Renting a place in Melbourne

Like I mentioned in the previous posts, I was living with my cousin after migrating to Australia. But now that I have a job, it was about time I moved out of my cousin's place. Let's be honest now, it is a hindrance when someone else is living with you.

I looked for available places for lease on RealEstate and Domain mobile apps, and noted down a few. It is easier to check them up on the phone because the apps show the places on the map.

On the day before I was supposed to start working, there was a schedule for inspection of a house near the work place. I went there, because I was free on that afternoon. That was when I realised the state of renting in south east of Melbourne. This area is old, so the houses are old; some of them look like my parents' parents' houses. Most houses do not have air-conditioning. They only have heating; some very rare ones don't even have heating! People in Australia seem to have a made up a habit of spending the hot days at shopping malls. There are of course new houses; they demolish old houses and build three small houses on the same land. And they are expensive. But there are cheaper and newer houses if you are willing to go farther from civilisation, but I did not want that. I set a maximum rent target of $350 per week, which is still crazy high compared to what we paid in Japan. Sadly, you should be really lucky to get a cheaper rent in this part of the country.

So that first house was a bad one. Then there were few inspections on the next Saturday. I went there early in the morning by train. The first house was a $340 one and it was quite large, had a split air cooling system but was pretty old still. I wanted to look around a bit.

After that inspection, I paid a visit to my friend's place in Clayton and he drove me around to the other inspections. We checked about half a dozen houses and towards the end of the day I was able to shortlist 3 places: two houses and an apartment.

One of the houses was right in the centre of Clayton and they asked $360 for it. It lacked an A/C but considering the fact that we could simply walk to do the grocery and that I could walk to the office, I decided to give it a go and I could apply easily as it could be done online.

The MagSafe charger of my MacBook Air is kaput!

When I moved to Australia, I could only bring the CPU part of my desktop PC with me. I had to leave the display behind. I did not bring the keyboard as well, since I was planning to buy a mechanical keyboard from Australia. So my desktop PC is not currently functional. That means, I am stuck with my 2011 MacBook Air.

I really miss my desktop PC. What happened a few days ago made me miss it even more. The MacBook Air's charger got damaged. The charging adapter is intact, but the cable is damaged near the adapter. It was slowly coming apart since a week or so ago, and last night it had its last breathe.

I do not know what is wrong with Apple’s cable designs. I have had similar experience iPhone cables as well. But the iPhone cable is easily replaceable. With the MagSafe charger, the cable is permanently attached, so you need to take it apart, find a replacement cable and solder it again if you want to bring it back to life. There are eBay sellers who sell replacement cables and there are guides on how to solder it back. But that is not a urgent solution. Without the PC, I am lost. The phone is not a replacement for the laptop.

I needed an urgent fix, which meant that I had to buy a new charger. There is an Apple store about a 30-minute-bus-ride from the office. But the original MagSafe 45W charger would cost $129!

The next hurdle: finding a job–and success

Moving to Australia was not that hard as I had all the qualifications, but settling down would be much harder. At least, that is what I originally thought. First of all, I needed a job. Without a job, I cannot have my own place (well, I cannot afford to have my own place), buy a car (without a car, you are going to waste a lot of time) and do anything for that matter. Finding the first job in Australia is the hard part, because there is a risk for the company when hiring someone who is new to the environment. After that, "people say" that it gets easier.

So, in the first few days, I had one goal: find a job as soon as possible.

Soon after leaving Japan, I made a connection with someone in Japan who offered to hook me up with recruiters here. Unfortunately, it did not yield me with any job opportunities but I received some good advice. And then, I did what everyone would do. I prepared a decent resume (which I had started couple of months ago and was continually evolving), updated my LinkedIn profile and applied to jobs on popular job boards like Seek and Indeed. I mainly applied for C/C++ related jobs, but it was underwhelming because most of the opportunities were for Java, C# and web development jobs. I wanted to go in the direction of C# development, but nobody would want to give me a shot without any commercial experience with C#.

But then I got lucky.

One of my former colleagues who had moved to Australia a while back, was resigning from an embedded hardware/software company thus a vacancy opened up. I went for the interviews there, and I received a job offering; probably my friend's influence helped a lot. It is a known fact that internal references get a high priority when filling positions. My experience developing the printer drivers, which was not exactly embedded, but close enough, must have helped too. It was a decent pay for a first position and there was the opportunity to try out new things, so I accepted the job. But it is a bit far away from  my cousin's place. It takes about 1.5-2hrs to get to work from there using public transport. But it would only be for a short time as I am looking to move into an apartment/house near my office, so that would cut down on the commuting times significantly.

I had several phone interviews from several other companies too, some of which I did when I was in Sri Lanka. The ones I did when I was in Sri Lanka did not advance any further, probably due to my lack of immediate availability. I got one HR phone interview after arriving in Australia from a company that had a fabulous working environment, and they invited me to a test and a formal interview, but I had already taken that other job, and I did not want to waste someone else's interview slot, so I rejected. I got an invitation to a phone interview from another company as well, but it was too late (and they took a whole month to sort it out), so I rejected that as well.

So, now I have a job in Australia. It only took me like 2 weeks to secure a job, so I am very pleased. There are people who go on without jobs for months and months. So I should consider myself pretty lucky. But to be honest, the luck only helped me get the interview. It is my experience/capabilities that got me the job.

Objective one complete; to finding an apartment then.