The Night Shift

Being a hotel receptionist on a Friday night turned out to be quiet. I was apprehensive traipsing around streets with partying tourists, a champagne bottle broken open with shards pointing upward across a pedestrian crossing and alcoholic foam along the gutter. But the hotel itself was in a calm courtyard, a wispy light rain falling, and the clientele turned out to be eminently well behaved. A room costs over €100 per night, the front desk had tall pink orchids on it, and the lounge had a grand piano, comfortable sofas, and equally pristine laminate wood walls. My supervisor came out from a back office and shook hands, a spare man somewhat older than me in a leather vest, with an open manner and direct way of speaking with people that I liked at once. In the end I handed over room keys for two groups of guests, and showed a young English-speaking pair where to write their address when checking in, but otherwise I had practically no duties except to sit and pass the time. Which was a relief because I thought I'd need to handle abstruse and diva-esque guest requests or learn elaborate check-in or security procedures.

The guests, fellow employees, and a black-suited gentleman who was briskly striding around (the supervisor revealed discreetly afterward that he was the hotel owner), greeted the supervisor and me politely as they came and went through the lobby. Two women guests (one in a sparkling black blazer, if I recall correctly) paused to give my colleague the run-down on their evening in the revue at the Friedrichstadt Palast. After 11:30 p.m. very little went on except for security personnel coming in to chat or check in or out.

My colleague intermittently watched a German TV series about the cop beat in Mainz. The dramatis personae were e.g. a 16-year-old too drunk to go home by herself and her (per my first impression, repellent-sounding) parents unwilling to take the trouble to fetch her, a car driver who performed a suspicious manoeuvre and (when stopped) turned out to have no license, and a young man who dove into the Rhine River on a dare during a bachelor party but found that the current was too strong to swim across. I was sure that part of the dialogue must have been re-recorded in a studio after the original footage was filmed, because most of the criminal 'talent' had excellent diction and the sound quality was unimpeachable. The series was surprisingly didactic, and not in the 'don't do crime' way you'd expect. It instilled the impression that police work is not at all about handing down biblical judgments about right and wrong; instead it's about figuring out which part of the rule book to exercise in which situation, staying cool-headed, and applying compassion where it seems justified. The police officers also repeated that people who have mental health problems should seek help, because law enforcement might want to but can't fix their life situations. If the series itself is entirely ethical, however, I'm skeptical.

So on the one hand I also chatted a little with the co-worker, who revealed inter alia that he'd grown up in the GDR and that there usually aren't any security problems at the hotel except sometimes with a homeless person but that this was manageable. I skimmed the headlines of the Guardian, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, the New York Times, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, browsed the websites of The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books, and had brought along Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin — and enjoyed reading all that. Lettres de mon Moulin are really wonderful, engaging to read, original, and descriptive, even if from a non-French-native-speaker's perspective they contain a lot of vocabulary that I never expect to use again in my life. (One of my favourite sentences was, 'Day is the life of beings, but night is the life of things.' — I wrote that down because I liked it so much.) ...  On the other hand, I was also very much engrossed in the police show.

After 5 a.m. a cleaning lady arrived and began to get ready for her shift, eventually wheeling out the trolley in uniform with her supplies. So did another colleague who seemed to do more security-type work. The supervisor told me I could leave 30 minutes early, so I did, delighted that it was already light out but also aware of having huge circles under my eyes. (I hadn't napped the day before, which might have been a mistake, and was woken up by noise and a headache so that I didn't sleep in until noon as I'd planned. That said, it was still delightfully refreshing to be in a position for once to tell myself: No, no, don't go to sleep yet! You need to wake up late for work!) After arriving home and being greeted sleepily by Mama and Ge., who heard me from their rooms, I slept about 5 hours and afterward gradually returned to my essay writing.

A Plum Harvest and the Footnotes of an Essay

Tomorrow evening I have another student job lined up, which will be reception work at a Berlin hotel from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

When the acceptance notification appeared this afternoon, it was a happy surprise because I was still obsessing about budgeting ... and worrying because I had been rejected for the 4 previous mini-jobs that I'd applied to this week. It's also harder to schedule work because of the Kazantzakis essay that's still underway. (No thesis has emerged from the primordial swamp of my thoughts yet, but the body of the essay feels largely complete and now it's just a matter of inserting footnotes and verifying details.) But this afternoon it was also a relief when I double-checked the German law about mini-jobs: while it's true that there used to be a monthly limit of €538 on earnings from mini-jobs, this limit was raised as of January 2026 to €603. Which means that, as long as I can book the mini-jobs, my savings will not melt away as quickly.

