Working Holiday...on Ice!
On fiascos, leadership, and whānau
One of my favorite podcast episodes of all-time is a This American Life segment called “Fiasco!” It chronicles the timeless story of an ambitious small-town theatre production of Peter Pan that devolves into chaos. If you’re looking for 20 minutes of audio that will make you laugh until you cry, I highly recommend a listen. One of the main takeaways from the show is that what makes a fiasco a fiasco is when the people involved/witnesses are no longer forgiving or rooting for success. In fact, a new set of social rules emerges, and people are often entertained by just how dramatically it can fail. Which brings us to…our ice rink jobs.
We showed up to our training on the 4th of July, which in New Zealand is just a random day. Everything seemed innocuous enough. They were still finalizing setup, but that’s to be expected for a pop-up the night before opening day. The first sign of what was to come was when, during rollcall, they asked Chris, “do you even work here? If not, you’re hired.” About five minutes into the training, two of our new coworkers learned at the same time as we did that they would be the shift managers. When we arrived to our first shift the next day, the ice slide refrigerator was already broken, and we were directed to shovel fake snow or pour store-bought ice cubes to revive it. Someone also ran over the frozen hose, which exploded, flooding the grassy field around the rink when it thawed. By 10:45 PM, as I huddled by the weakest little space heater, Chris was pouring buckets of water onto the ice rink. Our shift manager was running around trying to find his lost phone, his only method of contacting the actual manager for help. The next day, the actual managers announced they were going back to Auckland. When I asked when they were coming back, they said “maybe next week?” Reader, they would not be back. Not that they were much help when they were there! One of them disappeared for an hour during the ice slide fiasco to get a haircut, and the other one was 17. After leaving, they would simply never respond to our texts asking when we should show up to work next. I realized that they were leaving essentially four backpackers, some high schoolers, and a few locals to figure it out on our own.
Anyone who has spent any time at an ice rink will know that you have to resurface it regularly, ideally using a machine called a Zamboni. Of course, our shift managers had not been properly trained on how to use one. Instead of serving as the efficient riding lawnmower of ice rinks, the Zamboni would just push around piles of snow that we would have to sift from the blades with our hands, shovel into a bucket, and dump in the grass outside the rink. During this time, 40-50 kids and parents would be lined up at the edge of the rink, closely watching and impatiently waiting. With Sia’s “Unstoppable” playing just a little too loudly in the background, I felt like Vanna White as kids literally cheered each time we got one bucket of snow closer to reopening the rink. Eventually, all this improper resurfacing caught up to us. One night, I picked up a slaphappy Chris from a late-night shift who said, “I can’t believe this sentence makes sense, but Wolverine showed up to help out, and there’s a hole in the ice.” (Who is Wolverine? Probably the most wholesome part of the job, a local skating whiz offered to help out new skaters in his free time. He also cosplays as Wolverine, though unfortunately for the cinematic value of this tale, not while at the rink.)
But the true fiasco was the cursed ice slide. Huge kudos goes out to Chris for not only spending hours pushing kids and adults down the slide, but getting genuine, daily compliments on his upbeat narration. I cannot say the same for myself. When I tried to come up with my own witty banter to amp up new riders, I caught myself mid-sentence from saying “everyone remembers their first time!” On our last shift, Chris came to relieve me from ice slide duty, and a kid literally yelled “yay! A new person!” Without Chris, this ice slide would have been exposed for what it was: a pathetically small mound of grass, a thin sheet of plastic, ice that began to melt around midday, and questionable reinforcements. For the first week, if anyone older than eight went down the slide, it would send the blow-up barrier flying, and the attendant would have to keep running back and forth to try to hold it down. Our shift manager frantically attempted to pound back in the stakes every twenty minutes, giving Sisyphus himself a run for his money. On the worst day, a 10-foot metal pole fell from the tent ceiling onto the ice slide, narrowly avoiding impaling two sliders. We closed the slide for maintenance constantly, leading parents to complain. While I maintained my professional smile and said the slide would be open shortly, I’m certain my head was doing that thing where you are twitching and shaking your head no.
This ice rink job has definitely been a “type two” travel memory. One that has *not* been fun during it, but will probably age well into the silly experience we envisioned it as all along. For now, I am so glad I never have to put my bare hand into another hot, steamy skate, return it to the Jenga-like shoe structure, and narrowly dodge concussions once the wrong skate is pulled from the tower.
With great responsibility comes … great responsibility?
There was a moment on our first day that I genuinely thought to myself that this is about the level of resources that a pop-up ice rink deserves. Greater efforts should be devoted to more important societal goals. But that was before people started getting hurt, and I learned that the company had not provided first aid training to our managers. There were moments that I felt truly angry at being put in a position of apologizing for issues I had no way of solving to reasonably upset customers who were just trying to have a fun family outing. I felt especially bad for our shift manager, who was a good-humored, well-meaning guy. Management had clearly put him in a terrible position, as he had been given no training, resources, or tools. He told me on the first day that he wished I had been given the management position alongside him. As someone who was being paid minimum wage to perform the work of 2.5 understaffed roles, I kind of agreed. Had it been offered to me, I probably would have taken it for the slight pay bump! Now, having lived through the whole fiasco, I am so glad this option never presented itself.
