Goodbye sheep, hello yoga with a bunch of bananas
So I just brainstormed a bunch (no pun intended) of ideas for my first blog post, and I realised that they all seem to be intertwined with each other, it’s sort of like the chicken and the egg thing – where do I start?!
In primary school I was always the kid who wrote more pages of creative writing than the rest of the class put together, once I had that pen in my hand there was no stopping me. I fear the same thing may happen here only instead of a pen I have a laptop and instead of a school bell to halt my endless streams of words I have a real time word count in the corner of the screen to remind me to wind it down really soon.
Rather than word vomit everything I could possibly want to say in this first blog post, I’m going to start off super simple with telling the story of how I ended up at Pink Banana!
Without going back too far, I quit my corporate job as an auditor in New Zealand in June 2019 and travelled to India in the hopes of becoming a qualified yoga teacher – which I did! Woohoo! After this I hopped around Europe attending various metal festivals and volunteering for weeks at a time in random country sides. As you can imagine travelling doesn’t come cheap and while cleaning a toilet in a Portuguese guest house (voluntarily) it occurred to me that I should probably get a paying job, and soon!
While I had lived in NZ for 13 years, I still possessed a British passport and being in the Northern Hemisphere thought it’d be a great idea to get a wee bit of work experience in the Motherland. My initial intention was to find some contract work and earn a nice sum of money before country hopping again for a few more months. That all changed when I stumbled across the vacancy for a Financial Controller at Pink Banana Studios – it was literally like the job had been created just for me! It has been a goal of mine to incorporate sustainability and ethics into my work in accounting for a verrrrry long time and I just assumed I’d have to spend a few more years in the corporate world before ever having a hope of being a tree hugging bean counter! Since PB was in the initial stages of its B-Corp application and was already incorporating their values into their practices, a huge box was ticked for me.
I could tell there was a real family vibe to the team and that each team member was absolutely integral to the company and was valued as such. This is an environment I craved to work in after being in corporate for four years where you feel like a tiny little cog in a big scary machine.
The icing on top of the big (banana flavoured?) cake was Luna!! Dogs are absolutely incredible creatures and the idea of having a canine colleague sealed the deal for me. I can say with confidence that Luna has been an amazing presence in the office and can put a smile on your face no matter how stressful your day may be.
So anyway, after applying for the role and desperately hoping that there were no other contenders who might stand in the way of a dream job I snagged a video interview. I must have made an alright impression because I landed a second video call a couple of days later! After completing a business scenario task and receiving awesome feedback I thought I had it in the bag and was told I should receive an offer by the end of the day. It was one of the most nerve wracking days of my life and I had a steady supply of Portugese liquor on hand to help with the suspense. I was checking my phone literally every two minutes that whooole day in deep anticipation and when I received the offer I literally did cartwheels around the garden of the guest house.
I’m so thankful for the team taking a chance on me without even meeting me! It’s a huge risk for the team to have taken and I’m going to blow my own trumpet here by proudly saying it paid off. Everyday I am grateful to be part of this wonderful family and to be contributing to the creation of some bloody great, world changing content.
