still won! So, salivating at the probpect of the Habsburg - stacks of canned goods - misanthropy hat trick, I emailed the people back and asked how to get the job.

At least four times.

Bupkes.

So I thinks, “well, I’ll go to New Zealand, and then they’ll help me.” So I go to New Zealand, I meet the “Job Lady,” I am startled by her back hair (I don’t care how blonde it is, do something about it, you’re otherwise a pretty girl but on the borderline of turning into a golden tamarind) and she says I should send her a resume. So I do.

…

“I think I put my phone number down wrong on that resume I sent you; would you please check it?”

…

“So, uh, any jobs?”

…

Three weeks go by, I find my own job washing dishes at a “Mexican” “cantina” in Wellington, freak out that it doesn’t pay enough to live on (it didn’t), sleep with a co-worker, and run to the South Island because I don’t think I’m going to get to see any of the country because I will run out of money and have to go back and live with Dad and Anne Boleyn. Meanwhile, I start getting emails from Martijn-with-a-j about “SUMMER JOBS IN THE USA!!!!”

I’ve had a summer job in the USA. It was boring. I lived with my father and his common-law wife that has anger management problems.

I write him back and ask about jobs in New Zealand. This bitch then has the gall to write me back and tell me that they “only arrange overseas jobs for New Zealanders, but if I make any friends who want to go to the USA or Canada, to refer them.”

So I wrote back saying essentially “Fuck you, Martijn, and your little Dutch spelling quirks, too,” my email gets forwarded all over, I get “concerned” replies from the broads in the office, and then Golden Tamarind emails me back, says it’s my fault for not emailing her my resume as an attachment (which I did), and gives me a list of jobs washing dishes that I can apply for.

Well, I know how to get a dishwashing job. I got one. They loved me, they just didn’t pay me enough to pay rent and eat both and, silly little thing that I am, I didn’t want to try to live on native ferns I grazed on at the park.

So, uh… does anyone have a job opening in Wellington?

Bueller?