This journey began one unsuspecting Friday evening, when I was supposed to be hostessing at a local restaurant. I had been working there for about a year and I was starting to get sick of it. Business was slow, so instead of being an exemplary employee and finding something to clean, I turned to one of my favorite ways to kill some time. The wonderful thing about living in a small town is the weekly newspapers, and the fact that businesses still list all sorts of job ads in the back of them. In this era of electronic everything, it's so nice to be able to pick up a paper and get the news, the job updates, the real estate, and the classifieds all in one place. But I digress.
So here I was, sitting with a glass of tea and the local paper. I'd been eagerly searching the job ads for weeks, hoping for something more rewarding than serving unappreciative people the fantastic food that this restaurant provided. As I flipped the pages, I always read the paper backwards, my eyes landed on a job listing that had been placed by Parks Canada. Usually, the Parks Canada listings are for rather mundane positions, so I almost kept flipping the page. As much as it seemed appealing to have a pensioned job with benefits, I felt I was above being a Maintenance Worker, Mail Room Clerk, Gardener, or Trail Crew. I'm not stuck up or afraid of hard work, I just didn't have any desire to go backwards with my already non-existent career. So when I saw that this particular job listing was for the "Equine Specialist" position in the local Parks Canada Field Unit, I could hardly believe it. I didn't even know that such a job existed, and yet here it was, in a small town newspaper for me to find. As I read the job description, my level of excitement grew as I realized that I could meet each screening criterion.
So. I had potentially discovered the perfect career with the perfect employer. I could not wait to get home and start my application. But, if you have ever worked in the restaurant industry, you know what happened next. The slow evening quickly turned into a full blown mad house and I was stuck there for much longer than I had wanted. And it wasn't "nice" busy. It was a scrambling mess of hungry, rude people who thought that none of us could do anything right. I knew then and there that I HAD to land the Equine Specialist job with Parks. All I had to do was prove that I could do it. The fact that I would be able to.... definitely unexpected.
