Poor Joel

In the past couple weeks, I've been in numerous public washrooms. I'm noticing that more and more establishments are putting up dividers in between the urinals.

I thought about this for some time. I pondered hard. Why would they do that?

I figured it out. It was to keep people, like Joel, from initiating an "accidental" sword fight.

There. I've picked on Joel for this month. The quota has been met. I have another month to live.


My bank rocks!

I went to the bank today. Several signs were stuck to the door. I'd just like to let everyone know that my bank has a "theft prevention system" in place.

I wanted to walk right in, head straight to the teller, give him a high five and a big "fuck yeah!"

I doubt there's another bank in the world with a theft prevention system. Would-be robbers walk up to the door, pull the pantyhose over their heads, draw their guns and then stop. They read the sign and quickly turn around. The system could include some sort of video-recording equipment or possibly a security guard.

I always wondered where my service charges were going. Now, I know.


Items of note in my life:

I'm becoming the kitchen manager at work.

I was on the edge of a brawl at work. I watched as a group of drunks beat the crap out of each other. The cops were brought in. The cause of the fight was a girl. She was spitting on people.

In the past month, I've been to four flames games, two concerts and several movies.

I was in the Molson suite for one of the Flames games. I had free food, free beer and the best seats ever. Calgary won too.

I'm heading to Lake Louise for the Kokanee Free ride.

I've scored a goal in every ball hockey game this season except one. We've played more than 10 games already. We haven't been winning too many, but it's sure fun to score. Eh Joel?

I'm taking a night course at SAIT. I've now attended all three of the major post-secondary institutions in Calgary.

23 is a great movie. Pan's Labyrinth is cool. Hollywoodland is crap. I don't care if it's about Superman. It blew.

The bedroom secrets of the master chefs is my least favorite book by Irvine Welsh. It wasn't bad, but no where near as good as the others.

I'm thinking that's about all that I've been up to.

Will Sinclair High School Rules!

Are You Being Served?

Man, I hate Denny's. I hate the lack of service there, I hate the fact that their pre-packaged reheat and serve food takes so long to make, but you wanna know what I hate most of all? The fact that it's practically the only restaurant in the area. I mean, there's a Brewsters six blocks down, but tacked on to the 13 blocks I have to walk to get to the theatre... nah, I ain't walkin' that far. Of course, as I'm bitching about this I just remembered the nearby Red Robin... well then!

I've always had conflicted feelings bitching about service, especially in the job climate here. Because everything's so on fire, most of the service-oriented places are having a hard time finding staff. It's so bad that some places are being forced to cut the amount of hours that they're open. Naturally, this has put a lot of people out of sorts.

My one hope from all of this is that people would start to examine their own perceptions of the service industry and hopefully start to remedy them. After all, nobody has to work in the service industry now unless they want to. And why would they want to, really? Why work a low-paying job that's universally looked down on?

I hate to keep bringing this up, but look at dear ol' Dane's situation. He left his sports editor gig to go work kitchen in Calgary, his old stomping ground. The most interesting wrinkle of all this is that working kitchen pays $3 more an hour than covering sports, and that's not even considering the tip-out. However, just examine your own early reaction to finding out Dane's new choice of job. Even though it does make financial sense, did it make any other sense to you? Sports editor is a job you can feel proud introducing yourself as doing at a party. I really don't think it works as well for being kitchen staff.

So ideally, people would have recognized this and thought, "Wow! Waitresses and clerks and other help staff do make our lives easier! Maybe we should start treating them as proud members of the workforce instead of as stupid peons who aren't good enough to find REAL jobs." Do you think this has happened? Well, of course not. The most common reaction I hear is "Why are people so lazy? There's all these jobs open and nobody wants to work them! Tsk tsk, such a sad state, the youth of today..." So then they expect that people from other provinces are going to come to fill in the gaps. I'm sorry, but if I was going to uproot myself and say goodbye to my friends and family, I'd be doing it for a lot more than a job at fucking McDonalds.

Now who wants ice cream?

Vox Unpopulari

Guess what, boys and girls? I've decided to undertake the opening of a new blog. Finally! You guys yell out to the heavens. Here's the URL if you just can't wait:

http://superfuntime.vox.com

I wonder if Dane will be assed-out at my choice of URL? Ah well.

However, this will be a different kind of blog. I've decided to dip my toes in the river of MEDIA REVIEWING! Except they won't be reviews, necessarily. It'll just be me launching into huge blather-fests about the themes and other elements of the work in question. Very stream-of-consciousness and free association. Besides, I've never made a recommendation that worked out, unfortunately, so there will be precious little of that. Oh, and I'll be exploiting the Question of the Day feature they have over at Vox until it runs out of novelty appeal.

So I'll still be here, of course. I'm a hugely co-dependent blogger. It would just be too weird to have me launch into "reviews" over here. It might piss off Dane or something.

Yay!