Photo: Tim on Spitsbergen
Tim expects there will be a lot of applicants for this adventurous job, so he had to find a way to stand out from the crowd for the employer, the United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust. Last Wednesday he made the Facebook page ‘Mailman in Antarctica’ and then proceeded to talk to a lot of journalists from Dutch media such as the AD, Telegraaf and Gelderlander newspapers, the NOS news, Radio2, Q-music, and FunX. Meanwhile, his Facebook page has received 2,500 likes.
‘Of course it is not a case of, the more likes, the bigger my chances of getting the job,’ says Tim. ‘But hopefully my application will stand out and they will see how keen I am to get this job.’ He will send his letter on Friday 27 February, the closing date for applications. The island is ‘no more than an outcrop of rocks the size of a football field,’ but for a biology graduate who wrote his Master’s thesis about the North Pole, this is ‘a chance you will only get once in a lifetime’.
Tim: ‘Your view is a sea of icebergs and an awful lot of penguins all around you. And three colleagues.’ Because in total the Antarctic Heritage Trust is looking for a team of four people to run the tiny island from November 2015 to the end of March 2016. It is summer then in the South Pole and tourists regularly moor at the island, which has a museum, a post office and a limited amount of accommodation. So there is more to the job than making sure the tourists’ postcards and letters get posted. The job description includes running the museum, selling souvenirs, providing tourists with information and maintaining buildings. One thing Tim won’t have to do is mend showers, because there aren’t any on the island. Tim: ‘In the job advertisement it literally said you needed not to mind only being able to shower once a month. It is probably only possible on board a ship.’