And plenty of it.Back to work today, after following the usual pattern for my three days off -- Tuesday lying around the house recovering from work, Wednesday catching up on the stuff I have to do outside the house, and Thursday suffering from the caffeine shakes. Today, morning wasn’t bad; there were customers with problems, but these were customers of the rare sort -- the customers who actually listen to what you’re telling them and realise that you’re trying to work within the strictures of your employer’s policies to solve their problem.
Not like the ones who work in a veterinarian’s office in Thornhill and who call up to ask for Ross and so you ask them for their phone number so you can look up their file and tell Ross what the problem is and they immediately flip out and start screaming abuse at you and flinging about words like “smarmy” and “slimy” becuase you dared to ask them for their phone number and finally you get their phone number and of course Ross isn’t at his desk at that moment and they report you to your supervisor, and why were they calling in the first place? Because they received damaged goods? Because they were charged incorrectly on their credit card? Because their exercise equipment folded up incorrectly and squashed their cat? No, they’re mad as hell because the item they wanted was sold out and they think this is false advertising, that’s why, and if you ever meet them on the street you’re going to break their nose and count it a good day.
But that was last Saturday. Today was good.
So it was all going quite well up until two minutes before end of shift, when a woman called in to inquire about her credit card bill, because there were a few charges on there she didn’t quite understand. Of course she could always have matched up the numbers on her credit card bill to the numbers on her receipts, but that would have required effort on her part. So by the time I left work the bus had been and gone, unless it zoomed by the corner as I approached. It very well could have, I don’t know, because by that point it was snowing. I mean, really snowing. Serious snow. Snow with lightning and thunder mixed in. And good old smart-arse lemming, who so often uses this forum to mock his foolish customers, didn’t wear his gloves out this morning. So I had my face bowed down to prevent the snow from blowing around the edges of my glasses and cutting into my eyeballs, and anything could have zoomed down that street from the number 47C bus to the entire Huffenpuff Quidditch team, and I’d have been none the wiser.
But at least there’s a shelter on the corner, which blocks out most of the driving snow, where you can stand and wait for the next southbound bus. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And give up over thirty-five minutes later, after watching six, SIX, northbound buses speed by on the other side of the street.
I walked across to Dufferin to catch the next-nearest southbound bus. Normally that’s a ten-minute walk, but as I may have mentioned, it was snowing. If it had been raining it would have been bucketing down in torrents, but it was snowing and I have no idea what that does. Buckets down in torrents, probably, only colder. I jammed my hands in my coat pockets, which are remarkably capacious and thus remarkably open to the elements. If I squeezed my hands into fists I protected most of them from the cold, except for where the snow caked on the front of my coat and slid down into the open crack of the coat pocket and melted all over what used to be the balls of my thumbs until I had to have them amputated tonight because of the snow melting all over them.
Ten-minute walk. Halfway there we had to eat the huskies.
And of course I got to the corner and looked up just in time to see a bus speed past on its way north. I ask you.
By this time my glasses were well fogged and watered up, and I had to ask the woman standing next to me if that watery blur approaching was the bus or not. It was.
The next thing is: Caledonia and Lansdowne are relatively minor streets in the grand scheme of Toronto, but Dufferin runs from the 401 (a major highway connecting all of southern Ontario) to the waterfront (as far south as you can go in Toronto without drowning in Lake Ontario), and there were a lot of cars there, and there was a lot of snow on the road. Normally I would have passed the time by pulling out a book, but my hands were slick with melted snow, my glasses were fogged up and speckled with melted snow, and the book was called “Dying in the Sun” and there’s just so much irony a guy can take, you know?
Anyway, I’m home now. An hour later than usual. And I can’t wait to see what I’m going to have to trudge through tomorrow morning. I probably should have kept at least one husky.
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