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ISSUE 4 - WORK

CONTENTS

Message From the Editor
The Bottom Line:
All Play & No Work

THE REGULARS
IN BOX
Readers write: "I read what I thought was not going to be disgusting," one of our admirers writes.

Lost and Found
Alex Mackenzie discovers an innocent picture of a girl and a carrot behind the local stripmall.

DEFINING THE TERMS
The Devil's Work is Never Done
In the tradition of the Devil's Dictionary, Chuck Blade provides us with some expansive definitions of "work" we're unlikely to come across in the Webster's. 

WORK work WORK work WORK work
Thematically linked confessionals 
from the Barbed Wire stable:
Making Change
Kathy Paris takes us on a tour of her working life. "My mother advised me to marry a rich man. My dad told me I would make a good Safeway cashier," she remembers.

My Life in the Bush of Worker Bees
Ridge Rockfield had a government desk job but he gave it all up so he could bury his shit on the west coast."The pleasure of relief and a fresh wind playing across my ass never failed to wake me thoroughly into the new day," he pines.

My Brilliant Career
With an aimlessness that only a degree in Philosophy can inspire, Paul Levine takes a job with a suit, a salary, a business card and a company car. "I'd go from one end of town to the other, stop for a coffee, visit a friend or two, and check in at the office once in a while," he tells us.

Boiling Oil
Jeff McDonald spends a week working for Mr. Lube. " I should have divined that their eagerness to employ me had little to do with my strong interpersonal and teamworking skills," he laments.

The Smell of The Barn
A pre-pubescent Wes Robertson spends the summer working at a dairy farm. "Farming is not just a matter of taking care of animals; it also sometimes involves killing them," he recalls.

Naked at Lollygaggers
Leah London and her bar-room co-workers spent some time together after work."For some reason, that night we were feeling giddy," she admits.

Frozen Roadie
Meredith Lowe worked backstage at the Ottawa Winterlude festival. "All the spotlights were perpetually shaking because we were shivering so violently, she tells us. "Luba looked like she had a halo with a nervous tic."

Blockbuster
Walter Melnyk used to work as a movie reviewer, but now he's reluctant to even enter a movie theatre. "I'm bored," he says. "And I haven't even finished the buttery-topping of my $4 popcorn."

Survey Sales Slob
Despite his aversion to strangers lingering on his property, Ed Wrench lets a door-to-door surveyor into his house. "I became entirely focused on this little bit of spittle on his lower lip which clung to the upper lip and stretched until it broke," he recalls.



Message From the Editor
The Bottom Line - All Play & No Work
In terms of readership, the last issue - FIRST FUCK/WORST FUCK/NO FUCK , has been the most successful to date, attracting over three times more readers than any of our previous outings and giving some credence to the alarmists who claim that people are on the Internet largely for sex.
The theme for the current issue provides a chance for the writers to mull over the time they've spent in working scenerios, under the watchful eye of employers, presumably not having sex. As a result, the orgasms per issue ratio has slowed to a crawl. Out of all the writers, only Ridge Rockfield manages to find time in his working day to fit in the occasional wank.
Work and sex do have their similarities, though: almost everyone participates in them and most can't really explain why they bother. To help us think more about what work really means, Chuck Blade provides us with a revisionist dictionary definition with his The Devil's Work is Never Done. 
While, as Jeff McDonald shows us in Boiling Oil and Meridith Lowe spotlights in Frozen Roadie, work can be a purely pragmatic (and often hideously degrading) means to an end, Kathy Paris' Making Change examines the widely held belief that work is an expression of a person's value.
My own My Brilliant Career outlines the pitfalls of taking jobs you don't want (a habit of a lifetime), while Wes Robertson fondly remembers a job he would have taken had he not even been paid in The Smell of The Barn. Leah London's Naked at Lollygaggers is a cautionary tale for bar owners everywhere who fail to check in on their staff after closing. And to round things out, Ed Wrench takes a view from the other side of work when he encounters someone whose job it is to interrupt his time off in Survey Sales Slob. 
We welcome contributions for future issues to paull@istar.ca as long as you keep in mind that we have low standards and if you don't meet them your submission will not be published. Feel free to throw your story ideas in our direction if you're uncertain about their suitability. The theme for the next issue is VIOLENCE.
We also welcome your feedback. Please address all correspondence to paull@istar.ca

Paul Levine 
Vancouver, Canada 
September 1997



INBOX

AVOID ANYTHING DISGUSTING
I can't remember why I came here. Something about BayWatch? Well, even
if my motives aren't pure, I came, I saw, I digested. I read what I
felt was not going to be disgusting, and found it to be humorous, even
though the illustrations for Issue 4 leave a little to be desired. They
may have been thematically on track, but they seemed unnecessarily
vulgar. I thought the layout was great, very readable, and the animated
gifs are a nice touch. If you really want contributions, tell us what
the next theme is. Consider yourself bookmarked.
Insane John Wayne <ijw@braindamage.com>

IN THE MOOD
I was in the mood for reading some offbeat short stories this morning so I went cruising for ezines and found Barbed Wire #4. Just wanted to drop you a line to let you know I enjoyed the four or five stories I read. Please forward my admirations to Lyn Chick, Sian Young, Adrian Mack, and Laurie Drukier. I bookmarked Barbed Wire and hope to return again. 
Keep up the good work,
-Bob
rjmatter@internetmci.com



 
The Devil's Work is Never Done
By Chuck Blade

WORK (werk) n. 1. The pursuit of identity through the accumulation of money: the micro-economics of self-actualization. Productive compulsiveness wherein the toils of A are the means by which B achieves its end. An inscrutable state of affairs whose agreeable results lead many to dire conclusions. The practice of selling one's credibility for future considerations. The expenditure of energy in order to overcome the resistance of thinking, (all work and no play; never does a stroke of work; never liked, will do no, work); at ~, preoccupied with ones own affairs; set to ~, the illusion of purpose via the manufacture of desire. (Etym.) Teutonic philosophy that promised emancipation through the abandonment of all hope. 2. (Phys.) An exertion of force producing change (convert heat into work) often resulting from a violent or determined effort between opposing persons seeking the same livelihood. 3. Thing done by work, result of action upon nothing leading to nowhere; life's ~, white collar conceit, 1st cousin to the New Years resolution. The accidental wealth that comes from a career disguised as philanthropy.
...Surely living for oneself, amassing individual wealth or fighting to stay on top of the pack is no way to live. Your personality and your worth become defined by what you own rather than by what you are... Life without principle is devoid of meaning. We have tasted life based upon principle and now have no desire to ever live otherwise again. You do not know what happiness is until you have lived up to your highest.
Rev. Jim Jones

6. A state of being which occupies the time between sleep and those activities designed to help take your mind off things so that you can sleep. 7. ( Rel.) A sectarian conspiracy designed to rob the Devil of his due and place it in the hands of his managers (the work of converting the heathen). An eight hour daily sentence, often more, served for the crimes of convenience; ~ out, treating the body with violence so that it can sustain higher and more prolonged degrees of such violence. ( colloq.) A euphemism for the time spent in an athletic facility discussing work. ( Ling.) A conciliatory dialogue wherein two parties discuss a point until it can be determined who is the clear winner; ~ load, the fabled logic of the ass and the carrot. The colonisation of sacred time by machine time:
Sixty men can do sixty times the work of one man.
If one man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds,
then it should take sixty men one second to dig a posthole.

8. A necessary reduction in human capabilities creating specialization thereby eliminating utility. 9. Something which must be done in order to claim the right not to do it; a good day's ~ A dialectical conundrum in that a good day is generally regarded as one excluding the responsibilities of work.
All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life and degraded human life into a material force. - Karl Marx

10. (Econ.) A unit of measure in Social Darwinism that is inversely related to the value of its subject. A good day's work for Jane means sucking ten cocks a day to afford her child's daycare but a good da'ys work for John means sucking his boss's cock once to get his choice of vacation time; ~man, an archaic phrase no longer in common usage. ( derog.) The dog who returns to sniff its own excrement.
The machine you go into as a pig and come out a sausage. - Ambrose Bierce

Chuck Blade had a good job once.



