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4.30am – Transfer day. Alarms are going off around me. It’s dark. Matt and Rio are getting up to cook breakfast for the departing guests. I pull on my smoky bar top and trousers then head upstairs to start hoovering, polishing and cleaning rubbish from rooms. The chalet guys are cleaning toilets, making beds and bagging up old laundry. I explain that ‘I’m really not feeling the love this morning.’ 9am. Every time I’ve cleaned rooms, whether during the week or on Transfer day I’ve followed everyone else’s lead and generally finished when all the rooms are done. I didn’t see why this morning should be any different. I’d asked around and everyone seemed to say the same thing, ‘Finish Rooms, going back to bed.’ I sat in the bar, a bit pissed off, chatting to Iain. “There was no need for me to get up this morning. Everyone had everything covered, we were finished by 9am for fucks sake.” Today, the bar was set for a sub-standard deep-clean because there’d be only one of us working on it, “I’m knackered, I’m going back to bed like everyone else.” 12.30pm - Transfer day. I wake up feeling groggy, not tired, something different, I think I might be coming down with something. After lunch, the head housekeeper dropped a memo into my lap telling me that as I’d gone to bed without being given permission to do so, thus resulting in extra work for all my colleagues (Who? They told me they were all going to bed?) I was to be rota’d on for staff breakfast cleanup for the whole week in compensation. I shouldn’t have even been up for that shift and now I have a detention because of it? I’m 25, I’m on my last big, long, fun trip before I settle into middle-age (or mortg-age as I call it) and I’m getting a detention??? What the fuck is going on here? I started thinking ‘I worked my arse off doing 60+ hour weeks all summer so I could come out here and have a great time.’ So far I’ve not really spent any of it on going out or on boarding because I’ve been working more 60 hour weeks out here. Do I want to carry on getting poxy detentions or should I quit, get a part time job in a bar or net café and get a flat for the next couple of months and be a proper snow-bum, spending all my time and energy on boarding? Am I suffering from mid-season blues? It’s a common symptom of long term travelling. I’ve seen it a bunch of other people and had it myself when I was mid-way through my world tour, backpacking in New Zealand. When you get to the mid-way point between being away from home and going back home, you tend to evaluate things. It’s probably similar to a mid-life crisis or the panic before people get married when they look at what’s ahead and think what they’ve already done, then think, should I have done more? And then buy a Corvette. I woke up the next day feeling groggier, and in an even worse mood to have to get up and tidy up the staff room and breakfast stuff. I didn’t go out because I felt rough and I had to work on reception from 1200-1600. As I sat down at the desk, I saw a note from the head housekeeper saying I had to fill out ‘Your room has been cleaned by’ sheets with the dates, room numbers and names for all 26 rooms (single and dual occupant) for the 25th, 26th, and 28th. As I sat there copying the details, something in me clicked, I thought ‘Fuck Val D’Isere. I have enough money in the bank to go home, walk into STA Travel and buy a ticket to pretty much anywhere in the world and live like a beach-bum, snow-bum, snorkel-bum, whatever I want for the next couple of months until I would’ve come home from here.’ Or do I want to stay here working my arse off, getting detention and now writing fucking lines! John, one the General assistants and guy who covers some of our bar hours on our days off told me she’d probably rip up the room tidying sheets when I finished just like teachers used to do with lines, years ago…. The next day I woke up with full on man-flu. Headache, ear ache, sore, inflamed throat, hot and cold fever. It stopped me from going out and checking out prices of flats and room rentals in town. By this time though, Jonny had heard about my strop and checked out our rota. He thought we were doing about 40hrs a week so cut a load of my hours down. It’s
taken me a few days to get over my man-flu but I’m pretty much better
now. Doing nothing for a few days has given me a chance to think, and
to get things in perspective. I think I’ll stick around for another
couple of weeks and see how it goes with my new cut down hours. We’ve
been promised snow this weekend, so I’m going to make sure I go out every day
next week and fall in love with snowboarding again. I feel like I’ve
had a rubbish couple of weeks, but maybe this mid-season low and illness-break
has given me a chance to ‘turn over a new leaf’ and concentrate
on boarding and having a good time. We’ll see...
...otherwise I may end up writing Snow506.com from some hot, sunny, beach in Australia! |
