I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

FIRST DAY OF WORK...

...and I'm fricking exhausted.

I'm not going to say too much, but I don't think I'm putting my position in jeopardy if I give you the gist of what I do. I'm just a cart lackey, pushing shopping carts from the "corrals" (where you're supposed to leave the carts) or gathering them up from the parking lot where people leave them willy-nilly (what you're not supposed to do) and pushing them back to the main shopping cart area, between the outer and inner supermarket doors. Simple work, but repetitive and energy-depleting. But I'm not complaining; for a shy guy like me, it's one of the better positions as dealing with customers isn't really part of my job (the customers put the bags in the trunk themselves, though if I see someone having difficulty with that task, I'll probably offer assistance), and, for a chubby guy like me, every working day is like a four or five-hour workout, with bench-pressing, lifting (to control the carts), and some pulling.

The people at the store seem nice enough. The only real negative today was that one of the other minor tasks the cart lackeys have to do is take out the garbage from the various bins around the store. For the indoor ones, it's a simple task of taking one bag out and putting the other one in, but the outdoor ones frequently have the garbage bag slip out of position, so a lot of the garbage ends up at the bottom of the bin and it gets soaked by rain and gets totally slimy and goopy, but we're wearing disposable plastic gloves so it's not that bad. But one of the bins had this disgusting stuff in it that the chief cart lackey said was wet sand, but I thought it seemed like kitty litter myself, and I was digging it out and the middle finger of my right hand caught on something very sharp, which I very much hope was glass and not a used syringe, and blood started dripping and they had to administer first aid, wrapping my finger with paper towels and holding it under cold water for a few minutes and then putting Band-Aids on it. And the manager had to fill out work injury paperwork, which I thought was a little embarrassing for just a small cut.

But I get to work outside, and I get to see a lot of cars, so I can honestly say that there's much worse work than what I'm doing.

The next time I work is from noon to four p.m. on Friday... I know, really tough schedule, eh? Well, I've never had a proper job before (because I made bad choices and excuses and didn't try hard enough to find work in the past), so I have to ease into work.


Anyway, I feel like posting a couple of photos, though not of my workplace.




A cheery cherry red Volkswagen New Beetle showing support for the Ottawa Senators. I find one big difference between the Montreal and Ottawa hockey cultures is that, while Montreal hockey fans are generally more fanatical about the Canadiens than Ottawa hockey fans are about the Senators, Ottawa hockey fans tend to love flying flags from their cars. I don't remember seeing nearly the numbers of cars in Montreal flying Canadiens flags, though it could be that the NHL introduced the car flags the winter I moved to Ottawa two years ago.

For anyone who knows Merivale Mall, please note that the store I work at now is not Farm Boy, so this photo isn't an indirect way of showing you where I work without explicitly spelling it out for you.



A Toronto-bound Via Rail train with a General Electric P42 locomotive just out of Ottawa Station, crossing over Riverside Drive as it builds up speed.



A pretty good motion blur of a Porsche 928 on Elgin Street. My manual tracking isn't perfect, but the car itself is mostly in focus with a very blurred background.



This composite photo is kind of a glitch in Autostitch... I stitched together three previously-Autostitch'd segments of a 360º panorama of downtown Ottawa taken from Mackenzie King Bridge, but Autostitch wasn't sure how the images related to one another, so I got this weird lake reflection effect that I kind of like. (Here's the picture as it was supposed to look.)



A rabbit in my backyard.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 9:53 PM