"What were you doing in New Zealand?" An answer.
Andrew here.
The updates on this blog from here on out are going to be a little bit odd.
The thing is, the Fellowship has returned to the United States. Steph and I are back in Nebraska, the Good Life, and T has been in Minnesota (she'll return to Nebraska for a short stint next Monday).
So these posts from now on are going to be pulled from the Nostalgia File. It depresses me to think of it that way, but our New Zealand adventure is done and dusted, and there's no reason to avoid that fact.
Anyway, I can't speak for the other Frings, but I enjoyed our time on the North Island quite a bit more than our time on the South Island, though I loved both for entirely different reasons.
But living in Wellington, as I've said, was absolutely wonderful.
One of the things several people have been asking me, and I've been meaning to tell you, is what it was I did for work while we were in New Zealand. Since I no longer work there, I suppose there's no good reason why I shouldn't talk about it.
In Dunedin, I worked for the Accident Compensation Corporation.
I started out as a short-term temp, doing simple data entry. Thanks to my great attitude and exceptional work ethic, I eventually made it all the way up to the mail room.
Kind of.
It sounds unimpresive, but it was actually quite stressful. There was a limited amount of files and letters we received every day (our unit technically took all physical files and scanned them into the online database we used across the company, as well as doing the same with e-mailed files), and we were very competetive about getting our daily number of uploads pushed up as high as we could (if you didn't meet your KPI, you'd be let go, which actually happened once while I was in the unit).
So yeah, every day I busted my ass harder than I probably needed to, but it resulted in me being at the top of our daily standings on most days.
My unit was made up of about two dozen people, and I dominated those guys. It wasn't even close.
I'm kidding. It was a repetetive, yet challenging, job, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Before I move on, let me tell you a bit about the ACC right quick. Please don't fall asleep.
If you're in New Zealand (resident, tourist or otherwise) and find yourself injured in an accident, there's a law that makes it so that your rehabiliation and medicine and physio and everything related to the accident is paid for by the government, SO LONG AS you're willing to admit it was an accident and not blame any other party for it.
So you can't sue a guy if he accidentally runs a red light and pastes your car, but then you can have your medical bills paid for in full.
It's amazing. Sure, people still complain about it (one of the biggest concerns in the corporation is this idea of having a privacy breach, leaking somebody's sensitive or personal information to the wrong party or to the public in general), so I kind of kept the fact that I worked there to myself (plus, it's more professional to just not mention stuff about your job).
The few times where I would mention I worked for ACC to other Kiwis, they could barely hold back their bile.
I'd respond by inviting them to come to the United States and go through our health system to see how it's different. That usually shut them right up.
After we moved from Dunedin, after our adventure around the South Island, once we resettled in Wellington, I ran into a wall and couldn't find a job for about a month. It was stressful, I dipped into my savings, and it was a huge strain on my relationship with Steph.
But I kept at it, and I eventually found a job with... ACC!
In December of last year, I was hired on as a Claims Administrator in the Sensitive Claims Unit of the Accident Compensation Corporation, and, for the first time in my adult life, I felt as if I was doing something worth a damn.
Let me tell you a thing or two about the SCU at ACC.
If you're living in New Zealand, and you're a victim of sexual assault (and, yes, I use the term “victim” rather than “survivor,” because if you remove the victim status, you're indirectly taking away the nature of the incident as a CRIME, which it very much is), but if you're the victim of a sexual assault, ACC's Sensitive Claims Unit works with you to get your counselling and recovery process fully paid for, down to paying for your petrol to-and-from therapy.
Again, it's amazing.
My actual job may not have been the most glamorous one in the world, but the greater picture made me feel like I was contributing, in my own small way, to making this rock a better one to live on.
The team I was a part of within the unit was made up of me and three girls (roughly the same age as me), and we basically tried to lighten the load for the guys one rung up on the ladder from us.
It was a cool team, as two of us were American, one of the girls was from the UK, and the fourth was from Auckland. I think we were probably the most international team in the unit.
I never really connected with the American or the Kiwi, but the girl from the UK and I became pretty solid friends, I reckon. She's a traveler, and her updates on FB of where in the world she is now are making me insanely jealous every day I see them.
But yeah, she had a pretty negatively skewed idea of what us Americans are like, and I like to think that I helped make us look a little bit better, in her eyes at least, if in nobody else's.
While I felt like I really hit my stride both professionally and creatively in Wellington, I should give you guys full disclosure and admit that I'm at an age where it's incredibly tough to make new friends, and my time in New Zealand was mostly spent by myself (Steph and I had conflicting schedules a lot of the time).
Aside from my co-workers, I really only connected with two or three other people in the entire year we were there, and they were all in Wellington. One of our flatmates was a really cool guy who also shares a passion for movies, so we got to be pretty close, and he brought me around to some of his friends and a few parties, but otherwise, I stayed at home, wrote a lot, and spent most of my evenings reading or watching movies.
This isn't complaining. It was absolutely perfect.
I grew to appreciate my alone time to the point where being home, around people, has been overwhelming. Don't get me wrong, I love my friends, and it's such a lovely treat to see them, and to see the progress they've all made over the past year and some months, but I love, love, love being alone.
Weird note to end it on, but there it is. Thanks for reading.