Besides a student organization for Berlin's universities and trade schools offered a free online presentation by a tax accountant about how to register as a freelancer with the tax authorities, government pension fund, and health insurers. It was interesting to me because I've hoped at various times to be a freelance translator or copy-editor, tutor, or journalist. That said, at least presently, given the qualifications that I (don't) have in all of these professions, I am certain I couldn't earn enough by freelancing to cover the costs of insurance. So it's nice-to-know but perhaps not immediately applicable knowledge.

*

Inspired by the sunshine after a cloudy Wednesday, I cycled to the allotment gardens this afternoon. In a part of the gardens where free fruit is rarer, I unexpectedly spotted yellow mirabelle plums in two hanging baskets at a gate. Taking a few of them from the baskets, I saw that the gardener who rents the plot was crouching and working on her yard, so I told her thank you. To my delighted surprise, the gardener invited me in through her gate to harvest more of the plums from the ground. There was just too much, she said, so it makes sense to give the excess away — and she wished that politicians would learn that lesson too. We chatted while we gathered the fruit — she was disappointed that I didn't take more, but I felt it would be greedy, and she said that making vinegar from the plums is quite successful once one has the 'mother.' Finally she invited me back, once I find more recipes for the plums.

In a narrower lane I also came across a basket with early pear quinces that had likely been culled from the tree so that the branches wouldn't become too heavy, and two damson plums that had dropped from their tree to the side of the path.

It was especially welcome to find this much fruit, because the past few times I've gone to the gardens I've come home (nearly) empty-handed. Back at home, I ate most of the mirabelle and damson haul for dessert after lunch. Besides I turned the bruised mirabelles into a stew along with red currants, and ate it with granola and milk.

*

After the Kazantzakis essay is done, the next task is preparing for the Greek exam, then the Greek History essay that the professor said 'can be done in September.' As for the journey to Austria, I enjoyed it, and was kindly coddled by siblings, uncle, and father's cousin alike.

Four Hours of Hell: Cashiering at a Grocery Store

On Wednesday I went to the second job that I booked via the student app: four hours as a cashier in the basement of a mall in one of the tourist hotspots of Berlin. At home I'd reviewed the instructions for cashier work in general and the two or three different PDFs for this grocery chain in particular, although I felt fairly sure it was impossible to remember it all. Locking up my bicycle, I found the grocery store sooner than I feared.

The first step was to familiarize myself with the fruit and vegetable section so that it would be easier to ring up the produce later, which was a quick process. The second step was to meet my supervisor. A brisk, petite woman with her hair in a ponytail, she was communing with the dairy refrigerator section in the back when I found her. She escorted me to the employee break room. We passed through a storage area with trolleys, shelves stacked to the ceiling with disposable gloves and other supplies, and a loud machine built into the wall (pipes, toggle switches?, etc.) that I took to be a roaring air conditioner, and greeted a colleague. The narrow hallway was lined with bottles of water, which my supervisor invited me to drink from, and jackets with the store brand for the employees arranged on hooks.

The break room itself consists of a kitchenette with a wood laminate counter and a heap of grey polo shirts at the far end and a packaged Christmas tree stand stowed away at the near end, white cabinets above and below, and a sink in between. Blue storage lockers fill another wall — some of them labelled with names and roles, and others not. Papers pinned to a bulletin board explain hazard symbols, how to report inappropriate behaviour like harassment, a psychological service available for employees who are stressed by difficult encounters with customers, etc. Behind a pane of glass, a graphic of a tree rhapsodizes about the values of the grocery store chain. Taking into account the low table that fills the remaining corner of the room, I doubt that many more than 6 people can fit into the room. But it felt collegial.

Not sure if I should wait in the room until fetched, I decided to anxiously wait. After a while I took out my pens and my 'cheat sheet' of notes about cash register work, ready for duty. Finally I went out into the public area of the store again. Across the aisles, the cashier whose shift was ending made eye contact with me and waved me over.

In a little office, we started the handover. As a senior employee kept a practiced eye on a computer screen with her back turned to us, the supervisor asked me to weigh out all the coins and bills that were in the black cash box that I'd be using. Then she ushered me out of the office and over to the till, the previous cashier left with alacrity, she handed me my cashier ID card, and I sat down on the rolly chair prepared to serve the first customer — who was already hovering.