Making Change
By Kathy Paris

Work is a measure of my value. Not the only one, but one that is held up in our society as the yard stick of success. I grew up believing that work would be an expression of who I am. My dad worked and my mom stayed at home. They are good people who believe that Unions make life better. They always told me to try my best but intimated that I shouldn't want too much. At 17, preparing for my foray into the world, my mother advised me to marry a rich man. My dad told me I would make a good Safeway cashier (read Union). The shadow of their assessment of my value in the world has dogged me through-out my working career.
The obese high school counselor wedged in behind her standard issue desk fills the corner of her tiny, airless office. "What would you like to be?", she asks through thick, pink lipstick that matches her pink shift, her globby feet stuffed into pink pumps. "I think I'd like to be a lawyer." Her small blue eyes widen in surprise. "Why, dear, you need math for that and you know you can't..haven't...well, is there anything else?" She watches the teenaged girl shrug. "Listen, let me show you how to make change. I know you have a little trouble with numbers, but I think you will find this fairly easy. Here, if I bought something for $16.98...". Her voice wraps the girl in kindless pity.
My first real job was in Calgary, selling clothing for a retail chain store in a suburban mall. My previous work experience consisted of picking tree fruit in the Okanagan. My interest in mixing and matching clothes for other women turned out to be zero.
The back room is a goddam mess. She is standing in an abandoned riot of hangers, packing materials, cardboard boxes, store clothes, staff coats and purses. Her job is to sort this disaster. She begins to organize, listlessly tossing yards of plastic into a pile. The new fall styles are in, looking fresh and new beside the old stock collecting dust in the store room. On impulse, she recklessly stuffs a grey pair of corduroy pants into her sports bag, not bothering to remove the tag. Nervously, she tucks the bag under her arm and shouts out, "I'm going on my break" and scoots out the back door into the long, brightly light hall that joins onto the main mall walkway. Crossing the storefront, she gulps, hoping that no one has noticed her bag. At the other end of the mall, she hides the bag in a convenient shopping locker, and for a dime, locks her guilt and the pair of pants away until the end of the working day.
My next job was selling running shoes for a sports retailer. On my first day, the male manager of the store had me try on the running clothing, so I would understand the fit and the fabrics. Later I learned that he would move to a certain spot in the store when the change rooms were occupied by young women and lean over to tie his shoes. Apparently there was a crack in the door that allowed him to see them trying on shorts and tops.
She sits sideways on the fitting stool, her legs to one side instead of straddling it like a horse. Her jeans are too tight, but she doesn't really notice the discomfort. In front of her an "athlete" tells her his problem. The arch in the shoe cuts into his foot. Could he try on the other brand? Weaving through the grasping and grunting of the Saturday afternoon crowd, she escapes into the stockroom. In sudden refuge, the white noise of the air conditioning blends with the easy listening music drifting from a tinny radio. The dust from the shoe boxes leaves grimy lines of dirt embedded in the dry skin of her hands. Fresh blood seeps from another torn hangnail. Stopping for a moment in the dark of the aisle, hidden by the stacks of Nike boxes, she is blissfully, but momentarily out of the rush. She is reminded of the recurring dream she has about the store. In it she is searching for a pair of shoes for a customer but in the way of dreams she can't find what she is looking for. The sense of searching fruitlessly echos into dej vu. She sighs, pulls the appropriate box and returns to the fray. The store front is beginning to reek of old, sweaty runners.
I went back to school. At SAIT I attempted to "follow my bliss" and become a film maker. The commitment hit me like a brick. The expectations were overwhelming and I pissed the opportunity away in a flurry of drugs and alcohol.
Hey Mike, let me see what's in the trunk." Mike sways unsteadily, a bottle of rye swinging from his neck by a necktie. He looks like he has gone off the deep end. He has shed most of his clothing in the late autumn afternoon, wearing only a tight pair of shorts with black socks and shoes that are specially made for his maimed foot. Sweat and drool run down his chin followed by rivulets of rye. His eyes roll, then focus on the small, grey rental car. "Yah, Yah, commere. Lemme show ya my rock garden." He limps over to the car and proudly pops the trunk. She looks at the moss and plants and rocks that line the cavity of the car and looks back at him. "You're crazy, man.", she says. Mike laughs. "Here, have sommore T." Refined, crystallized THC. "Killer. Hereitsforyou. A present." About 3am she finds herself under the glare of the streetlight, reciting poetry while standing in front of the car with the rock garden. An unexpected wave of grief washes over her and a vague sense of loss presses into her awareness. 

I returned to retail with my tail between my legs and swore to make it work. In 1984, I moved to Vancouver and landed a job in the heart of Kits. The store owner was an aging entrepreneur from Edmonton with a mane of dyed blonde hair, an artificial tan, who smoked stinking Afghani cigarettes, and drove a Pantera. He needed buyers and managers and my long experience in running shoe retail heaven was the ticket. In the interview, his last question was, "Are you planning to get pregnant this year?" Crossing the line became his specialty with me; verbal abuse, manipulation and sexual harassment soon followed.
The telephone rings, cutting through the blackness of a vivid dream. "The store has been broken into and I need you to come down and tell me what is missing." She glances at the clock through sleep driven eyes. 1:30am. "Yah, sure.. I guess." "Come right away." She stumbles out of bed, more awake that she wants to be and after peeing, slips into jeans and a t-shirt. She wraps an elastic around hair. She follows the smell of sweat and alcohol to the living room, where her husband sprawls on the couch. The TV casts irregular flashes of light on his pale, round face. She leaves, knowing that turning off the TV will wake him. She drives from Burnaby to Kitsilano where the lurid pink and blue neon lights of the store logo finally reflect from her windscreen. Curiously, there are no police cars, no activity. She opens the side door with her key and makes her way up the darkened stairwell. Only the lights in the office at the end of the hall are on and she wonders why there is no commotion, no people. A man steps out of the office and beckons her. Personal alarm bells begin in her head and her heart sinks, suddenly aware that this is not what she has been led to believe. He escorts her into his office and sits down on the couch indicating that she should sit beside him. A mirror on the coffee table boasts a small envelope and four lines of cocaine drawn with razor blade. A rolled up $100 bill awaits usage. She knows she is standing on the edge of an abyss.
All of us assessed my value at the same level - exploitable. It has taken me a long time, 10 solid years of hard work on myself, to recognize my value. There have always been small pockets of respite, people in the work place who treated me with respect, but overwhelmingly the workplace has been abusive and unhappy or stultifyingly dull.
At 36, I have a growing sense myself and have come back to my original vision of work: an expression of who I am. I have shifted into a career that allows me to expand my talents in a care filled environment, in the company of people who treat me with respect. They encourage my participation because they see me as human, not as the objectification of some sick or demented need of their own. I've learned to change my destructive behaviour for less extreme, more positive activities. I am more aware of my inner voice. I trust the right people. I make better choices.
I've learned different ways to measure my success. Not by the amount printed on my paycheque, but by the way I feel at the end of the day. Normal people and rewarding employment are hard to get used to, but I'm working on it.

Kathy Paris rarely recites poetry in the middle of the night.


 

My Life in the Bush of Worker Bees
By Ridge Rockfield

Through university I never had what I thought were the traditional jobs one had between school terms: tree-planting, life-guarding, summer-camp counselling -- the sort of job I always wanted but never pursued. Instead, I had office jobs in office towers because I was taking an arts co-op degree, and there was no where else to stick me but in a cubicle. The work placements were supposed to be serious and career-related: in reality they were empty spaces for university students that had to be filled and any lukewarm body would have done. My first job was minding the mechanical engineering library of some subsection of some division of the federal public works department: I passed the time looking at catalogues of valves and flanges and other interchangeable machined parts. No one used the library, but I kept it updated and even had some sort of mindless improvement project on the go. For almost seven years after I climbed the office tower ladder, getting better jobs and better pay but not being any less bored. When my long-term live-in relationship with my girlfriend finally came apart at the seams, I took the opportunity to trash my career too.
I went west to BC and worked a season as a treeplanter. I was the oldest member of the crew and the most unproductive, but I loved being outdoors and shitting there. It was like a benefit or perk. The pleasure of relief and a fresh wind playing across my ass never failed to wake me thoroughly into the new day. My work, however, suffered from a lack of concentration. Instead of hammering in seedlings like an inhuman flesh machine I watched the shape-shifting clouds fly high overhead. I saw salmon and women, serene and peaceful, swimming upstream to spawn somewhere cool and shady. I longed to join them, but my sweat-swamped, pain-wracked body could not follow. All I knew was that my essential happiness was tied to the comfort of my bodily functions. Money didn't matter: but shit did.
From the clearcuts of northern B.C. I went to the wheatfields of Saskatchewan. I gained a job as a farmhand on a family farm for the fall harvest. The family was welcoming and devout, but we were in close quarters and I had to find some privacy to sweat out my sexual frustrations. The only place was the cab of the grain truck I drove from field to field, following the combine harvesters. At night, the combines would float like UFOs in clouds of bright lights and swirling dust: I would have ten or fifteen minutes before having to rumble out and take on a load of grain. It was in these brief breaks that I would stumble down off the vinyl bench seat and unload my own seed into the stubble. Don't get me wrong: I didn't have my hand on the stick shift the whole time I was there but it was a pressing problem that needed handling.
At the end of harvest I had just enough money to begin anew in Winnipeg, the closest city. A year later, my soul freeze-dried, I was back on the west coast and had no job nor any prospect of one. My friend Paul in Tofino had got a job as a deckhand on a shrimp boat and I thought that sounded cool, so I decided I'd go to sea too. I went down to the False Creek fish docks one morning in mid-June and found a fisherman who needed a deckhand, but not in any hurry. Archie was short and barrel-chested, a white-haired red-faced rooster who looked to be in his fifties. He wasn't too impressed with me, but after a week of constant badgering and my passing the skill-testing question "How do you clean a fish?" he relented and hired me.
We left Vancouver for Ucluelet and the west coast of Vancouver Island and began fishing. We were up every morning just before the sun rose. At first to gain a few more minutes of sleep I'd wait until Archie had fired up the big diesel engine, but I quickly tired of being rattled out of sleep by its head-splitting hammering roar. I was always dressed-changing clothes was pointless until I could get near a shower-so the first order of business was to go out on deck and shit in the old steel bucket we reserved especially for the task. The head didn't work, and Archie didn't care to fix it, so I learned to take my constitutional under drizzle and in big swells. For some reason the sight of my shit twisting slowly down into the inky water was oddly mesmerizing-my waste becoming food for something below that I might well eat sometime in the future.
The days were the same: set the lines, pull the lines, kill the fish, clean and ice them. Over and over and over and over. The fishing was poor so many days the lines came up empty save for a few coho or chinook. Sometimes we'd catch a halibut or a dogfish, and once we caught a blue shark almost four feet long. Archie pulled it up over the transom and while I was exclaiming how beautiful it was (the skin was a deep metallic blue) he pulled his knife and slit its white belly open. The guts burst out and Arch dropped the shark back into the water.
To vent my anger I began to find pleasure in gaffing the 30- and 40-pound chinook we caught. I was equipped with a short fast nasty and pictured Archie's head as I took aim. It was like batting practice: it was all about rhythm and swing and having a good eye. I would handline the fish to the side of the boat and try to keep the top of the fish's head momentarily still as it lay alongside. Then with a smooth swing I would sink the gaff into the top of the black meaty head and heave the fish quickly up and around my shoulder and into the boat where it would land on the deck with a solid thwack. Performed in one motion it was a beautiful thing to do. Archie who was 72 (to my surprise) swung a mean gaff. I admired his physical strength and resilience, and yes his indifference. He was an Anglo like me, and I saw the mean spirit lurking there too, the shade of greed.
All of this work left me completely unsuited for any sort of "real" job. I was now too independent, had valued shit over money, and was thus fallen. I couldn't get back up. And I am still on the ground, still digging cat holes to bury my shit, still dreaming of mighty arcs that smooth the way to the end.

