A perfect job for this cold weather

With everything around our home still frozen solid after yesterday’s ice storm, I was amused to read about a job offer from the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.  The Telegraph reports:

It is freezing, smelly, and you may be gone some time. Applicants to run the world’s most southerly post office have been warned about the harsh realities of the life they would endure in the Antarctic.

The successful candidates will spend five months on Goudier, an island “the size of a football pitch” just off the Antarctic peninsula, sorting the mail at Port Lockroy, a former British scientific base.

Port Lockroy base in 1962 (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Jane Cooper, 37, from Gloucestershire, worked as postmistress the season before last and said it was the “opportunity of a lifetime”.


But there were downsides. “If you slice spam really thinly, fry it and close your eyes, you can just about convince yourself it is bacon,” she said. “There is a lot of wishful thinking involved.”

There’s more at the link.

The UKAHT describes the location and the position in these terms:

Port Lockroy, Base ‘A’, is a British historic base situated on the tiny Goudier Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. It was established in 1944 and operated as a British Research station until it closed in 1962. The abandoned base was designated a Historic Site and Monument under the Antarctic Treaty and in 1996 restored as a ‘living’ museum. It is visited each Austral summer by approximately 18,000 ship-borne visitors amounting to one to two ship visits per day. During the short summer period approximately 70,000 items of mail are cancelled by hand before input into the British postal system. Goudier Island is also home to 2,000 Gentoo penguins that nest all around the building and staff continue to monitor the colony’s breeding success.

. . .

Do you possess the following attributes?

• Adaptability to different situations – Are you happy not to shower for up to a month, live in close proximity to three people and 2,000 smelly penguins for five months?

As well as being passionate about the Antarctic. You need to be:

• Personable – do you value getting on with others? Can you live and work with just three others for five months and be friendly and cooperative throughout?
• Positive – can you enthuse to visitors when it is -5C° and blowing a blizzard as well as cook supper cheerfully after a long cold day and very little sleep?

I daresay one can dress for the cold;  but I suspect Miss D. would look upon me with a jaundiced eye if I didn’t shower for a month.  That’s a relationship-breaker, right there . . .

Peter