Montreal Drivers

 

My family and I used to live in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. For a significant part of those years, we travelled to Montreal once a week. We pitted our skills against the best and worst of Canada's most aggressive drivers. He who hesitates waits. The only time they ever gave me space was when our car was sporting a bruise from a recent accident. Part of me wished that I was allowed to keep driving it like that. It gave a "don't mess with me" air. 

Visitors often complain that Montreal drivers pick on people with out-of-province licence plates. Guess what. They're too busy trying to run you off the road to look at your plates. They don't care. They do that to each other. If anything, they can sense weakness.

I'm a bit of a jerk sometimes, and I would often tease my French-Canadian wife about French-Canadian drivers. She suffered me on that count until the day we got stuck in a summer traffic jam. It was hot. The windows were rolled down, and we were sweating. Anyone without air conditioning was in the same boat. Radiators were close to overheating. It was not fun. Drivers would cut each other off, frantic to get into whatever lane seemed to be moving faster. Some guy managed to cut me off twice, and I still can't believe we didn't swap paint on his second effort. With everyone at a near standstill and the windows all down. You could hear people talking back and forth to each other. The worst, most aggressive drivers were all speaking English.

Funny Coincidence

 

I was training to take credit card applications with an experienced representative, and we had ourselves a couple of good laughs.

Early in the day, a young lady called in to apply for a card. For her job title, she called herself a freelance dancer. I would have bought that except she did her dancing near Pearson International Airport, just outside of Toronto. That part of Mississauga is well known for its strip clubs. I'm a freelance writer, and you're a freelance dancer. I'll grant you that. Dancing without clothes - you can't get any freer than that. Hey, everyone needs credit cards. Right?

Later that same day, we got a call from some young tough guy. He worked in security. Turns out he was a bouncer in a club in that same area, protecting freelance dancers from drunkards. What are the chances? I told my training partner that it was possible that these two customers had a professional relationship.

The funniest thing is my drunk credit card applicant was from that area, too. I've touched so many parts of their economy.

Both Ends of the Barrel

Have you ever had random stories or events resonate and fit together unexpectedly? Like the credit card applications that came in separately from a stripper, a bouncer and a drunk. All are working and living in the same area. This is another one of those things. I'm aware this could have a catchier title, but I'm paranoid that this is going to get censored. You'll see why soon enough.

While I was a student in California, I had a friendly chat with a security guard off campus watching over a small, neglected warehouse, and he was bored. He told me about the time he tried to play hero during an armed robbery. He thought that he could escape by making a run for it when the gunman wasn't expecting it and getting help. Lucky for him, the 357 Magnum misfired. The bullet hit him in the butt cheek and burrowed deep into the flesh of his gluteus maximus. He said it felt like "all the bees in the world" stung him on that spot. He went down - like he'd been shot and didn't get up again until the paramedics attended to him when it was all over. He recommends against anyone following his example.

Years later, I was asked to start giving a new employee a ride back and forth to work each day. I was compensated for gas, and we got along great. He had just returned to Canada, having lived most of his life in the United States. He had been deported back to his country after serving a full sentence for armed robbery. He and a group of buddies knocked off a credit union for $85,000 and got caught. He had been the gunman, and to scare the security guard into cooperating, he put, you guessed it, a 357 Magnum round into the ceiling. He told the man who had just peed himself, "Look, it's not your money".

By the time I met with him, he was a grandpa and just wanted to live a quiet life and see his grandchildren from time to time. Evidently, they were living in Canada because he was barred from returning to the USA. He never missed paying for gas and was a good worker in every way. He even handled a disciplinary problem for me in a way that only he could. That's another story that will end up posted here someday. If people like this story, it'll be sooner rather than later.

The last chapter of our relationship was his applying for a job at the new, up-and-coming Walmart warehouse. The company we were working for didn't pay very well and didn't offer very good hours, so I don't blame him one bit. I left there myself not long after him. The funny part of his getting that job was that he passed a criminal background check because he has no criminal record in Canada.

In the Sauce

I worked for a period of time at the local McDonald's so we could keep putting food on the table. I split time between kitchen duty and maintenance. A new limited-time sandwich had been introduced with its own kind of sauce. I spotted the new condiment bottle and immediately asked the young lady working with me that shift what kind of sauce it was. I do need to know these things if I'm to do my job correctly. Happy to help, she grabbed the squeeze bottle just a bit too hard when she picked it up and launched a little glob of sauce that landed perfectly centred between her eyebrows. I could not look at her during her explanation. 

One of my duties on maintenance was cleaning the ceilings. Once in a while, some of our teenage customers would smack a ketchup packet and get some on the ceiling. That was rare. What wasn't rare was blobs of Big Mac sauce and McChicken sauce ending up on the kitchen ceiling. I had to ask the guys how on earth that was happening. We had special dispensers that looked like stubby caulking guns for those sauces. A squeeze of the trigger will give you a perfectly measured amount for the sandwich in question. What I didn't know was that if you drop one on the floor and it lands on the pin, it will fire a generous glob of sauce with considerable force. I didn't see anyone do it, but in a fast-paced environment, it was only a matter of time. I was hurrying to keep up with a flurry of orders with only one other person in the kitchen with me. The McChicken sauce gun got away on me. When it hit the floor, it fired a stream of sauce that left a stripe on my partner, from his McDonald's cap down his shirt and pants all the way to one of his shoes. Nothing hit the ceiling, and nothing ended up on the floor.