Preface: The BC Experience was a short-lived tourist attraction in Victoria’s historic Crystal Garden building. The exhibition shut down before my friends and I had the chance to reschedule our plan to visit it.
I’ll also note that I currently work at the very place I used to clean, which is mentioned in the following throwback post:
September 16, 2006
Today was supposed to be a fun-filled day of visiting The BC Experience with Leah and Mike, and then celebrating the departure of somebody who I had never even met before at The Sticky Wicket Pub. Instead, in a bizarre turn of events… I got sick.
I’ve diagnosed myself with a sore throat, which has somehow brought on major fatigue. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the BC Experience, so I fired off another douche bag flavoured email Leah’s way.
“Hi! You may remember me from previous emails such as ‘Sorry, I can’t make it, I’m seeing dead people’ and ‘Sorry, I’m going to have to bail on movie night, I got mouthwash in my eyes’. I’m going to have to call this one, ‘Because my sore throat may impair my ability to make the most of our scheduled BC Experience, I’ve decided to postpone this’.
I’m sure she was thrilled.
I couldn’t break my boss’s heart and call in sick to work because not having a phone kind of got in the way. So, I sucked it up and showed up as scheduled; I cleaned a few toilets, mopped here and there before ending up falling asleep at The Bay Centre mall at 9am. (I was waiting for Chapters to open at 9:30am, so that I could look for a book that they didn’t have.)
I had another shift at 6pm, cleaning the same place I had cleaned in the morning. I was out of modest white ankle socks and had to dip into my “fancy socks for special occasions such as days when I’m out of normal socks” collection. Because I was wearing shorts, I stayed away from the knee and thigh lengths. This left me with only one option: a pair of weird looking brown chenille socks. They’re discreet enough, I thought, nobody will be looking at my ankles anyway.
On the way to job #2, a guy on a bicycle stopped next to me and pointed at my socks. Oh fine, I thought, let’s get this over with. I waited for him to laugh.
“OH MY GOD, WEIRD LOOKING BROWN CHENILLE SOCKS!”
Except, he thought my socks were fine, he just liked my tattoos.
While on the shitter in one of the washrooms at the store I was cleaning, I encountered a serious problem: the person who was responsible for stocking the washrooms with new rolls of toilet paper (me!) hadn’t yet gotten around to doing it. I had also wasted the last few squares of toilet paper on the toilet seat so that I wouldn’t get butt lice from the dirty toilet seat which, by the way, the person who was responsible for cleaning the toilet (also me) hadn’t yet done. I considered using my weird brown chenille socks but then I saw the automatic hand dryer and uh… figured that it could be used to also dry asses. Automatic ass dryer.
Mike was to meet me outside of this job at 7:45pm, but because I finished five minutes early, and because he was a whole five minutes late, I endured a few minutes of feeling really awkward as a scruffy guy who may or may not have wanted to fuck me tried getting friendly with me. His gestures were pretty basic: he’d point at himself and then at me. Over and over, with some words thrown in between. I kept shaking my head, and to that he would reply by rolling his eyes. Blow-drying my ass was more fun than this.
I ended up walking away from my waiting spot and found Mike walking towards me from the opposite direction. Mike was wearing his much-hyped leather jacket. For a few weeks, he had brought up mentions of this leather jacket; his dad had found it at work, it was in near-perfect condition, and it was now his.
“What do you think?”
“Enh… It looks more like a leather lab coat.”
“Cool!”
“No, not really, it should have stayed on the cow.”
Unfortunately, it is too late to stitch it back on a cow and I will have to see Mike strut around town wearing his leather lab coat until it suspiciously goes missing. It even has a small hole in the back, probably from where the cow got shot.
Even after my rude comments about his coat, Mike got me a bottle of Sprite, and cough tablets. The cough tablets, I told him, were what I ate for breakfast in the morning.
“Do you know how sad that is?” he asked me.
Yeah, just about as sad as it is that even after something like 23 hours of sleep, I need to go now and get some more. Get well soon, self.
-lkvy
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