Settling in in Melbourne Diaries

A fortnight into my new job, I’m taking stock. The level of professionalism is lower than my previous job, but there are some good and friendly people in my immediate work area, and I feel like I’m settling in. The age range is older than the previous place, with many ethnic staff, including a young Spanish woman with an accent so strong it borders on parody, and several women with Indian accents that are difficult to understand at all. There are also tremendous gaps in legal knowledge between different staff members. However, it’s a new start, and the legal work is primarily IT-related (including cloud computing activities) and at a high commercial level (e.g., negotiations with Amazon, Microsoft and Google). I can’t see me being here for more than 2-3 years, but when I leave it’ll be in a boom field. It’s hard for me to evaluate my career at this time. On the one hand I have many regrets: the somewhat wasted extra years at university, the lack of any promotions in my previous job (not that any were ever available), and the feeling that I could’ve advanced more quickly if I had started in the private sector. But if I’ll never be rich, I’ll never be poor either, and try to tell myself that if I have this job for the remainder of my life, it will not be a terrible outcome.

The location I work in is in an older part of the CBD, just next to Chinatown, and I have a view over the North of the city from the 35th floor. The area’s sensational for its food. In fact, there are six sushi stores within a twenty metre walk of the office block, and cuisines of every imaginable type (spotted a Uyghur restaurant last week). I love the wandering families from other nations and hearing different languages on each street corner. There are also specialist book stores, cinemas, dozens of hotels (from luxury skyscrapers to dank hostels), numerous cafés (Melbourne usually invariably appears in the global lists of ‘best coffee cities’ – in fact, I just randomly checked 3 sites and Melbourne was in all of them) and several music venues. Canberra’s entire attractions would fit easily into one city block here. I’m glad I was able to stay here.

I’m also paid slightly more than before and have got $9,500 coming in as a result of unpaid leave. Theoretically, this sets me up to buy a house in Melbourne, but a rough scan of the property websites this morning was very depressing, with house prices continue to skyrocket, faster than any conceivable increase to my salary over the next few years. Yet I am someone with higher than average income and little expenses. Housing in any inner city location is simply unaffordable if for so many if you have no parental or other support. But I’m reluctant to move to some outer suburban location, worried that I’ll decay like my parents did. Not being married has been a shithouse move financially (and being single in your upper 30s is no fun); though being a divorced dad would have been a hell of a lot worse.

Some bad news is a series of further injuries to my poor, forever aching legs, preventing me from running again tonight. Nothing major hopefully, but I should be seeing a doctor about this.