Good Day At Work: Actually understanding the customers; Bad Day At Work: Being showered in curry sauce - according to editor Anna Tuson

No matter what your occupation, there will always be good and bad days at work.

For me, the good days at my waitressing job are those when I actually manage to understand what my customers are saying - the bad, when I can do no more than stare at them blankly after their fourth attempt to place an order in French.

Happy times at my cheffing job include hitting the sacred curry sauce recipe right on target. When said sauce hits ME right on target as I attempt to transfer 15L of the stuff, it's somewhat less amusing. For me anyway. Of course my workmates could not imagine anything more hilarious - apparently. I emerge from the experience looking like our most popular entre, shrimp pakora - bright yellow, but red in the face.

Having worked as a newspaper journalist/ editor for the past three years, going back to the hospitality industry again has definitely been interesting. While I have had plenty of experience, having filled every role from bartender, to cook, dishie, glassie and waitress throughout my high school/ university years, things are a bit more challenging this time around for various reasons.

In fact many of those that know me have found it hard to even believe how I am currently earning a living. My dear friends and family would say, for example, that my talents do not include the ability to cook Indian food. But I have indeed spent my evenings for the past two months whipping up everything from jinga masala to vindaloo, chapati and pakora for the locals and tourists of Valais. And they, apparently, aren't finding it too shabby - even those that know what the stuff is actually supposed to taste like!

My second job is also something of a puzzlement. Most people would assume that in order to waitress in a cafe one should be able to communicate in the local language of said caf, right? Not so. Having mastered all of oui, non, and merci (plus some dubious phrases learnt from song lyrics - which I'm yet to try out on the locals), I was set to serving in the cafe at the bottom of the piste every morning. Let's just say there has been a lot of miming and charades going on in that particular restaurant this season.

This is just another one of the great things about small-town life. Unlike in the big cities, employers in the little villages do not have the luxury of a large pool of specialised employees so they have to be a little more open-minded when it comes to staff. Of course this is natural to some extent. But even I had to keep my astonishment under wraps as my lovely employers let a kiwi journo have free reign front-of-house with a French vocabulary that is well-exhausted within around 20 seconds, without batting an eyelid.

Or, in my other workplace, allowing her to run amok in their Indian-Pakistani kitchen, despite never having previously so much as rolled a naan bread in her life.

Sometimes I think perhaps both of my employers took me on just to keep themselves amused. They certainly get plenty of laughs out of the situation, be it over my creating a dish of dal and chick peas for the staff dinner (apparently it's like mixing tea and coffee together), or giving completely wayward answers in spectacularly bad French to their requests.

 But whatever the reason, I have to admire the way they welcomed me so readily and have been so accepting of my (fairly significant) shortcomings. I was a complete unknown to them when I turned up at their doors randomly, asking on the off-chance for work, but they simply said we could give it a go. As a result I have been blessed with the opportunity to learn new skills that I would not have otherwise considered a possibility - working with the public in a foreign language, and cooking a spectacular jalfraizy.

Anna Tuson - Expatica 2008