My first job was ... a paper round in Wigram, Christchurch, where there was a magpie that would attack me every single afternoon. I was so terrified of it that I used to bring a tennis racquet with me and try and scare it away by waving it around. Don't worry – I didn't hit the bird, I just tried to scare it away.
It taught me … that magpies are not scared away by tennis racquets. I just started skipping that part of the street (don't tell anyone who works at the Christchurch Star who was wondering why Hurricane Way residents didn't get their papers in 2001).
My big break came … in my last year of university I got scouted doing stand-up and became a music TV presenter for TVNZ U. It was my absolute dream job, I'd always wanted to do it. I was living my Jaquie Brown/Clarke Gayford fantasy and everything was great ... until seven months after I started they shut down the whole channel and I was made redundant. So I went pretty quickly from my big break to being back on packet noodles for lunch.
The last job I quit was … running activities for kids' birthdays at Motat. I also used to sometimes play the school teacher in the classroom. There's a maze in the dark that kids can do there and at one point there was a code brown in there from an 8-year-old kid. I quit soon after.
The most famous person I've ever met is … I met Jack Gleeson in Edinburgh this year – he plays Joffrey in Game of Thrones. I normally embarrass myself in front of famous people, but I played it VERY cool. The main reason I played it so cool is because I've never actually watched Game of Thrones.
