I should be at work

Today is a very strange day.

Every Friday at this time for the last three years or so I've been at the administrators desk at the church, planning for the Sunday services, answering emails, and desperately trying to work my way through a seemingly endless to-do list. It's been a fabulous job, one with the chance to work closely with a small team of good friends, to meet and pray together regularly, and one that has tested my ability to multitask. I left it on Wednesday with lots of things left in an imperfect or incomplete state, but overall generally content with my efforts and generally satisfied with the tasks I've left for my successor.

I still have a couple of shifts left for the other job as a casual college porter. I've enjoyed the diversity of this job as well. It has long quiet periods that rarely have busywork, followed by short periods of thinking on one's feet and problem-solving, and has been a chance for be to clean up my rusty customer-service muscles and work together a team of people doing the same job -in contrast to the admin job where all my coworkers were in very different roles and I was left more or less to myself-.

As I look forward to the next chapter of our life in Southampton, I'm also thinking about what sort of job I want to do while I live there. Mrs. Owl will have a full-time job in the university, and while I don't have to work in the extreme short-term since we've done okay saving while in Oxford, I'll need to do something relatively quickly, both to stop myself from going mad and to have access to luxuries like the ability to travel home to Australia for the occasional holiday. Since I'm not particularly skilled up in any particular field, and probably not in it for the long haul since we're not in Southampton for more than a couple of years, I have the freedom to pick something that I think might be interesting to try for a while without having to worry too much about the long-term career prospects.

So once I get settled in I'm going to look for a job that does some of the following:

• Allows me to have regular interactions with the same people: that's something I've hugely enjoyed as part of being a porter, developing a relationship with people over a number of small interactions, just as a natural part of the job.
• Challenges me brain in a way that lets me take something home: I don't like just switching off when my shifts ends, I want something to think about when I'm lying awake.
• Let's me manage a small team: I've never really done this in a paid capacity and I'd just like to try my hand at it.
• Gets me out of a chair sometimes: I'm starting to feel the lack of exercise pretty severely but I can't stand working out.
• Keeps me learning: I just like having interesting things to talk about!

So if you can think of jobs that tick some of those boxes and that you think that I'd be good at given what you know about me, do drop me a line in the comments. You never know, it might be the prod in the right direction that I need to finally find a job that I want to do for the rest of my life.


For now, though, I find myself sitting in the college common room watching the cricket and making companionable small talk with people's elderly relatives instead of being at work. It's not a bad way to spend the day, but I wouldn't want to get to used to it.