Ridge Rockfield killed no fish during the writing of this article.




My Brilliant Career
By Paul Levine

I'm sitting at a table in a Vancouver Airport hotel, dazed because it's 8am, itchy in a suit I haven't worn since a friend dragged me to another friend's wedding a few years back, and I'm watching a small, bald man splutter for twenty minutes without pausing, without taking a breath, delivering a manic soliloquy to his listless breakfast partner. Normally I would enjoy such a spectacle. Perhaps I might even stay longer than planned, luxuriously sipping extra coffees as I watch the scene unfold. But, unfortunately, I just happen to be the listless breakfast partner and I know that eventually it's going to be my turn to speak.
I'm here for a job interview, and this one is the tail end of a series of attempts to secure legitimate, career-oriented employment after completing a decidedly non-vocational degree in Philosophy. Over the course of my five years studying the works of the great minds of western civilization, I'd spent the summers vacuuming, Windexing and washing the rental cars of the bastard tourists of Vancouver. I'd never really considered that this work might provide me with the foundation for a more credible form of employment until I came across a newspaper ad with my name on it. EXCITING OPPORTUNITY WITH PROGRESSIVE, AGGRESSIVE, INTERNATIONAL RENTAL CAR COMPANY SOON TO SETUP SHOP IN VANCOUVER. COMPETITIVE SALARY. COMPANY CAR.
With no real idea of what the job actually entailed and figuring I had nothing to lose, I put together a vaguely worded resume replacing "Car washer" with "Service Attendant" and my real job description with something nebulous and rife with steroidal adjectives. I enclosed a cover letter outlining my immense knowledge of the inner workings of the car rental industry, saying that I had ideas about how the business could be run more efficiently and profitably (the only suggestion I could think of was "keep the cars clean" but what the hell, I had some time). A few days after I mailed my package the phone rang. "I'm very interested in talking to you," the voice said. "Can we meet for breakfast?"
I obviously shouldn't have taken the little bald man quite so literally since it became quickly obvious that his idea of the morning meal consisted entirely of endless cups of hotel coffee. As I sat in front of him surreptitiously eyeing other people's waffles and eggs in the vain hope of getting a contact buzz, I was starting to lose track of what he was saying. From what I could figure out, he had recently bought a car rental franchise and was opening up a couple of offices in Vancouver. He had little idea of the business and needed help getting the customers in. The job, it seemed to me, was well suited for an unambitious MBA or an enthusiastic upstart with a Business Diploma, but it was a bit of a stretch for a Philosophy grad with an intimate knowledge of industrial cleaning supplies.
"What we're looking for here is not very difficult to understand," he spurted. "We just need people to rent our cars. Is that too much to ask for gawd's sake? And I just don't have time to take care of all the things that need to be done to make this thing work. Christ, I wish I did. I'd do whatever it took, I tell ya. If I had to run naked in a hard hat down the highway I'd do it to rent those damn cars. Whatever it takes."
He was wearing un-ironed cotton pants and a short sleeved buttoned shirt of a restrained Hawaiian variety, the sartorial stylings of your typical rural British Columbian entrepreneur. I predicted that he'd never set foot out of continental North America and that his idea of the high-life might be steaks and beers at the Black Angus. There was a crudeness to his demeanor that would make it difficult for him to be accepted by the big city business community. I surmised that he was looking for a young guy in a suit to represent the company, to find out what his competitors were doing, mimic their strategies and rent some goddammed cars.
"So whaddayathink?" he asked.
We'd managed to go the entire "interview" without him asking me a single question until now, and it set me back a bit. I'd recently studied a number of books on answering interview questions and was poised to respond with balletic grace to "what are your strengths and weaknesses?" and I had a sparkling revisionist slant on my former employment I was just begging to start in on. But "whaddayathink" gave me a little too much pause for thought and not wanting him thinking me catatonic I blurted out, "sounds good".
He seemed pleased. "Well, good," he said. "You know something, Paul. I like you."
I repressed the reflex to say "I like you too" and smiled instead. He smiled back. "How about we start you on Monday," he suggested outlining a highly attractive wage and incentive package. "Of course, we give you a company car," he added.
I'd taken jobs I didn't want before. Hell, I'd never wanted any job I'd taken before. Why break with tradition now, I thought. "Sounds good," I said.
The job turned out to be pretty straightforward. Being the "Marketing Manager" for a local franchise of an international car rental company did not entail, as I might have imagined, sitting in a boardroom smoking cigars and making key decisions about how to spend my enormous advertising budget. Rather, my chief function was to drive around in my company car visiting desk clerks at hotels and service managers at body shops offering them commissions for referring customers.
I initially enjoyed the novelty of going to ten mini-meetings a day, cruising in my suit in my Chevy Cavaliar with the window open and the stereo blasting between pitches. I developed a radically succinct sales pitch that both impressed and relieved all my sales victims who were familiar with the more traditionally long-winded confirmations of the obvious. "Listen," I'd say. "A company hired me to tell you that they've got cars to rent to your customers and that they'll pay you a referral fee. Here are some pictures of the cars. Give us a call."
While I knew my efforts were having some effect on rentals, I certainly couldn't claim credit for the sudden upsurge in sales brought on by the summer tourists who clear every car rental lot in town during the high season. Yet somehow my boss, in his naiveté of the business and his commitment to convince himself that I was a good investment, insisted upon making me the sole cause of the increase in cash flow.
"Excellent work, Paul. Whatever you're doing is obviously working," he said. And with that he gave me a bonus cheque for $500 and sent me back out to do the rounds again.
At this point it was far too soon to re-visit anyone so instead of driving around from meeting to meeting I chose to just drive around. I'd go from one end of town to the other, stop for a coffee, visit a friend or two, and check in at the office once in a while. "You're doing great," my boss would say. "Thanks, I'm off to a meeting," I'd reply and hit the road again.
As summer turned to fall and rentals dried up, I was pressured to perform. Selling, I discovered, was a game of chance. The more people you talked to, the more chances your efforts would have some result. There was also a luck factor. Once in a while you'd be in the right place at the right time and through no real effort of your own you'd be a hero. I decided to play the odds, avoid seeing too many people, and hope the ones I did see fell into the luck factor.
One of the strategies car rental companies use for ensuring steady rentals is to setup exclusive contracts with large hotels whose employees are then obligated to refer customers their way. Opportunities to make these kind of deals are few and far between since the big rental agencies are always somehow in bed with the major hotel chains. Nonetheless, I would sometimes visit hotels that had an exclusive contract, offering them my company's cars for emergency back up. As part of my banter, I'd ask them how their relationship was with the sole supplier. Usually I'd receive a polite brush-off, but one day at a particularly ritzy downtown hotel the dice were in my favour. "We're sick of them," the desk clerk told me referring to an international car rental agency with a reputation for "trying harder". With that, I scheduled a meeting with the hotel manager and had an exclusive contract signed within the week.
Once again I was celebrated for my hard work and dedication to the company's success. So once again I gave myself permission to slack off, relying on more chance episodes to keep me in the good books. Between my luck and my boss' inattention to detail I maintained the delicate balance that kept me employed, my employers happy, and my car driving around aimlessly. After a while, I took to sleeping late and then, as the day was ending, made an appearance at the office. Eventually, they gave me a pager so they could contact me on my travels. While I initially thought this might put a damper on my freedom, it actually had the opposite effect. Now I could show up less at the office. If someone there wanted to talk to me they'd just page and I'd give them a call. I participated in numerous conversations from fictional locations across the Lower Mainland from the comfort of my apartment during this period. During lunch with my father one day, a page came in. "Looks like you've got a pretty cushy number here," he said surprising me that he'd noticed. I called the office from a payphone. My boss sounded uncharacteristically serious. "I need you to come in and see me this afternoon," he said.
"What do you want to talk about?" I asked.
"We'll discuss it when you get here," he replied.
I arrived at the office ready to be told that my boss had finally realized that my presence on the payroll had no direct or indirect bearing on the number of cars being rented. He, of course, would have no real evidence regarding my premeditated aversion to completing any tasks tangentially related to my job description. Instead, he would probably tell me that the company needed to do some navel gazing, to more carefully plan their marketing strategy, and that they would let me go for now, perhaps bringing me on board in the future in a more casual capacity, should I fail to find more permanent employment elsewhere.
I liked the idea of no longer participating in this farce of a job but I was also reticent to reenter the ranks of the unemployed. At the time, having an aimless job seemed somehow far superior to being aimlessly unemployed, although now I realize there's little difference.
"Listen, Paul," my boss began. "You've been with us a while now and you've done some good things for us. When I first started this mess, I didn't know my asshole from my elbow in this goddammed business. Now we've got some idea of what we're doing and we're looking more into the future. We can only learn from what we do and get better at it, you following me?"
I nodded, forcing a grim smile. He continued.
"Money's coming in but our expenses are high, as you can imagine. But that's not gonna stop us moving ahead. What we're doing here, Paul, is we're purchasing another car rental operation with outlets in small towns across the province. Now you've been doing a job for us here helping us get those cars on the road, and we're gonna have plenty work to do with all these small towners to watch over."
I was puzzled why he was telling me all this. Did he want to relish the pleasure of firing me while the organization headed into an expansion. I asked him to tell me where he was headed.
"You don't bullshit, that's what I like about you, Paul. Well, let me tell you, those guys in those small towns, well, they need a little kickstart to get them going, if you know what I mean, and I'd like you to be the one to give it to them."
He then outlined a plan to increase my salary and send me on a grand tour of the BC Interior and Vancouver Island so that I could pass on the secrets of my success to his new business partners scattered across the province.
I was dumbstruck. No matter how braindead these small town hicks were, they were guaranteed not to warm to the idea that they could increase profits by driving around town aimlessly.
"So whaddayathink?" he asked.

