New Job, New Apartment

About a month ago, I started a new job.  They're doing a big project in Geelong at the moment, and needed some extra hands to help out, so they asked me to come and help out.  I'm still waiting for them to figure out that they've hired a backpacker :-)

Anyway, this is what the commute looks like on a map:

As you can see, it's a bit of a drive.  Fortunately, there is transportation available from Melbourne.  Unfortunately, it took a good 45 minutes to get there from the house I was staying at, so I've found a new place to live, in Port Melbourne.  It's a nice, two-bedroom beachfront unit, with one heck of a view.  I just moved in yesterday.  It looks like this:

The living room (in case you were wondering)

The back patio, viewed from my bedroom

View from the balcony

View from the balcony

A little over a month ago marked my last day with my previous employer.  One of the conditions of my visa is that I can only work with the same company for up to 6 months.  That put me in a bit of a bind, financially speaking; I'd just bought the Patrol and I knew I wouldn't have enough money to do my next big road trip that I was planning in June.  That meant I needed to be employed for another three months.

It's hard to find contract work as a software developer for such a short term.  A lot of recruitment agencies won't even talk to you, and the few who are willing to work with your limitations can't really help you when all of their clients want someone for a minimum of 6 months.  I found one prospect at the beginning of March, but it fell through, after an absolutely heinous and grueling interview process which involved, among other things, a five-problem technical exam that took nearly 3 hours to complete.

I prayed and prayed to find something.  And then, ever so slowly, a realization began to dawn on me.  I realized that, all things being equal, I'm pretty doggone happy with the way things are going here.  Australia's a pretty big country; one year just isn't enough time to get the "real" Aussie experience.  I wanted to try to find a way to stay out here for longer.

About this time, as I had all but given up on finding a "real" job, I chanced upon a job listing on Seek.  I'd gone through so many different variations of my resume, trying to tailor it to each listing to make me stand out.  But it was 6:30 AM on my last day of work, and I didn't have time to change it, so I just fired off what I had.

Around 10AM, I received an email from the HR manager, which simply read:

Hi Steve,

Thanks for sending your details through to us. I would be very interested in having a phone conversation with you at your earliest convenience.

My number [redacted]

Kind Regards

I was completely floored.  I called the number and spoke with him, and he set me up a phone interview for Monday afternoon.

I must have done well in the interview, because they invited me out for drinks on Friday, to meet with the folks from the Melbourne office and two other new hires.  I must have done well at that, too, because they didn't call me over the weekend and tell me the deal was off.

So, now that I had my employment all sorted out, I decided it was time to start looking for a place to live, a little closer to where I'd be working.  Taking public transport from that house to my new job meant leaving at 6:30 AM and geting home somewhere close to 8:00 PM.  No.  Just... no.

Finding a decent place to live in the city for the short term can be surprisingly difficult, if you limit yourself to a furnished room and you're not prepared to pay through the roof.  As with employers, most house/apartment shares expect a minimum 6-month stay, especially when you're taking over someone else's lease.  There are more opportunities for a 3-month term with a house share than with a job, but it's also far more competitive, and vacancies fill almost as soon as the listing goes up.

When you're looking for short-term accommodation, you also encounter a lot of places they couldn't pay you to stay at.  I found this especially true in St. Kilda, where I had the option of paying $140 per week to share a closet-sized room (that's room, not apartment) with a complete stranger, or $280 per week (and higher) for my own room in a place that was in worse condition than the old dorms at Tech.

I did consider a couple apartments in St. Kilda.  One would have been perfect, but I balked at the price, and by the time I made up my mind, someone had already beaten me to it.  Another was alright, but the place I ended up moving into was nicer and had a furnished room.  There was also a place in Middle Park, which was the cheapest (good) place I could find, but I wouldn't be able to move in until May.

The place I did end up getting was advertised on Gumtree (Australia's competitor to Craigslist).  I'd also been looking on Easy Roommate and Flatmate Finders, where my response rate (contacting someone about their listing and then receiving a reply from them) was less than 50%.  With Gumtree it was probably closer to around 80% (although pretty much all the "dumps" I looked at were listings I'd found on Gumtree).

I moved in on Saturday.  It was hard to leave my old place - lots of good memories and lots of good people to socialize with.  But this is something that had to be done.

As to the visa, I'm going to be working with my company's migration agent to try and get on something else.  Currently, I'm exploring the possibilities of a subclass 457 (Standard Business Sponsorship) or a subclass 189 (Skilled - Independent) visa.  I don't know how much longer I'd like to stay, exactly, just that I don't want to have to go home for good in July.  It's a big country, and there's a lot more I want to experience here.