I have always had a degree of skepticism when people talk about leadership. Not because I don’t think it’s important – quite the opposite! As I wrote about in a previous post, poor leadership and bad management limit the ability to develop a culture of trust, provide effective mentorship, and achieve the mission of an organization. While I’ve been lucky to have managers who have shown it’s possible to bridge the gap between talented specialists and great people leaders, there are millions of “accidental leaders” who fall into these roles, only for themselves and everyone around them to discover what different skills it demands. If anything, we probably need a greater focus on leadership development for organizations to truly be effective. But as a student and young professional, I often felt like leadership was talked about vaguely, and as something everyone should strive for no matter what. Maybe this is intended to be an inclusive, encouraging message for young people at a time in their lives where so many options and choices are still ahead of them. But it sometimes felt like people were encouraged to become leaders simply for the sake of being leaders, not because they had found a reason to lead or an environment where it made sense for them. Or worse, people were encouraged to pad their college applications or job resumes with leadership titles, no matter how relevant or legitimate. As an enthusiastic joiner (tell me your cause – I will be that one person who shows up to all your meetings!), I often found myself being asked to lead when I didn’t want to. Not because I didn’t see myself leading anything ever, but because I knew if I led in the wrong space, I would grow to resent the very thing I had so enjoyed being a part of.
Although this ice rink job was always just a means to make a little money for our travels, there is something about working a dead end job that makes you feel like you have no other options. As the days went on, I began to feel anxious about trading in strategic work for the mind-numbing task of lifting surprisingly heavy plastic frames over a barrier so we could overcharge kids who couldn’t skate to borrow them. I am reaching the point in my (normal) career where more and more of my peers are taking on formal leadership positions, and I am feeling vulnerable about stepping back at such a key time for those opportunities. While I have had personal growth and experiences in this recess year that I think are professionally relevant, it’s difficult at this stage to predict how much this year will practically “set me back” if I return to a similar field. On one hand, watching one little crisis after another at this ice rink had the effect of reminding me of my ambition – perhaps egotistically, I have to believe I could manage operations more effectively than the three raccoons in a trenchcoat in Auckland that seemed to be running the show here. But it also reminded me of my long-held sense of knowing the right context in which to lead. I’m grateful I was not the random lucky winner of the drawing to manage this fiasco. Sometimes with great responsibility just comes…great responsibility over something you want no part of. It has reminded me that I’m also grateful that I didn’t keep myself in a place in my (previous) career that I didn’t want to be just for the sake of possible advancement. I don’t know where I’ll be in my career in a year or in five years, but I hope I’ll be working somewhere that I can see leadership making sense for me.
Whānau!
The true highlight of our time in Taupō has definitely not been our ice rink jobs, but the family (whānau) we have been staying with! We literally just posted on a local Facebook group asking if someone would let us park our van in their driveway, and we got so much more than that! The family were all travellers themselves and had hosted backpackers previously, so no one seemed shocked when a few random Americans showed up one night in their van. We aspire to host like them one day, and see how it can make life so much richer!
Between speaking English and hanging out with other backpackers, sometimes we can forget we are living in the South Pacific. Living with a family in New Zealand for the first time since our WWOOFing experiences has definitely exposed us to more of those subtle and major things that differentiate Kiwi culture. They taught us more Kiwi slang and showed us a bunch of old, iconic commercials with classic Kiwi humor made for New Zealand’s equivalent of D.A.R.E. We watched an All Blacks rugby game, including their famous haka — a traditional Māori dance performed before every game. We ate delicious corn and mussel fritters on toast, dressed up with sweet chili sauce and sour cream like those from a local market.
The dad’s side of the family is also Māori. We were very honored that they invited us to visit their iwi’s (tribe’s) marae (meeting house). As outsiders visiting for the first time, we entered through the main gate with other visitors and were received with a short ritual. Because a family friend had recently passed away, we unexpectedly ended up attending a traditional multi-day funeral at the marae. In the family’s words, it was a good time to see the marae lively and full of people, rather than just empty like ones we’ve seen at museums. The morning of the main funeral service, we woke up early to head over and help prepare the food. It’s common for people who are less directly related to the deceased to help prepare the huge feast for everyone who has come into town to mourn. The meal included delicious hāngī-cooked meat and root vegetables! Rocks are heated up to several hundred degrees, then lowered into a pit in the ground with trays full of food to be cooked for a few hours. The flavor is smoky, but not quite like anything else we had ever tasted! We really appreciated seeing the communal aspect of the event preparations, as opposed to the more commercial experience of weddings and funerals that we are used to back home. Many hands really do make light work!
One of their final parting gifts to us was making sure we knew the correct pronunciation of the place we are headed next: Tiritiri Matangi! As previously mentioned, we are headed to the island eco-sanctuary to volunteer with the Department of Conservation. It feels like the perfect way to end the first half of this trip! We’ll bookend the six months with a few days back with our first WWOOFing hosts in Auckland before flying to Australia (!) for a few weeks! Lots more soon!