"Er, sounds good," I said.
Over the next couple of months, I took an all expenses paid trip across the BC interior visiting car rental franchise owners offering them the wisdom of my experience in big city marketing. I had mercilessly little to say so I always suggested a lunch meeting in the hope that we'd spend most of the time ordering and eating. In lieu of any meaningful advice, I'd prepared some handouts - lifted from one of the companies I used to clean cars for - outlining some basic strategies for marketing car rental services. Most of the owners seemed very pleased that they had something to take away with them, that they'd had a free lunch with a representative from the city, and that they'd had the opportunity to talk with someone new. Afterwards, I'd head to my hotel, flick on the TV and await the dinner hour.
I arrived back in Vancouver to glowing reports of my efforts. The franchise owners, I was told, were motivated and poised to promote their businesses. After the trials of business travel, I was glad to be back in the city but was not looking forward to driving around in my company car again. Once more my boss took me aside to let me in on the progress of the business.
"We've taken over some outlets in three of the local suburbs here and I've been talking to the operators about having you going in there to give them a bit of a boost," he said. "We'd also need you to cover our ass, too, so you'd continue doing the hotels and all that."
This looked suspiciously like the kind of work I'd have a very hard time avoiding. Keeping my immediate boss under the illusion that I was devoted, resourceful and industrious would not be difficult, but what were the odds that the other operators would be so inattentive. More than likely, they'd been in business long enough to know what results to expect and notice when they weren't being delivered.
I had to admit that I was riding this job out like some bad relationship, doing what I could to emulate the idleness of unemployment while enjoying the shallow legitimacy of simply having a job. All my work experiences to date had been dutiful exchanges of my time for money, and the only intrinsic satisfaction I had received from any of them was in avoiding doing the work. Dressing up the job with a suit, a salary, a business card and a company car had done nothing to appease my desire for meaningful work.

"So whaddayathink?" my boss piped in.
That moment I entered the ranks of the unemployed devoted to the idea that if I was going to let my life slip by idly I'd do it on my own time without the veneer of a job, a paycheque, and the counterfeit momentum gainful employment can provide. While I've avoided taking any job since that I haven't wanted, the feeling that I'm a prisoner of whatever work I'm doing and my instinct to avoid the requirements of the job description have never really left me. The solution, I have slowly discovered, is to work for someone who understands my reluctance to work, gives me plenty of time off, pays me well, and truly appreciates whatever small efforts I eventually do get around to putting in. This is why I work for myself.

Paul Levine no longer takes any job he's offered and works for himself to avoid deceiving his employer. 




Boiling Oil
By Jeff McDonald

I usually don't begrudge server people the tips they get - tips make a minimum wage into a livable wage. But why don't we tip pump jocks? They're making six bucks an hour too, and a sharp one can save you time and money, while a bad wait person can make what's supposed to be a pleasant dining experience into an exercise in epicurean frustration.
And the question applies even more strongly to those poor souls in the pit at the quick oil change joints scattered along our nation's streets, so pleasing to the eye and convenient too. Why don't we tip them? They deserve it as much as a sullen, indifferent, or worse, obsequious wait person, even if the service they provide doesn't directly affect the quality of your dinner date, and concomitantly, the likelihood of romance blossoming or lust running rampant. The week I spent working at a Mr. Lube had to be one of the worst weeks of my life. Everyone has their work stories from hell, and torture isn't too strong a word to use to describe those jobs, but not many actually involve boiling oil. Working in the pit at Mr. Lube does.
It was the summer after high school, which I had botched tremendously. Times were tough in Alberta that summer - the boom had busted, and you couldn't pick whichever job you wanted the way you could for the twenty or so years previously. I had gone to a Canada Employment Centre, and they sent me to this Mr. Lube on the city's south side. They hired me on the spot - I should have seen it coming. I should have divined that their eagerness to employ me had little to do with me and my strong interpersonal and teamworking skills, which they didn't ask me about, and lots to do with desperation to get someone, anyone, down there into the pit. Which is where I found myself moments later.
It's grim. You stand on this metal catwalk which is covered with oil, not surprisingly. Your tools are hanging on hooks around you; wrenches for the oil pan bolt, the filter wrench, and a grease gun. A car pulls in and above you; you get a blast of fetid, superheated engine air on top of your head. You've got a few seconds to try to get the oil pan bolt off, and pull the adjustable bowl thing up and under the pan. As you loosen the bolt, oil heated to about 95 degrees Celcius begins to trickle out and down your hand and arm. When the bolt finally comes off, the oil splashes down into the bowl, and some usually splashes up again and onto you, your face, into your hair, wherever. Then you've got to find and take off the oil filter; it's greasy and hot too. You put a new one on, and then it's time to grab the grease gun and fill the zerks with fresh lubricant. You've got to get each one, and most of them are in awkward spots requiring you to rest your hands and arms on various superheated metal engine parts. Then you do it again. And again. And then you do it again. And then once more, and then again. For ten hours. After your shift's over, you spend about 45 minutes cleaning oil off the catwalk -- unpaid. The supervisor was an asshole, and my co-workers were dullards, if I may be charitable.
Anyway, it's no fun, and every time I think of that bleak week, I think someone should unionize the poor bastards who are stuck down there. I was lucky; the posties had walked out that summer, and when that strike ended, Canada Post hired a bunch of people like me to deal with the backlog of letters. Working there has its own horrors, but boiling oil isn't one of them.

Jeff McDonald is a good tipper.