My supervisor showed me one or two procedures, told me to ring using the switch at my lefthand side if I had any problems, and then strode off. Fortunately the Francophone colleague at the bakery counter — a tall young man perhaps in his twenties who I think was called José — was able to ring up purchases that didn't require weighing, as I found out in the course of my shift. Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, I was the only cashier in the shop.

I passed the first two or three loads of items across the scanner as if I were an alien acquainting myself with earthling objects, not sure if the bar codes would be read in properly or not.

But after that the main problem was navigating all the buttons for weighing fruit and vegetables, deducting the 30% discounts, accepting forms of payment that weren't cash or mainstream credit/debit cards, scanning in coupons and loyalty cards or keying in customer reward app codes, and figuring out how to process a bottle returned for deposit that hadn't been accepted by the machine in the back of the store. Customers asked if there were disposable spoons, and I could only guess that they were at the round bar table; they asked if I had a bottle opener, but I didn't.

I wasn't able to tackle all of that properly. I usually asked for help from colleagues, explained concisely enough what was needed, and got it. Once my supervisor swooped in before I needed to signal her and helped out; another time, the shopper was in fact an employee and she helped me out. In the one case that I rang twice and nobody came, there was a brief dispute at the bakery counter afterward ('why did you leave the one employee by herself?'). But people were very forgiving to me specifically; the supervisor who'd seemed uncertain at the beginning started intermittently smiling at me.

On the bright side, my upbringing in Canadian manners became a superpower: I automatically fished up a polite greeting and smile for every customer no matter what catastrophe was going on. Counting out change was also straightforward as I was used to doing so as a shopper myself. Finally I found myself embracing the customer service side of things and liking the customers.  Figuring out if they spoke German or English or neither was like a game. But also semi-consciously noting the different shopping styles; guessing at which jobs or travels they'd come from; classifying them as health and fitness aficionados, businessmen, heads of families, young women 'adulting' by making themselves nutritious meals, partiers with wine or beer or mojitos, cheeky teenagers splurging on small treats, tourists getting themselves pots of honey or other items they couldn't get at home, etc.

On the other hand, after a while I thought that the same customers were shopping again: it felt like they were repeating in an infinite loop. I only came up for air again two hours later when finally nobody was standing at the till for a minute or two, psychologically battered and feeling like I had been swimming for hours against a current as water kept flooding into my mouth. I looked at the clock, shocked that it was only shortly after 6 p.m.

(During that quiet time, as the online training suggested, I took a spray bottle of disinfectant and cleaned the till with a cloth... which I realized later was actually only intended for the computer screens.)

Twice the line of customers grew so long that stirrings of discontent were audible. Besides I made a few mistakes with customer reward apps where I think I didn't properly give the discount because I thought that just scanning the card was enough. Once I failed to realize that a bottle was for deposit and then, long after another customer pointed it out to me and I'd finally figured it out, was unable to get away from my till to tell the customers that they could get money for it. In other words, I shorted the customers.

But the worst thing I did that day probably cost the company a large pot of money in one go. A customer who had bought food for over €70 apparently did not confirm her purchase by pressing a green button twice as she needed to (or perhaps there was a technological malfunction in the online data transfer?). After she and her groceries had disappeared from the shop, I saw that the EC debit card payment process was incomplete and running out of time. I did have the presence of mind to ask my supervisor to archive that set of purchases in the till, so that I could ring up the next customer. Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind before that to swing around and check the screen of the card reader, pressing the green button myself if that was what was needed.

Finally at 8 p.m., my colleagues and I checked repeatedly that all the customers were out of the shop. The senior employee and José had already signed out for the day. I handed over the two bottle deposit receipts that I'd gathered over the past four hours and my supervisor hauled out my cash box. Then I awaited with fear and trembling in the office as my supervisor jotted up the totals of the electronic payments, the bottle deposit, and the cash box at the computer. She shook her head over something and redid a calculation. I was worried that I would have to pay the €74 that I'd accidentally cost the company out of my own pocket — so I'd owe the company money instead of being paid for the past four hours. But then she turned around with a broad smile and told me that I had €1 more in the cash box than expected. It didn't really make sense, because two or three customers had told me to keep the change, but it was always only 1 cent or 2 cents. Still, it was a relief.

