Wieners and Losers: The Pie Girl Returns

I’m back and bigger than ever (I grew two whole centimetres last year!). Where have I been, you might ask? Maybe I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I’ve been forced into witness protection in a country town somewhere in New South Wales until I could safely return home. Too far-fetched? Then maybe I was abducted by an underground cult and made my daring escape using just a spoon and some dental floss. No? Okay, I’ve been eating my way through Italy, finding my spirituality in India and falling in love with Javier Bardem in Bali. Wait, never mind, that’s just the plot of Eat, Pray, Love.

Or it could be the fact that I am a creature of procrastinatory habit, not to mention, a teenager. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Buckle up kids, because I’m about to start making excuses for my lack of writing. I’ve officially fallen down the VCE rabbit hole, with two Year 12 exams waiting for me come November. In the last 2 terms, I have juggled SACs, dolled up for my first formal, assisted on Year 7 Camp*, endured mid-year exams, ventured across Bass Strait and rogained in country Victoria. Not to mention attended all Adelaide matches in Melbourne (minus Round 5 against Hawthorn, but I can be forgiven for that, I was working).

Nevertheless, upon working at the soccer last Friday, I realised that I haven’t even written anything about last year’s Champion’s Cup, let alone the majority of the 2015 AFL Season, thus it was time to make my return to the Almanac. So here it is, my somewhat disjointed recollection of the year that has been.

So what exactly have I been up to at the ‘G? In a broad sense, anything and everything. I am now officially the Pie-Wiener-Donut-Ice-Cream-Slurpee-Soup-Cashier Girl. Doesn’t quite have the same ring as Pie Girl, does it?

Throughout the year the MCG hosted other sporting events aside from Australia’s favourite pastime involving a Sherrin, so I got to experience several crowd types. I served soccer fans with identical haircuts (for reference, google David Beckham) who only bought water, I was called “love” more times than I could count at the rugby and survived selling Drumsticks to questionably dressed cricket goers in the summer.

And what about the most important day of the football season, Grand Final Day? MAN, IT WAS INTENSE, MAN, INTENSE! It was my first time ever operating a cash register in a store that just so happened to sell absolutely everything imaginable for six hours straight (with my allocated break, naturally). It was like that time in Year 9 PE when I was one of the only remaining players on my dodgeball team and I miraculously evaded three balls at once. Except my shift didn’t end with a testosterone pumped teenager hurling a red foam ball at my eye.

If you can remember back to reading the Herald Sun Weekend lift-out on August 29th last year—I mean, who can’t?—you might recall a familiar face featured in the My Saturday section: Me! The story stems back to Period 5 German on a Wednesday when I sneakily took a phone call on a toilet break (don’t worry, I had done all of my work). Confused as to why work was calling me during school hours, I answered the phone to a very official member of staff. As it turns out, a fair amount of workers had read my Almanac piece and they recommended me to the Herald Sun. I headed back to class excited, but sad to tell my friend that I was going to miss out on the first third of the marathon screening of the Batman trilogy at IMAX that we had arranged to see.

I felt like quite the celebrity on that day, donning my cherished yellow jacket and white hat whilst being followed by a camera snapping me in my best attempts at being candid. To top it all off, I made it just in time for The Dark Knight. As a typically un-photogenic individual, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did not look like a spud in the photos, rather, a normal human being with only one chin! Only the other night, as I was walking back to the staff area, was I approached by a security guard who asked “Are you the one from the paper? I always see your photo next to the vending machine during my break!” I guess it’s the small things in life.

Later on in the year, I was again overjoyed when my Pie Girl article was chosen to be published in the 2015 Almanac. It was pretty groovy to attend the book launch with my Dad and even groovier to see my piece in the foreword. Of course, Dad had to make a note of the fact he had THREE stories in the Almanac, but as the great Taylor Swift once said, “There are going to be people along the way who try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. But if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you.” Plus, he didn’t get his glorious mug printed across a whole page.

Most recently, as a treat to myself after a maths assessment (side note: I would not recommend sitting an analysis task covering 10 chapters of work. It’s not worth your sanity), Dad and I ventured off to soggy Geelong to watch Adelaide battle it out against the Cats. Whilst it was a disappointing match, I had a splendid adventure, with my first trip on the V-Line and experimentation with seat drying methods. As it turns out, real estate magazines from the Saturday paper are highly absorbent.

With a recent recruitment of pie vendors, I’ve been jumping around carts and uniforms, experiencing various areas of the MCG. I have mastered the arts of convincing 12-year-old boys to buy slurpees, ladling soup, onion-ing hot dogs (cue Game of Thrones theme: wiener edition and wurstwasser jokes) and rolling donuts in sugar. What lies ahead of me in the future, only time will tell, but for now, I know it will involve one thing in particular: my beloved Melbourne Cricket Ground.

*Whilst trying to appear cool to some Year 7 boys on that camp (you know you’ve reached a low point when it comes to that) I conveniently dropped the fact that I worked at the MCG. I had almost won all of them over, except for one kid, who trumps me by telling the group that his dad works for Hawthorn. How on earth could I top that? By beating him and his mates at a classic game of ocean-piggyback-wrestling.