The Smell of the Barn
By Wes Robertson

The summer I turned twelve I refused to go to camp. My refusal was based on an experience at YMCA daycamp the summer before, where fifteen-year-olds had used bows and arrows to ventilate the tents that we younger kids were being taught to put up--and they were the counsellors! I insisted I would be much happier staying home for the summer riding around on my cool red banana-seat bike, and hanging out at Mac's Milk with my friend Mike. Mike was thirteen, and should have been going into grade eight, but for some reason that was never explained to me he was not being allowed back. Instead he was being sent to re-do grade seven at a private boarding school on the other side of Ottawa. He didn't seem too concerned about this, and I thought he was pretty cool.
However, I'm sure my parents were not happy at the prospect of my spending all summer under Mike's influence. Unlike my younger brother, they knew they would never get me to go to camp; this was a kid who had fired his piano teacher himself! So when my grandparents, who lived on a farm an hour south of the city, mentioned that a nearby dairy farmer was looking for summer help, it must have seemed like a perfect opportunity. The next day we heard that my cousin Rocke (six months older than me) had decided to work at the farm full-time for two months, while living at my grandparents' place. I can't remember now whether I liked the idea from the beginning or had to be persuaded, but within a week of the end of school I was at the mall with mom buying work boots, work gloves, and a baseball cap (Montreal Expos) to keep me from "dying of heat stroke." Boy, I thought those boots were cool. The next weekend we all piled into the Volare and headed out to the country.
My grandparents were not farmers. In fact, until about two years before they had been lifetime urbanites, my grandfather a well-known surgeon and medical professor, and my grandmother a respected Montreal socialite, mother of four, and collector of Victorian children's books. But in 1975 they had given up their house in Ottawa for an 80-acre farm near Kempville. "The farm," as we very originally called it, had an old main house made of solid gray stone, a guest house we called "the cottage," a big pool, and acres of thick forest and wide, rolling fields. Everyone loved the farm, but especially us grandchildren, because we got to drive a tractor, help cut down big trees, swim in the pool, and harass the dairy cows who grazed on part of the property.
The cows were the property of Bill Latourelle, a nearby farmer who grew alfalfa on some of the fields and helped maintain the fences. He was also the one now looking for farmhands. Bill was a quintessential Ontario farmer, with a sunburnt face, beer belly, big callused hands, and CAT hat for every day of the year. He had been born on the farm, taking over the day-to-day operations over from his father ten years earlier. You could tell that Bill honestly liked being a farmer. He had a permanent smile, giving the impression that he was joking around all the time; but in fact ran the farm professionally, keeping the livestock healthy, the buildings in good shape, the costs down, and (I know by experience) the hired hands happy. He had a way of telling us what to do that never sounded like an order. "Well boys," he'd say (he called any group of men "boys," even if his dad was there), "who wants to get started?" Of course, when he put it that way, we all did.
That first weekend we went over to see Bill to finalize the arrangements. After a short discussion it was decided that we would work there for two months, until the beginning of August, for ten dollars a day, plus breakfast and lunch. At that time I got a weekly allowance of five dollars, so ten a day seemed like extravagant riches to me. We settled this while sitting around the farmhouse's big kitchen table: Bill and his fifteen-year-old son Dean, Rocke, me, and our dads. The table had long benches instead of chairs and a big linoleum-covered lazy Susan in the middle with assorted cold pops on it, put there by Bill's wife Marion. I had a Coke (I don't specifically remember this, but I always drank Coke), and sat there feeling very grown up. This was my first job.
On Monday at 6:00 am Granny drove us to work in her blue Dodge Omni that I swear had a top speed of twenty miles per hour even with the pedal pushed to the floor. I still wonder if granddad had it fixed that way so she couldn't hurt herself on those roads. It was dusty, country road all the way there, and I still remember every house and barn and rail crossing we passed, slowly emerging out of the dawn mist. Everything looks different in the early morning. Granny reminded us to always wear our hats and work gloves, to drink lots of water when it got hot, and to call her right away if we wanted to come home for any reason. I think she was more nervous than we were. When we got there the house was quiet and there was no one in the courtyard, but we could hear the thudding of the milking system's air pump in the barn. So we waved good-bye and went inside.
The inside of a working dairy barn is a busy place. Of course there's the rows and rows of big black and white cows, tethered by their neck halters and chewing away thoughtfully on the hay or silage shoveled into the trough in front of them, or drinking from the cow-nose-shaped water fountains between every two stalls. There's also the smell, especially in the summer, of cow and manure and hay dust and milk and diesel oil and a million other things. At first all the smells are impossible to differentiate, but after a few weeks you start to be able to tell them apart, and even detect changes. There's skinny cats roaming all over the place, dogs lying around paying no attention to the cats, thick clouds of bluebottle flies at every gunk-encrusted window, and collections of empty bottles and old hinges and broken tools and papers on every windowsill. And when we walked in that first day there was also Bill, Dean, and another farmhand Dean's age rushing around doing the milking. They were too busy to show us step-by-step what to do, so we just kind of followed them around for a while trying to figure it out. One thing I learned very quickly (but thankfully not the hard way) was to dodge when the cows lifted their tails as we passed.
Bill's farm had a semi-automatic pneumatic milking system. An air pump created a vacuum in a pipe that ran the length of the stalls, with taps every ten feet or so. To milk a cow you first plugged a milker unit (which resembled an octopus with a stainless steel tank for a body) into the pipe via a rubber hose. Then you squeezed the cow's teats (Bill always called them tits, then said "sorry, boys") to get the milk started, wet the rubber nozzles, slid them on, and let it suck away for five minutes or so. When it was done, you closed the vacuum tap, the nozzles dropped off, and you carried the milker in to the "tank room," where you poured it into a big stainless steel tank in which all the milk was stored until it was picked up by the co-op tanker a couple of times a week. The tank had a big motor-controlled paddle in it that continuously stirred the fresh whole milk to keep it from clotting. The tank room always had a sweet, cloying smell which I guess was nice but which I also found unsettling. I actually liked the smell of the barn a lot better, once I got used to it.
When milking was done, which took about two hours, we went in for breakfast. It was by now eight thirty, the time school usually started, and already my boots hurt me so much I had to walk on the balls of my feet to keep the pressure off the red-hot backs of my heels. I didn't tell anyone, of course; I was no wimpy city boy. Breakfasts at the Latourelle household were not for light eaters--stacks of French toast, sausages, scrambled eggs, fried tomatoes, toast, and of course lots of sweet, creamy coffee. Lunch (they called it "supper" for some reason) was the same, only with a slightly different menu, and I remember wondering on that first morning how they could all eat so much food. I never wondered about that again; by the end of the summer I was routinely eating 3 or 4 times as much as I had before--or have since, for that matter.
Every morning began the same way; but what we did for the rest of the day depended on the season, or what needed doing most. When we first started, the big project was to put an addition onto the barn, which was getting old and cramped. Bill didn't need architects, permits, or outside contractors to help him: he and his dad just drew up the plans on a few pieces of paper, bought some cement, lumber and corrugated tin siding, and went to it themselves. They had started a few weeks before we arrived, and already had the foundations dug and forms built, as well as starting to assemble the roof structure on the ground in the back yard. Bill's father had built the original barn, and it looked pretty solid; it was obvious they knew what they were doing.
So, for the first month or so we worked on the barn, making visible progress every day. Sometimes we would have to call in neighbors to help, for example when we raised the pre-formed roof structure into position. One of the most helpful neighbors was Ivan, who lived a couple of miles away and was a relative of some sort to Bill. He was a friendly but very serious type of guy, and hugely strong. I swear he could have picked up a cow if he'd had a reason to. With his help, and of course some tractors, front end loaders, winches, pulleys, and other tools, we had the structure up within a couple of weeks. We then spent a few weeks on finishing: windows, roofing, siding, and interior walls. I clearly remember being hoisted 50 feet up in the air (it was probably only 20) in the bucket of a front end loader to nail on some tin siding. Although I did manage to put some nails in, I remember seriously wondering the whole time if, when I fell, I would die instantly or just be horribly maimed.
To my relief, I made it back down to the ground in one piece. I did get injured in my first week on the job, though--by my new boots. Having never owned work boots before, I wasn't prepared for the breaking-in period, and thought for a few days that burning, bleeding feet were a normal part of farmhand life. One day, though, I couldn't take it any more, and told Bill after lunch that I just couldn't put my boots back on (it was a firm rule that boots came off when you came in the house). One look at my wounded feet told him why, and he got out a pair of Dean's old runners for me to wear for a couple of days. The next time I put on my boots (warily), they had magically molded themselves to the shape of my foot, and I never had any trouble with them again...at least until the day Bill filled everyone's boots with shaving cream while we were eating lunch, and Ivan threw him into the manure pit. But that's a different story.
Hay season began when the barn was nearing completion. For a week or two Bill would head off alone in the afternoon to mow his hay fields, which were scattered around the area. I went out with him once to see how he did it, but it wasn't too exciting--all you do is drive around the field like a Zamboni around an ice rink and mow the crop down into long, wavy piles. The hard work comes when the mown hay has dried, and baling starts. First Bill would drive around the fields with the baler and pack the hay into hundreds of rectangular bales, each held together by two bands of twine. Then the rest of us would show up with a tractor and a big flatbed wagon, and we would drive around the field slowly picking them up and stacking them on the wagon.
There were three jobs available out in the hay field: driving the tractor (easy), stacking the bales on the wagon (hard), or throwing the bales up to the wagon from the ground (very hard). Those bales were at least thirty pounds each, and tossing them fifteen feet in the air to the top of a full wagon was not something that, at twelve, I could do for long and live. But I didn't want to drive the tractor all the time and get teased about being lazy, so I became an acknowledged expert at stacking the bales on the wagon in an interlocking way that prevented them from falling apart. It was usually around 30 degrees out there on the wagon, and with the heat, the exertion, and the monotony of the work I often zoned out and had long, detailed daydreams about ice cream, or water, or swimming. Although I had no idea what I was doing while zoned out, I did some of my best stacking work during those times.
The job didn't finish when we got home with the wagon: that only meant it was time to store all the bales in the hayloft. Three or four of us would climb up the conveyor belt to the loft, then the belt was turned on and the bales would start piling in, one for every three or four rungs. It was kind of cool to start with an almost empty hay loft and end up with one so full that our heads were bumping against the roof. But it was also unbelievably hard, hot, and dusty work, and sometimes we wouldn't finish it and the evening milking until five or six o'clock. At that time there was no better feeling than to go home quickly, change while you were still hot and sweaty, and jump into the cool, blue swimming pool. Often I would go back in after dark, swimming laps underwater, or just floating and watching the moon rise.
Farming is not just a matter of taking care of animals; it also sometimes involves killing them. This is a very basic and natural part of farming, though admittedly not a pretty one. It was at the farm that I learned how accurate the expression "running around like a chicken with your head cut off" really was--although you don't usually let them run around much. Instead, you hang them up by their feet before cutting their head off so that they will thrash around for five minutes or so and conveniently drain themselves of blood. While I was there they also slaughtered a cow, which I didn't personally witness, and a pig, which I did.
Short of actual killing, there were also a lot of other gory tasks of a veterinary nature to be done. The most dramatic was castrating piglets. The operation itself is very simple--hold the piglet between your knees, make two slits in the groin with a scalpel, push the legs together to pop the "prairie oysters" out, slice the connective tissue, and throw them to the dogs. It's simple and necessary, but disturbing to witness for the first time, as the sound the piglets made during the operation was an unearthly high pitched whining squeal that sometimes sounded almost like a human baby. I wasn't responsible for doing the surgery, but had to catch the piglets and hand them over for the operation. I felt badly about that.
On the other hand, there were some animals that I didn't feel sorry for--like gophers. Farmers hate gophers intensely because gopher holes in fields are very serious obstructions for tractors, having been known to break axles and steering struts. And when a farmer feels intensely about something, he does something about it. So some evenings we would stay late and head out in the pickup with Bill driving, Rocke and I in the back, and Dean in the passenger seat with a big shotgun. Gophers often come out of their burrows in the evening and sit on top of their mounds, enjoying the evening sun, so we would barrel along the country roads in search of exposed gophers, and when we found them Dean would blast away with both barrels. I don't think we killed many gophers this way, but it sure made us feel better to try. Needless to say, we never told granny about those trips.
One day near the end of the summer, when the barn building and haying were done and Dean was away at a 4H Club meeting or something, Bill asked Rocke and I what we thought of going out to pick up a big old water trough in an unused pasture of his near the railroad crossing. Rocke and I thought it sounded like a good idea, and we headed off in the pickup. The trough was a big old iron water tank with the top cut out of it, and had been sitting outside, unused, for over two years. Bill wanted to put in a second trough behind the main barn, and thought this would do the job.
To get it on the truck, we levered one end of it up with some 2 by 4's and a car jack, then backed the truck, with the hatch open, underneath the raised end. I was steadying it while Rocke guided Bill back; but the truck went a few inches too far, knocked the supports out, and the tank came crashing down onto the truck's hatch with my fingers in between. I jumped up and ran around yelling "shit shit shit" like a complete wacko for a minute--I was in serious pain, but thought it was just temporary, like when you stub your toe or something. Then I looked at my finger, and noticed that the top half had been crushed flat, and was starting to bleed thick, red blood.
I don't remember much after that. I know Bill drove me to my grandparent's farm, where my granddad, a surgeon in Italy in W.W.II, stitched me up a bit and then drove me in to a hospital in the city. I remember the hospital, the tetanus shot, and the little metal finger cast that I had to wear for a couple of weeks. And I remember going back out to the farm a week or so later and showing the finger to Bill, who looked so worried I thought he was going to cry. That was the end of my first job, and it's probably because I felt so badly about worrying him that I haven't been back to Bill's farm since. My only reminder is the ring finger on my right hand, which is flatter than the others.
These days "work" for me means meetings, phone calls, and reading and responding to email--nothing even close to as hard as tossing big hay bales around, though the pay, paradoxically, is a lot better. But I learned much of what I know about work while being a farmhand, and it has the distinction of being the first and last job I ever had that I would have done even if I weren't paid for it. When you look at it this way, as jobs go, it was pretty cool.