After I'd changed back into my street clothes, the supervisor joined me looking far more relaxed and ready to go back to everyday life. She even said that I'd done great, especially considering that it was my first day, and that she expected to see me again. With the €74 metaphorically stamped across my forehead like the scarlet letter A, and my guilt over the times I'd accidentally shorted the customers out of money, I candidly said that it had felt like one catastrophe after another to me. She laughed, and led me out through a warren of corridors into the outdoors, locking up the shop behind her. And I cycled back home in a daze.

***

When I passed through the apartment door, I felt like I'd journeyed through a few circles of Dante's cosmology into something more Paradise-like. But even at home, I was so stressed (and the air was so warm and humid) that I could not properly go to sleep until past 3 a.m. The feeling of buzzing energy had passed when I'd eaten dinner that the family had prepared and when I'd done a few progressive muscle relaxation exercises. It also felt weird to complain as a grown adult with her fair share of privileges about a common job that many teenagers, and many adults who have fewer privileges to cushion the stress, do.

But I was still quite worked up. My conscience was uneasy about all of my cash register mistakes — which felt like theft — and I was stuck on a loop of being constantly afraid of doing something wrong. An additional twenty or so minutes of yoga did not change that. Once, when I did doze, customers appeared on the other side of a phantom till in my sleepy imagination again. It took what felt like a few minutes to get rid of them.

In the event, I didn't get more sleep than four hours. At 7:15 a.m. city maintenance workers started using a chainsaw to lop branches off a bush outside the apartment and I couldn't get back to sleep again. In fact, I didn't properly go to sleep again until after midnight.

In between I've done hours of research about translations of Nikos Kazantzakis's writings into English and two trips to libraries, piano playing, leisure reading, housework and grocery shopping, and sunset strolling with my sister.

Partly the past weeks have been delightful and I've hopefully conveyed that in this blog.

Yet to be whiny but open, this is not  — given the facts that I still need to earn more money this month, finish three essays, finish reading the book that my Greek professor wanted me to finish reading, and get my spoken Greek and written grammar up to snuff for the exam at the end of this month — the relaxing summer holiday that I was hoping for.

Let's see if it changes for the better tomorrow. One of my brothers and I'll take the train to Austria for a short trip, joining other family members who are traveling by car, returning on the 12th.

The Friendlier Face of Bureaucracy

On Thursday I set off into the near 30°C temperatures to the Gesundheitsamt in order to watch two instructional videos about food safety and certification, and then to receive a certificate.

It was organized on the fourth floor of an office building. The interior was cool enough that it wasn't a hardship to walk up the flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator. First we were sorted into a waiting room. Amidst the pleasant wooden furniture that reminded me of a pediatrician's waiting room in the early 1990s, I became aware that the other applicants were younger than I was (some of them likely even still in school or recently graduated). Then we went one by one to the office to pay the 30€ fee and verify that our name and birthdate were accurate.

After that, we took our seats in a room where the videos were screened. Rows of chairs, two leafy potted plants taller than I was whereof one was alive and one dead (like the comedy and tragedy masks in theatre), a desk fan that had the seal of the City of Berlin stuck to its centre (presumably to discourage us from smuggling it home under our coats and calling it our own), blinds covering the open windows and a faint hum of traffic wafting in, and a coffee table or two, completed the interior design. We were something like 20 people at the end.

The videos were painless. Admittedly some of the acting in it had a touch of ham in scenes that required agonizedly swiping at a perspiring brow and clutching the solar plexus. The first one told us which foods were the most perishable, which illnesses and health conditions are dangerous, and how to behave if we feel sick or have an open wound. The second walked us through our certificate and told us that we needed to get it sealed and signed by an employer within 3 months, in order for it to be valid for the rest of our lives.

Finally, we returned to the office to receive the certificates. The ladies in charge were warm and friendly: one of them came up close and half-touched my elbow to greet me, and another wished me success as she handed me the paper.

Delighted to be ready early, I went back home at 11:30 a.m. — long before the temperatures rose to 38°C toward the evening. At home I was even more delighted to find that the student app seems to confirm the food safety certificates on our behalf. So that essentially I have fulfilled and will fulfill a basic precondition for food and service industry jobs for the rest of my days.

Since the bicycle transport work I haven't done another job ... yet. But I have made progress on university coursework: researching the Greek-Russian literature essay and reading the Kapodistrias biography. And, relieved to have so many chances at work where people actually need and want me, I have felt quite cheeky and good-humoured.