In 2008 I lost my job and went into a fuel terminal as a relief hand, covering people’s holidays. I knew nothing about densities, volumes or metric tonnes: whatever they told me, I copied and did.
I came from another trade. I’d studied interactive systems and I’d done web design and development at an internet agency in Berlin: I wrote those pages myself, in PHP. I wasn’t a programmer by trade, but code was never foreign to me, and that explains a fair bit of what came later. The last thing before the terminal was working as a designer for a training academy for the unemployed.
There was no bridge from that to this. My job became writing numbers on paper and converting them by hand, with a book of tables next to me, and at no point did anyone explain why they mattered so much.
That’s where I met what would be my enemy for the next twenty years, though I still didn’t know what to call it. Monkey work: tasks you could train a monkey to do, repeated shift after shift by qualified people. And it’s exactly where the mistakes get in, not through ignorance but through repetition and tiredness.
In those first months I made some pretty bad mistakes, the kind that make you think you’re not cut out for it. But I’ve got one thing going for me: once I’m in, I don’t back out.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do, which is what I still do today: watch, learn, copy and hold on, and only once you’ve mastered it, simplify.
The door that looked like the right one
Holding on wasn’t giving up. I wanted to get back to what was mine, and during those watches I started a master’s in online marketing at Online Business School.
So when an agency renting villas to tourists through online sales channels turned up in 2012, I saw it clear as day: there was my chance to pick my passion back up. I left the terminal while they were offering me a permanent place.
The reality was rather different. What they wanted me for was to be an agent: meet the tourists, handle the day-to-day, and little or no online marketing.
The agency wasn’t an agency either. It was a cash and carry supplying hotels which, on seeing how much the agency running their villas was raking in, had decided to set the business up itself. That’s what they wanted someone with online marketing knowledge for: that, and meeting tourists.
The owner had seen what the other one was billing and reckoned there was nothing to it. That was the entire business plan.
Part of the pay came by the short route. It wasn’t just me either: on one fixed day of every month a queue formed in front of my desk, and the whole workforce went through it.
It lasted months. When I saw the whole thing was a joke I left, and on my way out I offered to run their marketing and online ranking as an outside freelancer. They never replied, which was a blessing.
That’s when I realised the mistake I’d made in leaving industry.
Going round in circles
The next thing I tried was working for myself letting out apartments: taking other owners’ units and putting them online in exchange for commission. Through the family I had contacts who might have let me run theirs.
Nothing came of it. And the reason has served me as a compass ever since: I’m pretty bad at winning people over and negotiating, and no amount of willingness fixes that.
A friend who is good at it offered to let me help manage his, and I did that for a few months. The same thing as the villa agency all over again, but with a friend, close to home and earning considerably less.
I took it as training for setting something up later on, but I never put a single thing from that online marketing master’s into practice.
The hotel
Another friend, who worked on reception in Maspalomas, told me he’d heard another chain was looking for cover staff on reception. He couldn’t even remember which one. He gave me a number and I called: it was the Riu Palace Maspalomas.
That same afternoon the hotel manager called me in. We talked for a while in several languages and, with no background in the sector and no experience at all, he gave me the job.
Once I started I understood why. Tourism was benefiting from the wreckage of the financial crisis: they’d hired a stack of receptionists from sectors like banking, with languages and with degrees.
And there I ran into an old acquaintance again: monkeywork.
What the tourists consumed came as slips with the customer’s signature and the room number written in biro by whichever waiter was on, so depending on the stress and the angle the number came out however it came out. We entered them into the system by hand, one by one, and then sorted them into folders by room. With that system it was inevitable that someone would get charged for something they hadn’t had, and I don’t even remember how many it must have happened to.
And here, for the first time, there was nothing I could do. It was a closed system, imposed from the top down, that could only change with investment and by replacing the whole process with a digital one. All I know is how much I hated that task.
I was there about four months. Guests would come over for a chat and they spotted it straight away: not because I did it badly, but because they’d tell me “you can tell this receptionist thing isn’t for you.” I’d tell them my story, and more than one said goodbye with “I hope I don’t see you here next year.”
The call
One day a headhunter called me, looking for people for a fuel terminal that was about to open. It was Oryx.
I was going back to industry, and going back in while everything was still to be done. I came in as shift supervisor, the job I’d already done for several years at Shell and at Aegean.
The other shift supervisors were better qualified than me, but they had no experience in the role, so my judgement carried a lot of weight. Shortly after operations started they put me forward for operations coordinator.
I’d stopped looking for a job that would let me create, and I’d started creating inside the job I had.