A few weeks ago I was bitten by something that came out of one of the shipping containers at JobLandTM. I looked down at my arm and some hairy red monster insect was plunging various parts of its face into my forearm. Naturally as I watched the creature “chow down”, my paranoia told my brain that I was about to die. As is usually the case, my paranoia was instructing my brain erroneously, and nothing of the sort has happened…yet. There has been some swelling, which is far from swell, but nothing like a fatal collapse or something. It was just another indication of my belief that it is morally wrong to have to work early in the morning on a Saturday. Mother nature was merely acting out her frustration as well. I doubt my supervisors would have seen it as the same kind of sign however. Despite my run in with the Malaysian insect, I remain alive.
One of the most evil corporations in the world has an advertising program: “There is a little McDonald’s in everyone…..”. Of course there is. There is a little DDT in everyone too, because of the way it goes through the food chain. This is why there is a little M in everyone…. its a lipophilic toxin that is highly bioavailable! So I was shopping in “Safe”way one recent evening and I managed to say something stupid. It is interesting how stupid/dumb things can come flying out of my mouth when I least suspect that they will. So I guess the poor boy behind the counter on this occasions was very sorry he mentioned many things to me, including that if I bought another cucumber I could get a special price. I’ve always hated small talk in a checkout line…. it is always the same… never goes anywhere (by definition)… and I’m terrible at it when I don’t want to be there. So when I blurted out a certain statement at the line that day… one that I usually reserve for friends as a joke… I was a little annoyed with myself. “Are you trying to seduce me”? I’m lucky they didn’t call the police.I have seen the look before…. intense concern/alarm/fear/disgust. Sometimes I attempt to get to this point on purpose, sometimes it happens by accident. It did it on purpose today to a guy at work…… ” You gots you a real puuuurdy mouth!” It had the desired effect and I know it was received as a joke, which is what it was. I’ve always been a bit strange.
Still, incidents like this always bring back to my mind the concept of a filter between my brain and my mouth. Or, as some must be thinking, the lack thereof. During the course of recent years the filter between my brain and my mouth has been in a steadily decreasing state of repair -both verbally and written. I do not know the nature of this phenomenon, but it occasionally makes for interesting situations when I do not disable it intentionally. Blurting out “are you trying to seduce me” at inappropriate times can land one in trouble regardless of whether the incident was intentional in nature or not. Certain situations can cause my filter, which as of yet I have not decided on a name for (Wernicke??), to disengage itself from the normal course of my brain’s behaviour. It gets frightened from its roost, and it scurries down somewhere near the brain stem, quietly sobbing to itself, until it is safe to come out. It always loses the battle for the brain. When it is inoperative for a significant length of time, all hell breaks loose. More than one website entry/ conversation/ email etc. have been conducted during the course of such a filter breakdown. My brain undergoes significant changes, neurotransmitter concentrations rise and fall inappropriately, cells die, and small fires may break out amid the chaos and anarchy. It’s a Japanese game show in there sometimes.
Many things can cause the filter between my brain and my mouth to scurry to its hiding place. For example…. alcohol, or waaaay too much sugar. This is most often expressed through email and does not occur nearly as frequently in person. Several vivid examples of this are in my memory, some recent but most a long time ago. Whatever the case, it always makes for a good story later. Some have been referred to for years due to the incredulity of their recipients. What the hell did you send me???!!!!
“You sent me an email entitled: ‘SNOW!!!!’. It wasn’t about snow, but, honestly, I don’t know what the hell ANY of it meant”
After a particularly bad week recently, a friend pointed out something like: “it can’t get any worse”. Ha! The next day I got home and my basement suite had flooded. Lets do some background here…. I got home from work one day and noticed that the entire roof of my house and most of the third story had been torn off and thrown onto the front lawn. This got my attention because 1) the roof is not normally found on the front lawn and 2) I was not told that this was about to happen. The rather huge blue tarp that had taken up residence in the roof’s rightful place did not ease my mind. You see, this is Vancouver, and it tends to RAIN here. Despite being worried that the “roof” might leak, I suspected that things upstairs were in good hands and that flooding would remain an intangible concept. Then, things got tangible….I walked in the door of my basement suite after a really hard day at work ( hundreds and hundreds of 60 pound boxes….). Upon opening the door, I noticed in my usual observant way that there were torrents of water coming through the ceiling and the light fixtures. I may have uttered and audible expletive. After procuring all the garbage cans, pots and pans, and improvised buckets made out of laundry baskets, boxes, and garbage bags, I decided that I should attempt to get hold of the people upstairs. They might want to know that there was a river running through their house… Problem: I didn’t know where they worked. A 45 minute survey of the neighbors didn’t yield any results either, nobody seemed to know, but most were suspicious of me because 1) they didn’t know the people next door and 2) they thought I was trying to gain illegal entry to the house (which I ended up doing anyway). I had no contact numbers or anything for the people upstairs, and so I decided to actually go to the second floor in order to try to get hold of them. The stairs down into the basement have two doors, neither of which was locked. If they had been, I might have simply gone through them anyway under the circumstances.
