Please Sir, May I have a job?

Listen to this while reading: Imagine Dragons - Radioactive

So I got a job.  In America.  In fact, at Mammoth Lakes ski resort.  Now there’s something I never thought I would say!

Now I personally think this story is quite interesting.  One of those intriguing mysteries of life.  I will never truly understand all the events that led me to this moment, but I am grateful nonetheless.

It starts, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, when my sister and I decided to arrive late into San Francisco after driving up the coast from Cayucos, California.  This started off a chain of events where by we got off the Bart Train at Powell Street, tired and weary from a very long drive day.  We carried our very heavy backpacks (we’ve been on the road now for a month) around central San Francisco searching for our hostel.  By the time we had checked in and set our copious amounts of baggage down, it was nearing 11pm.  Hence, in order to simply fill our stomachs, we decided to head directly across the road from Orange Village Hostel to Jasper’s Corner Tap & Kitchen for dinner.

After tucking into a delicious meal of polenta, mac n cheese and tomato salad we got chatting to our server, Jack.  He had recently moved to San Francisco to live with his girlfriend and had found it tough to find a flat for his girlfriend and himself, and a job.  He mentioned they were still looking for a place to live, and it had taken him about 3 months to secure the position he was in at Jasper’s.

After chatting for sometime, he mentioned that a great job, one he would do if he could live anywhere else, was working in a ski resort.  I had never considered working in a ski resort previously, mainly because of the unbearably cold weather and because I’ve only ever snowboarded a handful of times.  Over the next few days, as the thought sunk in and as I struggled to find anything remotely intriguing on a multitude of job search websites, I began to consider the option more seriously.  After doing a bit of research online and seeing what great things other people had said about their time working in a ski resort, I began to like the idea more and more.

I applied at resorts in California and Colorado, and had decent responses on both fronts.  California’s location was a draw card, and when it came down to it, I focussed my search mainly on Tahoe and Mammoth based jobs.  I guess, the rest, as they say, is history, because I took a phone call on Friday from Michael at Mammoth Mountain offering me a position at The Village Lodge.

I like to think that even though times sounded tough on Jack, he was somehow working at Jasper’s that night as a blessing to me, in order to point me in the right direction.  It makes you wonder what kind of impact anything you do makes on someone else, whether you’re fully aware of it or not.  I guess everything we do in our day to day lives is bringing us closer to the next stepping stone, whether it’s a large stone such as a job, or a small one, such as where to eat dinner.