Corporate Journey
Every interest together with every skill learned is rooted in an epic tale. This is mine.
A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down
Every free-spirited project needs some form of organization. After School, I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do yet, but I was clear on what I didn't like. Staying on the farm with my parents would not be it, and my dad stayed in Bloemfontein at the time. In a desperate move to rekindle a relationship with him, I moved to my grandparents in Bloemfontein. Although my dad and I never fixed our relationship, I had to get a job at some point with my grandparents being pensioners and all.
At first, I found a hawker job, selling what they called "Reinhard" products. It was about selling low-quality and cheap products on the street. Out of desperation, we went into the township, I got stabbed in the back and my dear granddad told me it was the end of that bs job.
After a month or two, I started working at New Horizons. Trying to sell Microsoft Office training by calling at least 50 people per day, giving away the first lesson. I wasn't able to close any contracts, so they let me go after learning what I could, even an A+ computer technician course. At night, I was playing rugby for Old Greys rugby club's second team. Thinking back, this was the basis for understanding most new software basics and made it easy to learn new programs.
Thereafter, my hospitality journey began when I worked as a waiter at a Greek seafood restaurant called Musselcracker. The Greek culture was fascinating and I made a ton load of friends. It was an interesting time of my life. The same owner, I upgraded to being a barman at a nightclub called Sunset Cafe. At this point, I felt snug in the Greek community. Sunset Cafe closed, and the same owner opened Pharaohs, also a nightclub. Working here was great.
One evening, a respected Greek drank at my bar. He was softly spoken, but as I've become accustomed to, no Greek is soft. All of them are just, firm, and rule with a measure of fear. Or at least I felt that way. Anyway, Andreas invited me to work in his restaurant (New York Restaurant) the following morning as a bartender. The next shift at Pharaohs was a bit different. The door didn't open and we received a message that the Night Club had closed. Luckily, I already had a new job at the Restaurant, even if it was only part-time.
Needing to pay rent and eat more regularly, I applied and go a full-time job at a pub down the street from New York restaurant at a place called Characters. This was where I got introduced to the feared Italian culture when working for the Patrellas. It wasn't them that made me quit a few months later before I started working as a waiter at Golden Cloud Spur. In a short period, I progressed to being a cashier as well as a waiter and takeaway carrier. The hours were long and I always had money, but never had enough to buy something substantial.
I was lucky to land a full-time position at SBV Services. I started working in the coins department, delivering coins to banks in the Free State and Northern Cape region. After a while, I became a coin teller in the retail department from which I worked myself in the payroll department. This might sound confusing, but the bank's payroll department has no correlation with what the rest of the world thinks about payroll.
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I liked managing the department as I saw room for improvement. To implement the improvement, I enrolled myself in a Project Management course which I later asked the company to enroll me in a more advanced Project Management course. I was promoted to supervisor and excelled in Management courses.
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Running this department and doing kind of well financially, I wanted to return to my creative roots. In 2019, I enrolled in a Creative Writing course which gave me the hope to become a professional writer/ storyteller. A year later, the company restructured and retrenched employees. I volunteered to be retrenched as I didn't see myself in the future of the company. I wanted to launch a sports media company, something I feel passionate about.
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In the three years after SBV Services and during my studies, I found that I always was a storyteller. Now, I had to learn to get my imagination onto a format for other people to see, or more importantly, allow the storageies to materialize with written, visual and audio support.