Over the course of my working life I've had some pretty strange jobs. While not all the jobs could be viewed as strange in and of themselves, I had to do a lot of strange and/or odd tasks while at work.
I once worked at a company where my sole task was to scan pages into the computer. They wanted electronic records of their board of directors meetings that dated back to what seemed like 500 BC. So there I was, 19 years old, with my own office, scanning page after page into a computer that is now obsolete.
I worked at a law firm one summer where my "job" was to update law books. This is how you update law books: rip one page out, put another in. Yes. It was
that boring. I believe that was the summer I developed a taste for pot and beer. I mean, who wouldn't?
During my brief career as a cook, I was forced to attend to a myriad of disgusting tasks. Here are a few of the better ones:
1) smashing a bag of ice with a chair leg to make the crushed ice for the seafood platter.
2) pouring bleach on the maggots behind the garbage cans
3) dispensing with all forms of societal norms and sexual harassment claims
I also spent a few months working at a local bakery/cafe here in Montreal run by 3 sisters with little business sense and the people skills to match. The place was a filthy mess. They insisted on storing egg and tuna sandwiches in a display case with a broken fridge. It was July. It was hot - fish and mayonnaise were involved, bacteria were multiplying at an alarming rate. When it was suggested to one of the sisters that someone might get poisoned, she replied, "no one's died yet." When the cafe closed a few months later the new proprieters revelead that they had found 18 dead rats in the basement.
My professional life has had its ups and downs. But it's also been rife with hilarity and a cast of crazies to rival those in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Here are some of the best ones:
1) John Jose O'Reilley
I worked for Dave's father for a few months right after university. I had no money and had just moved in with Joe and needed a paycheck stat to prove to my mother that I wasn't, in fact, ruining my life (I was). O'Reilley was a lawyer who may or may not have been disbarred. Someone was always threatening to report him, such was his character. O'Reilley was a pathological liar who often wore a surgical mask to work, claiming he didn't want to get sick. One of the girls at the firm claims to have seen a cockroach climbing out of his jacket one day. He claimed to have a farm in the country with hoards of cows and chickens - I think he had a dirty apartment full of surgical masks and bowties and very little else. Anyhow, that year for Christmas he gave us all Raclette cheese from his "cows in the country" - cheese that he had made himself. Cheese made by the cockroachey, surgical mask wearing, pathological lying grease monkey. It sat in my fridge for 3 months before I threw it out.
2) Nina Whose Last Name I Can't Remember
Nina worked as a notary in the same office as Dave's father. Nina was from Poland, about 300 pounds and paranoid like nothing I've ever seen before. She had wild and coarse grey hair that shot out in every direction imaginable. She wore electric blue eyeshadow applied haphazardly across her darty eyes, mascara brushed across her eyebrows. He had about 4 teeth, each shooting off in opposite directions, often stained with coffee and peach lipstick. Nasty. Nina was so paranoid that someone was going to break into her office that she placed a filing cabinet in front of said office and worked in the hallway. Perpetually on a diet, Nina had been advised by her "doctor" (most likely Polish) that a diet of heavy cream and peanut butter was her key to weight loss success. So Nina drank cream out of a styrofoam cup stained with peach lipstick and marred by jagged teeth marks akin to rat incisors. Nina and O'Reilley loathed one another - watching their psychotic yelling matches was the best part of my job. Personally, I think there may have been a drunken indiscretion at some point which resulted in shame and eventual hatred. Ah, office romances - who says they don't work out?
3) Ravi the Dishwasher
This one was really weird. A Tamil tiger AND pathological liar, Ravi washed dishes at one of the restaurants I worked at. Ravi told us he lived in Scarborough with his wife and 3 kids. Said he washed dishes for us and another place down on Queen street. Seemed to be a stand up guy - drove a nicer car than all of us. In truth, Ravi had no family, spent all his free time gambling at the casino in Niagara Falls and pining for white women to impregnate. He chain smoked and kept king cans of Bud in the garage which he drank thirstily from during his shift. His command of the English language was....not good. Turns out that Ravi had been working under someone else's Social Insurance Number and collecting EI on his own. Nice.
There are, of course, many more. Like Nancy the schizophrenic dishwasher and Greg the pathetic diabetic who worked seemingly in reverse he was so slow. Or the sad guy who ate his lunch in the bathroom such was his social anxiety.
I wonder how I figure into this mess. Maybe unbeknownst to be, I'm one of the crazies in someone else's blog.
"Then there was Hilary..."
