Remembering Names

I should have known by the little smirk on my supervisor's face as he walked away that something was up. He just put me in charge of foilers (a type of edging machine). Told me to get all four machines ready, and he would be sending me a full crew of eight men. I hurried to try and get the conveyors loaded so they could get to work as soon as they got to me. 

They arrived as a group. All newbies except for Brent, who was a good worker, and Jerry, who had to be the slowest worker in the building. Had to do a quick orientation for the other six and then paired them up on the machines. Gave Brent someone who looked competent and gave Jerry someone who didn't. The job isn't that complex. One guy puts the work in the machine, the machine does its thing, and then the other guy on the other end of the machine takes it out and stacks it. As long as the first guy puts it in the machine straight and the other guy doesn't bash it on anything on the other end, everything should run well. I get to run back and forth, making sure everything is running properly, bring them palettes of work, and get rid of the ones that are finished.

Since I was going to be telling these guys what to do all shift long, I figured I'd better learn everyone's names. That's when I figured out what the game was. Larry, Terry, Barry, Gary, and a second Jerry. I was holding my breath when I got to the last guy. His name was Brock. I started laughing and told him he was the only new person whose name I was going to remember. I'm sure the supervisor would have made sure they all rhymed if he had the bodies to make that happen.

The shift ended up going well. Just everybody had to get used to being called "hey you!" Brock and I ended up working together for another company a few years later.

 

Tick Tock

 

Ambassador College, the infamous cattle car, one bedroom, sixteen men; I had a top bunk. Colin was in the bottom bunk. We had some pretty strict alarm clock rules. Rule number one was no snooze alarms. Sixteen people? That would have driven us all around the bend. The second rule was that if you had an alarm go off, you had to shut it down within a reasonable amount of time. We had one student who struggled with that. The solution was that his friend would shut off the alarm for him, grab him by the ankles and drag him to the study where he could wake up at his usual pace.

I started off with an old alarm clock I brought from home with me. The off switch was on the back, and all I had to do was park it carefully against the wall. As soon as it went off, I'd be airborne, hit the floor, and push the clock against the wall. Worked great as long as everyone understood to keep the landing pad clear when it sounded. I did land on someone once. Getting slammed early in the morning by a two hundred and ten pound semi-conscious young adult is not a good way to start the day. No problems until my alarm clock went bzzzt and died.

Somebody in the dorm blessed me with a replacement, and I accepted it with some misgivings. It was hard to turn off, and I imagined myself leaping into the void, locating it, and then bashing it repeatedly against things to kill the awful racket it made. I thought I was smart by taking it to bed with me. I figured, if it was lying right next to me, I could drag it under the covers, muffling it while I found the off button. 

Some time in the wee hours of the morning, my mind registered that I'd just bumped it off the edge of the bed. On that side, there was a partition between me and the next bunk, but there was a small gap that went all the way to the floor. That's where I'd pushed it. I knew I had to find this stupid thing because it was set for an early start and no one was going to be happy with me. I crept down to the floor because I figured it went all the way down and wiggled my way between the boxes stored under the beds and started groping around for it. I wasn't having any luck. I stopped and listened. I could hear the guys breathing, my heart pounding, and the ticking of clocks was coming from everywhere. I strained to try to sort through the sound, and I continued to grope around. I was ready to give up and just plan on facing everyone's wrath in the morning. One last thought: maybe it didn't go all the way to the floor. Sure enough, I found it lying on Colin's pillow right next to his head. I am so glad it didn't hit him. I went out after that and got myself a clock a little better suited to my purposes.

It Was a Gusher

Bill, our maintenance man for the shift, squelched his way to the manager's office. He looked like he'd just taken a shower with his uniform on.

    "Krista, there's a pipe leaking in the men's restroom."

I thought the evidence spoke for itself, but Krista had to go with him and see for herself. They came back a few minutes later, and she was now just as soggy as he was. One of the pipes behind the toilet was a little loose, and some customer decided to give it a drop kick. Busted it right off. This wasn't a little trickle. It was leaking like a broken fire hydrant. 

Just find the shut-off valve, clean up, and everything is fine, right? Wrong. The shut-off was in a little maintenance closet that we lost the key to almost a year earlier. It took a while for them to get in there. I'm not even sure how that finally happened. I'd been pulled out of the kitchen and was busy with the snow shovel, trying to send as much water as I could out the side door of the restaurant. Someone built a dam with rags to keep it from invading the kitchen. At its worst, there were places in the lobby where the water was close to four inches deep. We had to shut down until we managed to get on top of things. Someone came in and fixed the pipe. I got to wipe down the walls and ceiling in the restroom and then helped mop up the rest. That was the cleanest the floor got in the entire time I worked there.

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.