Utter humiliation

I'm now back in Melbourne after we fled Mildura at the dead of night - completed one full (6 day!) week of fruit picking and promptly packed up and took the night bus back to civilisation! Ah, it wasn't that bad, I had an interesting and at times enjoyable week, and the countryside was beautiful. It felt VERY good not to have to pick grapes today though!!

The title of this post refers to tuesday night, when Peter, the manager of our hostel, came round with the work roster. Now, our hostel was in central Mildura but the farm where we worked was actually about 20kms away, across the border in New South Wales, so every day someone had to drive us there in the minivan. Annabel had done it up to that point, but she had been lucky enough to get transferred to one of the much-sought-after hourly-paid jobs, so Peter had put ME down to drive the next day. (I had foolishly admitted to having a driving license when asked at check-in).

I immediately told him there was no way I could do it. "I haven't driven since I passed my test 6 years ago, and that van is really weird, and I don't want to be responsible for driving everybody..." Peter pointed out that there was no one else on the job with a license and told me I would be fine. I demurred. He threw me the keys and said he'd take me for a drive round the block to get used to the vehicle.

On the way to the van, I psyched myself up. After all, I told myself, I do HAVE a license. Just because I haven't used it doesn't mean I'm not capable. It would be fine.

We climbed into the van, which, may I point out, was weird with the gear stick on the side of the steering wheel. To make things even easier, the gears were arranged as the mirror-image of the normal gear pattern: 1st gear was to the right of neutral, instead of left. I started the van. It jumped forward - not in neutral. OK, don't panic. I found neutral, checked all my mirrors, checked my blind spot, eased off the clutch and - yes! pulled out. Everything was going fine. I tried to find 2nd gear, failed, and somehow went into 4th. The engine sounded crazy. I tried again - still no 2nd. I slowed down, went back into first, then realised that a car was coming up behind and, obviously annoyed, was really close on my tail...I thought about indicating that I was pulling in but couldn't remember how to.

I think we'd driven about 5 metres down the road before Peter was yelling "Stop, stop, pull in, get out, you're not driving...I don't know what we're going to do but you are NOT driving."

He took me back home in silence. I walked into the hostel living room, tried to put a brave face on it ("Yep, I was right, I can't drive...") but collapsed in tears before the words were out of my mouth. It was not a good evening - this was pancake day, so once I'd recovered sufficiently I tried to make pancakes and couldn't manage that either - we were using a stupid hostel frying-pan with no handle and nasty home-brand instant pancake mix, and it just would not turn solid, but remained as squidgy dough in the bottom of the pan. This lead me to label myself as a failure as a human being.

Luckily we eventually discovered that there was a French guy on our job who also had a driving license, so he was given the job of driving us to work.

Aside from that trauma, things were good - there were some really nice people at our hostel, and we went out with them on wednesday night which made our last day of grape picking harder than it should have been - Mike spent the whole morning sleeping in the back of the van, and I spent the afternoon stretched out in the shade, asleep. We haven't been paid yet, but I'm not expecting much...you really realise the value of money when you can measure every dollar as "2 buckets, after tax". Grrr...