Wes Robertson doesn't like the sound of squealing pigs.


Naked at Lollygagger's
By Leah London

It wasn't the smartest thing to do. And the only reason we didn't all get fired is because we didn't get caught. It didn't matter after a while - within a year we were all working at different jobs, some of us in completely different cities.
I'm not talking about the frequent all-night drinking sessions, or the ingredient-full, multi-layered late-night snacks we invented. No, that's regular staff behaviour in many bars. The night we should've all got fired was full of the usual highjinks, plus an unusual finale involving total nakedness.
It was one of my favourite jobs, even before Naked Night. Lollygagger's is a cozy neighbourhood pub that's still there after all these years if you know where to look. I don't know if it was the neighbourhood or the name, but the place attracted an oddball clientele of assorted professional idle types: writers, artists, actors, musicians and wannabes. The staff, on the other hand, was your normal collection of writers, artists, actors and musicians.
I was the Night Manager. For the first time I had a job with a little authority but almost no responsibility. I counted the cash and made the schedule, but if things didn't balance or we were short-staffed once in a while, no one seemed to care. What made the job even easier was frequent absence of the owner. It was his first restaurant, joining a string of assorted retail, wholesale and other ventures; he didn't know what he was doing and I liked it that way.
It's actually amazing we didn't get caught in any of our mischief-making. The pub is in a trendy downtown neighbourhood, on a well-travelled and brightly-lit street. The owner lived on the block and if he stood in the right place and looked just the right way when the lights were on, he had a near perfect view through the front picture window. He might have seen the fireplace rituals and the clumsy sword dances that winter, or heard the giggling over concoctions of peach-banana margaritas on the patio in the summer. I don't know how he didn't hear us wailing on Naked Night. Maybe he did, and decided it was more than he wanted to know.
On most nights, after we rushed the drunks gently away, it was my responsibility to make sure the cash was counted and totaled, that all the doors were locked, the kitchen closed and the bar doors, including the keg room and liquor cabinet, were securely fastened. Well, as anyone who's worked in a bar knows, the end of a busy summer night, when it's still too hot to go to your un-air-conditioned, too-small apartment, the thing you most want to do is sit with your pals and have a cold one. We'd pour a couple of the best pints, turn off the lights, crank up the music and sit down to fan the evening's sweat off our tired bodies. Sometimes we'd play cards, spark a fatty and have a snack. If I planned things correctly, I'd be left alone with the bartender I was fucking before he went home to his girlfriend. On those nights, everyone else drifted off fairly early, leaving me and Jack to "finish up."
For some reason, that night we were feeling giddy. It could've been the moon, it could've been the sudden plunge into steamy summer weather. Maybe it was pay day, or a fresh supply of smoke, or maybe a major victory over a particularly annoying regular. Whatever the reason, that night we started a new game - drinking shooters out of anything but glass. From my regular spot at the front corner of the bar, the sundae dish of scotch and brandy finally got to me. I gasped my way over to a table. We needed a new game.
We thought about strip poker, but we were too drunk to concentrate on straights and flushes. Besides, we didn't have any cards. We discussed spin the bottle but there was only one person I wanted to kiss, and I was still under the illusion that our affair was a secret.
We compromised brilliantly: Strip Spin the Bottle. But all the bottles were either locked up or waaaaay over there on the bar. With the determined inventiveness of people desperate for amusement, and equally desperate to not go home, we invented a simple toy using a cigarette package and a blue stripe and began to spin that instead.
The rules were simple: one person spun the package. Whoever ended up at the end of the stripe had to remove a piece of clothing. Then they got to spin. A game with a skill level appropriate for five sitting-down drunks. But a very high interest level.
I can't remember what music was on, probably something loud and hated by the customers and the owner. We refilled our drinks. No one was quite sure where this was going, but we were all committed to wherever it ended. At the same time Jack let loose an animal howl and Dan grabbed the package. We shouted and cheered, "Let's go!" "I'm first!" "Take it off!" Jack fought Dan for the game piece and I chased them both around the table.
"Hah!" Holding one hand over my eyes for dramatic effect, I spun the package. My first spirited attempt sent the smokes flying across the room, knocking the sugar bowl off table 8.
"Penalty!" "Take it off!" We were getting louder and we hadn't even started. I spun again. This time the pack stayed on the table, the stripe pointing straight at Meg. Jet black hair falling in her eyes, silver bracelets jingle-jangling like the ice cubes in her gin and tonic, she reached down with a knowing grin and demurely removed a sandal. "You'll run out of those pretty soon," Dan leered.
Meg's turn to spin. Eyes narrowed and tongue poking out slightly between cocksucker-red lips, she grasped the pack firmly in her right hand and gave it a determined twist. It ended up in front of Dan. He stood, and grinning like a three-year-old in sight of the beach, slid off his shorts. Still standing, he took his turn, then pirouetted, waving his arms. We laughed and hooted at the first glimpse of skinny white butt flesh through threadbare briefs.
Meg was the victim again, laughing that it was no fair. We shouted her down til she took off her skirt and spun for the next one.
This time Jeeta squealed with delight and nearly bounced herself under the table. Since leaving her mother's house - and authority - at 25 (and still a virgin) she was making up for lost time. That year she'd had four boyfriends and twice that number of one night stands; started, quit and started smoking again; and graduated from pot and pills to psychedelics, speed and coke. Her loud laugh and sharp tongue turned almost as many heads as her daring fashion forays into plastic, leather, underwear and toys. Giggling in delight at our naughty game, she peeled off the barely-there white vest of her latest ensemble to expose the lacy black bra we'd been glimpsing all evening. Distracted by the sudden clear view, Jack was surprised when the stripe pointed at him.

I watched him closely, anticipating the delicious secret thrill of being naked with him in front of our friends. I joined in when the others started shouting, suggesting where he should start. "Get on with it!" "Show us your naughty bits!" "Topless bartender!" "Bottomless!" He smiled, and with hands that touched me every night, pushed away the brown curls that stuck to his forehead. Funny, he wasn't shy that first time when he surprised me in the office with nothing on but socks and that wide soft smile.
We were raucous in our impatience, shouting with the thudding of the Violent Femmes: "LEMME GO WI-ILD, LIKE A BLISTER IN THE SUN; LEMME GO WI-I-ILD, BIG HANDS I KNOW YOU'RE THE ONE." In a sudden decisive move, Jack unbuckled and flung his shorts to the other end of the room. I wished mine were the ones in flight. He looked at me and slowly, carefully, deliberately, turned the stripe. Pound pound - musical interlude. I pulled the sweat-damp shirt off my skin and stretched my arms long and hard above my head, arching and straining flesh, muscle, bone. My eyes stung a straight line to Jack's. I felt things pop.
We kept playing. There was almost an opportunity to stop and return to ordinary drinking mode, but somewhere between the underwear, the pounding music and screaming giggles, we missed it. Shoes, socks, belts, pants and jewelry disappeared faster than the last beer. For some reason, Meg was wearing more layers than some people own; we decided she had to be the first one naked. "I don't even let my boyfriend watch me undress!" she screeched as the stripe pointed at her again and again.
Last I saw, Dan was down to t-shirt and worn out ginch. Jeeta put her mouth to my ear: "Can you see my tampon string?" Jack had my shirt over the arm of his chair. Meg spun and Dan stood to protest. Maybe I missed something, but he was suddenly naked from the waist down, lecturing enthusiastically about freedom and openness, waggling his index finger in our eyes, his dick slapping the table. Poor Dan - he's a little shorter than average and had to keep swinging his hips up and around to make it stay there. "You guys should all be proud...blah blah blah," he demonstrated eagerly. I thought he was going to pull something before we could stop laughing long enough to get our drinks out of the way.
After that spinning was a formality. The cigarette package was useless, tired and limp from all the handling. By the time we drained our glasses we were all triumphantly naked. Music gave us the rhythm to dance around the tables, through the kitchen and in the office, howling and singing. Jeeta disappeared briefly into the bathroom to tuck her tampon string safely away.
We sat hot naked flesh down on each chair in the room. We sat on tables, flipped coasters at each other, tossed ice cubes and shot straws. When the music ended some time later, we were spent and tired and beginning to get cold. The sky was turning a downtown pearly gray. Finally quiet (but still naked), we leaned on the bar. To celebrate the unparalleled bonding experience, Jack mixed us each a B52 in a tea cup. We drank, toasting each other and solemnly promising that the night's revelations would remain our secret.
We all told of course. Jack told his pal Biff after their squash game the next day. Dan had to tell his girlfriend when he came home without his underwear. Meg's boyfriend saw a whole new side of her. And Jeeta spilled to everyone she knew except her mom.

For all of us, life went on pretty much as usual. For a while, we enjoyed minor celebrity status among our friends and coworkers, turning down requests for repeat performances and suggestions to improve the game. My sister thought my antics were a symptom of a deeper problem.
Jack and I discussed it the night I told him I was leaving. He held my hand but wouldn't look at me even as he said "I love you". We agreed that night was one of the high points of our relationship.

Leah London always keeps her tampon string out of plain view.



