How Peter Jackson cost me my job in New Zealand and other topics non-relevant to human existence.

“Are you crazy? You could have been killed.”, Lee said. She was like my mum, just without the nice bits. She yelled at me but then didn’t give me ice cream to make up for it. She judged me but then wasn’t proud of me ever – or at least I felt that way.
“I’m not going to let my employees be killed just because they are a couple of bloody battlers.”
Oh yeah, and she was Australian which made everything she said sound cute rather than the tone she was going for – in this case threatening.
“I’m being serious! This is no laughing matter! I will fire you if that’s what it takes to protect you from your own baboonery.”
What upset her so much, you ask? Good question. I will take you back in time and tell you the whole story, which eventually led to my dismissal from my first real job. But since it’s quite long, I’m not going to tell it to you all at once but rather piece by piece. Every week I’ll give you one more chunk of the story and believe you me, it’s worth hanging around for.

So how did I loose that job? And what kind of job was it to begin with? Well, lean back and enjoy hearing about my  misery, because if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past months, it is that there is no topic people like to read about more, than other peoples’ misery. Don’t feel bad about that, it’s human. Let’s dive right in:

So it all started back home in Germany when I watched “The Lord of the Rings”. What a great movie! And since it is basically a ten hour tourism commercial for New Zealand, I was dead set on flying over to Kiwi Island and exploring all the places where the movies had been filmed, overlooking vast landscapes Legolas had once overlooked and sitting on trees until they started carrying me around. Isn’t that a great idea? Well let me give you the answer: No!

Don’t get me wrong, New Zealand is a magnificent country and I didn’t regret spending one year of my life there at all, but to go there to check out LOTR places… Might be slightly disappointing. You might now expect the main issue to be, that the places weren’t as cool in reality as they seemed to be in the movies, or something like that. But that’s not the reason for my disappointment. The places looked great from afar but I couldn’t actually get close. It seemed like the entire movie series had been shot on private property.  Many places I couldn’t get into even if I was willing to pay money for it.

Some places on the other hand did take my money and a lot of it, too. How much? Let’s just say the prices weren’t as low as everything else in this place. Get it? No? Ok, what about this one: I wouldn’t have paid this much for a first, second and third breakfast combined. Still nothing? I just wish my wallet would have been as big as their feet but less hairy. I’m sure you know by now where my really bad puns (can you even call that puns) are going: I paid $50 to be chased through the masses of tourists in Hobbiton, by a tour guide so old, he could have been part of Elrond’s Council for all I know. When I saw a boy who was about as wide as he was short, sitting in a wheelbarrow for a picture, next to a pumpkin which looked alarmingly like him, I thought to myself that the Hobbits would have hated this. Strangers coming to their shire and taking pictures, talking, being noisy and annoying… That was not the Hobbit way of doing things and it wasn’t the Marius way either. My visit to Hobbiton did result in a couple of decent pictures, though:

Long story short: I didn’t purposely go to other LOTR places after this unfortunate incident, but I did see a few along the very long way still ahead of me. And since we received a complimentary drink at the Green Dragon, Hobbiton wasn’t such a waste of money after all.

All of this happened within the first week of having my new job, my first job, a job I would only have for a few more weeks… A job that had surprisingly much in common with Harry Potter, but more on that next week.

I feel like I drifted off topic a bit. Guys, I think I might do that occasionally while telling you this story, I hope you won’t mind.

See you next week and remember to be the weirdest you can possibly be.

PS: Weird people are cool and, by the way, my name is Marius, I’m a German communication major, bla bla bla… nobody cares about this stuff anyway. Cya!