The second floor of this house is well furnished. It contains a great deal of stereo equipment, solid oak furniture and dining room table type things, and a big screen TV. It also has (had) the nicest hardwood floors I’ve seen. However, most of these things were contained within the ever expanding lake that I found upon going upstairs. I unplugged all the equipment I could, relocated it to the kitchen (which hadn’t begun to leak at that point) and grabbed all the towels of mine that I could find. In a particularly irrational moment, I also grabbed the quilt off of my bed to dam the second floor lake. There was a LOT of water coming through the second story ceiling, and everything was beginning to sag from the weight of the water above it (it eventually burst and a bunch of the “dry”wall has since come down.
Getting up to the remains of the third story I found that the infamous tarp had filled with water almost down to the floor, and had pulled its sides away from the edges of the wall, exposing it to the rain that had ended only an hour earlier. There was a downspout that drained the rest of the remaining roof at the back of the house. Only problem was, it was emptying right onto the floor, and was the majority of the water infiltration problems until the giant reservoir of water contained in the tarp burst onto the floor. This day was beginning to suck.
Eventually, I decided to reinitiate my idea of contacting the owners of the home. I didn’t want to start rifling through drawers or something, so I called all the numbers posted on the fridge, most of which were just people involved in construction companies. Finally, I got hold of someone who knew them, but was a bit confused as to why I wanted to contact them. Needless to say, the guy who lives upstairs was a little alarmed with what I had to tell him.
Flooding sucks.
The thing with hardwood floors is that they don’t necessarily absorb water too well, so most of the water coming through their ceiling (besides the stuff filtering through the couch) made it all the way down the air vent into my suite.
Notice in the pre-apocalyptic picture the lower part of the ceiling which seemed to be where most of the water was coming through (right onto my table). Strangely enough, I had just packed and moved my new camera from that table that very morning – so I’m glad it didn’t get wrecked even though there was no film in it. The wall behind the bookcase had a lot of water flowing out of it as well, and pretty much all of the carpet on that side of my suite (pic only shows half of it) was a puddle. In terms of monetary damage I got off easy – the only things wrecked were some of the files in the file boxes in the corner, and some of the finish on my table. The bookcase, composed of mostly particle board, has started to come apart because it absorbed a lot of water. There was this enormous…. I don’t’ know what to call it, a blister perhaps….. blister of water that started to grow out of the wall beside the bookcase. It eventually burst. I have no idea if the bookcase’s life is at an end or not. I hope it isn’t, I haven’t’ anywhere else to put all those damn books! It could have been a lot worse, the majority of the things that will need to be replaced are the drywall in the ceilings and maybe my carpet if it decides to rot and stink. If rotting does occur, the damage could be extensive, expensive, and stinky.
The pre apocalyptic room
JobLandTM is beginning the cull the summer herd. This is done by seniority, not by quality of work or competency (competency would allow me to stay much longer). This sucks. However, it is still the busy season for a while, and JobLandTM has hired temporary workers to do some of the less mentally “demanding” tasks. A lot of these guys try everybody’s patience. Apparently, this year, the JobLandTM bigwigs pointed out that the temp company would only be sending its “best and brightest” this year. I never believed that this was possible, but hearing the stories of LAST years debauchery, I guess it may very well be true. Last year these temp workers got into physical fights, yelled a lot, threw things, had criminal records including manslaughter, were smoking pot in the lunchroom, and in one particularly memorable incident, one was caught masturbating (inappropriate in most work environments) in the corner. I’m surprised that such tales are not retold more often. After this, working with this years crop didn’t seem nearly as bad, although I have caught one individual indulging himself with a flask of dark rum at lunch. Thankfully, he doesn’t work in a position to hurt others, though he does drop a lot of things. He doesn’t speak English either, which makes it hard to point out grievances with his conduct directly. He does yell and waves his hands a lot though. We have begun to do the same. Life isn’t all doom and gloom. Last week I crashed a meeting for Co-op science students about how to volunteer and get experience… and I didn’t get CAUGHT!!!! This was especially great since I have never been in Co-op, and am not even a student at this point at CementLandTM. I was recently embroiled in a discussion at JobLandTM about the redundancy of body parts. We have two of a lot of things. Was this meant as a built in redundancy in case of the loss of one of these parts? I started it as something silly, but it blossomed into a serious discussion (for other people). Lose an arm, use the other one (makes my golf swing a little less smooth, but it is still possible). We have two eyes, but can use only one if pressed, you’ll just bump into things more often. Some people probably think I have already lost an eye…. I think most of us can do without one ear, simply because nobody listens to anybody else anyway. Those things we have only one of, THOSE are the important things. Lose one of those and you are seriously screwed (and quite possibly dead). Of course, this is the same work crowd that I utterly stumped when I pointed out that I had taken a picture of my new camera. How do you take a picture of your camera when you have only one camera? Hmmm….. We now return you to the year 2001, already in progress…