 

Frozen Roadie
By Meredith Lowe

It's January in Ottawa. The daytime highs are up to a balmy -20 Celsius. Normal people would stay inside and make hot chocolate. But to Ottawans, it means skating on the frozen canal and buying deep-fried bread dough from sheds built on the ice.
Yes, it's time for Winterlude again, that supremely well-intentioned festival that celebrates the worst winters on the planet by holding ice-sculpting competitions in weather that makes the contents of everyone's nose an automatic honorable mention. Blame it on the numbing effect of government work, but these folks throw an outdoor party when they are freezing their expertly-covered asses off.
During the five years I spent in Ottawa, I tried to be a good sport. After all, I was raised (to my great chagrin) in Prince George, a city parallel to James Bay in latitude, where punishingly long winters are punctuated by the odd pancake-eating contest and a truly bizarre event, Snowgolf. The latter involves chasing a purple ball around a snow-smothered golf course. It made it onto American TV once, via That's Incredible... But this was a more localized event and could easily be avoided.
I reached escape velocity and got out of Prince George (fine city, go raise your kids there, not for me, urban chick that I am), but due to ignorance and luck and just poor planning wound up in Ottawa. So there I am, having elected to go to university in the bureaucrats' paradise, when I run out of money about two months into my second year of school. Being caught between a rock (lack of access to government funding) and a hard place (lack of access to parental funding), I become a hash-slinger. I wait tables, I tend bar, I secretary, I cashier in a smelly deli, I count ballots in pointless student elections.
In my third year I got lucky (luckier). For the princessly sum of ten dollars an hour, I could parlay my background in community theatre into techie skills to become a roadie! Backstage pass and all! OK, it was at a hall on campus, but it was my ticket to coolness nonetheless.
Oh yes, that was the glamorous life... twelve hour shifts (four pm to four am), blocking drunks from running onto the stage, trying to break up fights among stoned rugby players. I did, I admit, take a real pleasure in telling little chickies that they couldn't go backstage without a pass like the one I had. But the rest was really just a job. Some of the bands were jerks, some were great. We figured that the test for coolness for a small Canadian band doing the campus circuit was if you couldn't tell the band from the real roadies when they walked in. The bands who shared their contractually-required beer with the roadies - they really broke the scale on the cool-o-meter.
So it was an OK job, and my rent was getting paid. Then came Winterlude show. I showed up from a bartending job at six pm, and slid out across the ice. Yes, they put a stage on the lake. People had to drill through the ice to test its thickness to make sure we could build a stage on top. I guess it had passed the stress test - BECAUSE IT HAD BEEN SO DAMN COLD FOR WEEKS AND WEEKS AND WEEKS - and the show was going on. Brilliant idea.
Now, being a broke little student, I didn't really have enough winter clothing, so I piled on layers of other people's extras until I looked like the Michelin man. In fact, we all looked like the Michelin family reunion, waddling around hooking up monitors and stacking speakers. Luckily, Andrew had extra boots I could borrow. Normally this would not have been feasible as his feet were proportional to his height (six two), but I was wearing so many pairs of socks that they were actually a little snug. No frostbite on me, though, nosirree!
So at the appointed time, in my slippery mittens and clumsy boots I clamber up two or three stories of scaffolding to stand on plywood and run a piece of equipment with which I am not familiar at all. Oh well. I figured I may not make it to showtime anyhow, as the wind was blowing hard enough to make the whole structure sway rather alarmingly, especially since we were jumping up and down to keep warm. And so, with the technical crew in place, the fur-toting audience waiting, and the cds (exotic new technology at the time) cued up for the lip-synching, the show begins!
Well, it was a high point in Canadian culture, I am happy to report. First some painfully bad rock band, luckily forgotten. Then a Quebecoise singer who was probably huge in Quebec but on my side of the cultural chasm unknown. Finally the main act - Luba, enjoying her moments of fame, I trust. Luba's drummer had not shown up so a truck driver filled in, bashing away merrily at the cymbals even between songs...
I was connected last on the crew headsets so I could hear but not be heard. The stage manager trained me to run the spotlight as we went: "Meredith, tighten focus...it's the switch on the lower right hand side... No, the other switch." However, despite the highly professional lighting crew, all the spotlights were perpetually shaking both because we were rocked by wind, and because we were all shivering so violently. Luba looked like she had a halo with a nervous tic.
And so, finally, after they have faked the last sax solo on a freezing instrument, after the truck driver finishes his Keith Moon number on the drum set, after the last hot apple cider has been drunk by adventurous music-loving government functionaries, it's over. It's time to load out. We stand on the cables to coil them because they are frozen, we hold duct tape in our armpits to warm it up enough to tear off a piece, we drink coffee out of thermoses but can't actually tell if it is hot or cold. We curse a lot, in the time-honoured tradition of techies, especially those going into hypothermic shock.
Around dawn, I get a ride home from someone but the ride isn't long enough to get any heat going in the truck. I take a bath but my apartment is so cold that the water cools off quickly and I lie in lukewarm water wondering if it really is lukewarm or I am just suffering from cold poisoning. I crawl into bed. I miss Spanish class that morning and for several weeks afterwards due to a purely coincidental bout of bronchitis.
I worked many more shows after that, including a Brazilian-themed fundraiser which instilled in me a Pavlovian distaste for "The Girl from Ipanema" and a certain professional stage manager. But that's another story.
And at the end of that year I hung up my work gloves and got a student loan instead. I still can't conjugate worth a damn in Spanish. Tengo frio, tenemos frio...

Meredith Low now only accepts roadie jobs at indoor concerts.




Blockbuster
By Walter Melnyk

I love summer-release adventure flicks. Always have. The very first afternoon of my 1967 summer holidays was spent watching James Bond infiltrate volcanoes and toss black-turtle-necked muscle guys into piranha pits. The summer of '77 was spent visiting and revisiting Darth, Han and Chewie. Later it was Indy, Ripley, and (for a while) anything with Clint.
But then something started going wrong. Increasingly, my summer movie menu was thinning to a strict diet of explosions and quips. It really hit me last summer as I watched the frightfully expensive lemondrop-yellow Ferrari crash, tumble, explode and finally burn against the San Francisco skyline in The Rock.
I'm bored.
And I haven't even finished the buttery-topping top-half of my $4 popcorn.
Twister's parade of "bad" scientists in fleets of imperial-black corporate vans, on-the-hour tornadoes (real storm-chasers might catch one storm per season), and sidekick scientists looking and talking like Meat Loaf was even more irritating.
Then came Independence Day. Hey, besides horizon-obscuring deathships, the flick's first half actually offers some decent comic touches. Scary aliens descending as REM's The End of the World As We Know plays on the radio. Real-life conservative think-tankers nitpicking the president's extraterrestrial foreign policy on The McLaughlin Group. But it couldn't last. Before Randy Quaid blows up (real good!) he spouts enough closing crudities for a trilogy. Up your ass!
Now I'm really bored. In fact, this summer Event Horizon, Con-Air, Face/Off, Fifth Element, Spawn, Mimic, Air Force One, Conspiracy Theory, Lost World, Steel and everything else that goes boom in the night remains on my unseen list.
Why the trend to dumb and louder? Summer releases with titanic budgets of $50-$200 million can carry make-or-break consequences for studios and the execs that run them. That kind of pressure drives the film industry to pander to what it perceives as the Beavis-and-Butthead attention span of the lucrative teen-young adult movie audience.
The accompanying paranoia that a flick may bore Gen-MTV for even a second has lead to annoyingly breathless movies. Let's go back to The Rock for a second. The telling point wasn't all the expertly coordinated jet-fly-by carnage. It's those omnipresent tracking and panning shots that buzzed actors' heads every time they spoke. The movie never sits still. Never. Geez, we've got 12 seconds of expository dialogue here, keep it moving!
Alright, merely griping is fun but it makes me sound as upbeat as Harrison Ford doing a promo spot. What should be changed? What's missing?
The answer lies in simply looking at classic thrillers and adventure flicks and noting what made them great. Look back via your VCR. You'll discover three key elements have been jettisoned in favor of bigger blasts.
The first ingredient is pacing. Today's flick ads trumpet "rollercoaster" thrills, but it's a rollercoaster that plummets straight down for 127 THX-enchanced minutes. Masters like Hitchcock knew the best rides let you catch your breath for the next thrill. In Psycho, Janet Leigh talk-talk-talks with Anthony Perkins before methodically cleaning up for bed. Just then -- boo! -- in comes "mom" for 30 seconds of slashin' in the shower. The transition still kicks up the shock today. The tile, knife and chocolate-syrup-blood montage ushered in the modern era of horror. Leigh later confessed she's never showered after viewing the finished cut.
And what about the lack of genuine suspense in today's expensive thrillers (a kind of cinematic law of diminishing returns)? The explosions and bellowing monsters are technically flawless, but the overkill results in as much plausible suspense as the coyote eyeballing the roadrunner. Bigger and bigger sensory dosages are pumped into jaded eyes and ears to get a reaction (with a recent admission from Dolby labs that we can suffer temporary hearing damage at the movies). Conversely, a small-scale scene with a believable threat can be truly terrifying and suspenseful. Which kind of scene have you chewing your nails: Arnold dueling with jet fighters or the off-screen psycho slicing off the cop's ear in Reservoir Dogs?
The indestructible Sgt. Rock nature of modern heroes also undercuts suspense. There's never a milli-second of doubt that Bruce Willis will get to that briefcase before it blows. When it was Jimmy Stewart teetering on the ledge of death, well, you're never too sure.
The final missing puzzle-piece is character development. Flapping the good guy off a tailgate at 3,000 feet is more gripping if we actually care about the guy on the tailgate. This time let's rent Jaws, which became one of the most successful thrillers ever made even though the final cut featured fewer special effects than originally planned (the mechanical shark kept breaking down). Look for the long, boozy scene in which Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider all guzzle too much brandy and begin swapping scar stories. As the night grows darker, Shaw's half-mad Captain Quint recounts how he survived the sinking of the real-life USS Indianapolis (which was torpedoed and lost hundreds to shark attacks after delivering the A-bomb to Tinian in 1945). Shaw tells his tale brilliantly. We understand the demons clawing at his soul. Later, as the trio confronts death and the Great White, his bloody fate is far more compelling. Pity Steven Spielburg eschewed this kind of detail when he turned from sharks to dinosaurs.
Sure, I could go on. Give me North by Northwest's knowing dialogue, the political barbs from Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 or the underbelly reality of The French Connection. Heck, give the me the wind-blown panoramic pleasure of Indy Jones excavating against an Egyptian sky. Don't give me another wide-screen of shot of Cage/Cruise/Willis/Bullock escaping a building/boat/plane/city as it mega-blasts in slo mo.
I don't enjoy staying away from the air-conditioned big-screen oases, but last summer's bottoming-out was so low I may never go back. And given Masterminds' trailer with Patrick Stewart bouncing a buggy into a pool of ick, I haven't missed a thing.

Walter Melnyk has a VCR, an air-conditioner and a popcorn maker.



Survey Sales Slob
By Chuck Blade

I live in a house. This is a good or bad thing depending on whatever thing is or isn't going wrong with it at any given time, and over the course of time I have accepted that there WILL be, and there HAS been, things. After all, shit happens all right, it's just a question of what and when, and then dealing with it. I'm normally quite naturally disposed to anticipate the worst, and therefore plan for it, so I'm never too surprised when the shit does happen, then it's action stations. However, contrary to my nature or perhaps out of a lack of insight or even plain neglect, when I considered living in a house, I never seriously viewed it as a drawback that a house has an easily accessible front door. I soon discovered that it was indeed a drawback as it seemed to be an open invitation for every goof balled cause riddled creep aimlessly roaming the neighbourhood to approach and rattle against in the vain hope that a lost soul will be converted.
I detest unannounced knocks at the door. You just know it's going to be the Jehovah Witnesses who, contrary to my original and strongly held belief, ARE willing to argue with my Nieztschean views on God and hell until the cows come home. Or it's some kid selling newspaper subscriptions or large chocolate glossets with almonds for some charity the kid doesn't know the name of. Or they're collecting cans so Scouts can go camping, but where's his uniform and what's with the peace sign he's flashing me?. Or it's an over educated under employed next generation kid who will wash your windows, paint your address on the curb, or sell you some local artist's postcards. Or it's the sheriff asking if I'm me. And it pains me to have to tell them all no to their faces, but I get up and go to the door and do it anyhow, partly because I haven't got anything to give, but mainly because they have invaded my little life and disrupted the serenity of my home head space. Uninvited participants are unwelcome at my door. That's my motto.
Some day last week there's a knock at the door. It's about 11:30 am and it's already hotter than hell in the house. I'm lying on the bed. I may have been working late the night before but I don't know. The dogs are going crazy so I know it's somebody I don't know. I'm sweaty and surely disheveled which I'm hoping will work in my favour as I open the door to greet a perfect stranger.
And there he is. He's a little pudgy guy, dark hair, glasses, dark suit, striped shirt unbuttoned at the neck, loosely tied print tie, a briefcase, clutching a wad of curled papers in his sweaty boxer's grip palms. By the sight of him I don't know what he's selling, and I don't want to guess, so I ask him.
While he launches into an over enunciated and exceptionally longwinded answer to that rather simple inquiry I find myself not comprehending as I become entirely focused on this little bit of spittle on his lower lip which occasional clings to the upper lip and stretches until it breaks, accumulating in a bubbly balled mass on the lower lip again, only to repeat the process over and over with every other word spoken. It was becoming hypnotic so I had to avert my eyes, to refocus, to listen, but only to notice his face is really sweaty, his pant cuffs are tattered, his shirt is open at the bottom, and his fly may be open. I was so engrossed in this guy's grossness that I didn't hear a word he said in reply to my question which I'd forgotten by now. My guard was down. "What?" I said. He had me.
It turns out he's not selling anything. He is however beating the streets looking for suckers that fit into his demographic requirements to do some sort of statistical survey. Not really wanting to participate but still stricken by the sight of him, all I can manage is to ask him if it'll take long, to which he says "no". Of course, that's a matter of opinion, but it's too late, he's in. Out of a sense of courtesy I invite him to sit on a dining room chair, one I'll burn later, and I join him and I begin to prepare for the worst, as he starts hauling booklets and pads of paper out of his briefcase and littering the dining table with them. I'm still punch drunk from the rude awakening of the door knocker and the attached hideous invader now in front of me, so I sit patiently and quietly, hoping this will all end and right a way.
He, on the other hand, is starting to get too comfortable. He's chatting about this and that, trying to engage me in some banter about some current event I'm not even aware of and probably wouldn't care about even if I were anyhow. Not wanting to encourage any more interfacing with spittle-face than necessary I limit my participation in this chatter to smiles and nods. With his little fists he irons out the rolled corners of what appears to be the survey and I give him some encouraging yeah's and hmmm's as we get down to the survey preliminaries, determining if I fit the required demographic. He asks several simple questions like your sex, age, marital status, income etc. Everything's OK and we're moving down his list then I answered something and suddenly I'm not it. Evidently I don't fit the required demographic for this survey.
Inside I'm feeling great, no more questions and spittle guy is going to leave soon, but I console him with my best "too bad" as it seems like a big loss for him me getting away. I get up and wander toward the door, trying to focus his attention on leaving now instead of continuing on with the chatter he is beginning to start up again. Unfortunately he's a bit of an unfortunate and doesn't take the hint but rather doubles his efforts to get me talking. I play him out a bit but he still wouldn't leave and eventually I verbalize my need to do other things, like right now. He finally gets the point but before going he says he'll be around the neighbourhood next week with a different survey and he tries to get me to commit to a time he can meet me. I tell him I work shifts and I couldn't possibly say when I'd be in, wished him good luck, and let him out.
With an as irregular schedule that I keep I shouldn't have seen this guy again, but some how it happened. This time I nearly puked. That spittle thing became the central focus for me, even over all his other horrible characteristics. Again I never heard a word he said. All I knew was that I had to get rid of this guy before I adorned his same unbuttoned untucked striped shirt with a splotch of previously chewed English muffin and orange juice. I took a booklet out his outreached clammy palm and said to come and get it in two days, same time. Then I closed the door. It must have happened abruptly for him because I know he was confused afterward as he stood on the porch for a couple of minutes before leaving. Maybe he needed to give or get something more from me, but he would have paid for it with his shirt if he insisted on it right then. Anyway, I know he'll be back; he knows where I live. Shit.
I immediately check out the survey spittle left me. It's a legal size booklet of 191 pages, whose purpose is to "describe the opinions and lifestyles of Canadians". "It's fucking huge, this is going to take hours" I think, or say, and it did, about three and a half. Well the lifestyle of this Canadian meant putting it off until tomorrow afternoon, all afternoon, whereupon I got in to it in a leisurely fashion while relaxing on my roof deck and over a beer or two.
As dull as I thought it would be, I was surprised to find it provided interesting insights into the statistical methodologies underlying the survey, and estimating just what it was they were really asking. I noticed that some questions would come up again, maybe four times in total over a particular section, where frequently two would be the reverse or negative expression of the same statement. I assumed this is likely done to ensure there is consistency in the answers to a particular question, answering in favour or against to two statements and the reverse to the two juxtaposed statements, and to the same relative degree? I found it just made it so you had to read the questions carefully. I'd also check back to see what the difference in the phrasing of the statements were. Occasionally I'd change some answers.
The content of the questions was interesting on occasion too. The query's' subject matter ranged from opinions on economic, governmental, language, immigration, equity, and unity issues to consumer surveys, including five whole pages on bread. Generally I had to circle a Strongly Agree, Somewhat Agree, Somewhat Disagree, or Strongly Disagree answer for a statement of opinion. (Except for the bread, that was a complex matrix of questions of yes/no's on usage, with selections of varying frequencies of use per week, and an indication at which of many grocers you would or wouldn't and have and haven't and in what frequency per week purchased said types, and there were at least twenty, of bread.) 

E X A M P L E S
It is perfectly all right for a woman to display masculine behaviour.
It is totally wrong for a woman to show her masculine side. 
(Ditto questions, substituting man for woman and feminine for masculine.)
Most people on welfare could get a job if they really wanted one.
It is a side effect of our society that some people will be out of work.
If a retail cashier gives you too much change it is morally wrong to keep it.
It would be all right to increase an insurance claim if you could get away with it.
The economy is stable and will improve modestly in the future.
The economy has peaked and the future outlook is disastrous.
The Armed Forces have done a good job of keeping world peace.
Canada's Armed Forces shouldn't participate in peacekeeping activities.
Which of the following program's policies and standards should the federal or provincial government administer:
Education

Multiculturalism

Language

Welfare

Health Care

Armed Forces

Finances

Environmental
I found it hard to fit all my answers into the limited number of opinion categories provided. Usually the vagueness of the question or my uncertainty as to what it means or because I hadn't really thought about that subject recently or at all even, I frequently answered modestly, either for or against, but wishing I could really straddle the fence with an 'unknown', but no such luck. Occasionally, I would STRONGLY circle one of the "strongly's" and validate an opinion I really do have, but then the questionnaire would ask whether I hesitated or not before answering that last question, and then I really would hesitate. Perhaps I was over thinking some of the questions but that curse I blame on my higher education.
Finally page 191. The last question: Whether you'd do another survey? I said no.
Spittle face came the next day to pick up the treatise, and as I suspected he tried to get all cozy in the house and wanted to go over the whole thing to make sure I filled out everything right. Wary of his scheduled arrival, I avoided English muffins and orange juice that morning, and in order to avoid the spittle-make-me-puke-thing I kept myself busy in the kitchen making my lunch and loading the dishwasher during his entire visit. He managed to drag it out for just over an hour before my co-conspirator wife dropped a couple of huge get-the-fuck-out hints while I was pointing out the focal point of the room he was in, that being the front door. A metaphorical sledgehammer to the head and he got the hint. I shuffled him out the door, never to set eyes on again, a point I made clear to him once he was out on the porch, and I closed the door of my again peaceful abode.

Ed Wrench was never told not to talk to strangers.



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