5/30/2006

I Am... Stricken?


Ladies and Gentlemen,

Please allow me to let you know, up front, what I learned yesterday:

Being on strike is stupid, and fucking sucks.

My eloquence knows no bounds, I know.

Some dick at TTC's maintenance department decided that the union wasn't really being forceful enough, and at eleven o'clock Sunday night, locked up Wilson Subway division. This douchebaggotry quickly spread to Greenwood Subway and Arrow Road Bus divisions, and by 4:40 Monday morning, when I got off work, they had the whole damn system shut down. No warning. No union sanction. I had to leave my bus on Evans Avenue. So then, I went home. And please, follow this sequence of events closely, so you can see how enjoyable my day was. Where was I? Ah, yes. Having just finished driving all goddamn night, I went home. I went to bed. I slept for not quite two hours. I then roused myself from the ambrosial unconsciousness I had so briefly been experiencing, and drove Tanya to work. Traffic wasn't truly heinous, but it wasn't cherries fucking jubilee, either. So then I went home. Slept for a further three hours, but it was bad sleep. It was the kind of sleep where you're so tired you think you'll sleep through the alarm, so you keep waking up and thinking you're late, and rolling over really fast to look at the clock. Maybe the rest of you don't do this, but TTC freaks the hell out when you're late, which I guess makes sense. So after three hours of the worst sleep since blackout curtains went out of style, I got up, had a bleary-eyed shower, did not shave, and went to work again. I get to work, and what's going on? Fuck-all. Except that instead of the usual ten or fifteen guys chilling at the division waiting for work, every single driver that ought to be on a bus is in the driver hangout area. Damn near two hundred sweaty guys. Not cool. There had been pickup baseball and soccer earlier, but this was pushing noon, and it was forty-two, with humidex. We were lucky; the streetcar guys got locked out (one of 'em got heatstroke and had to be ambulanced off the whole two hundred feet to St. Joe's). So I hung. There were two card games going, and much conversation. I talked with my buddy John, about where to get the cheapest video card that'll run DirectX 9.0 (Future shop, $75). I talked with my buddy Steve about... some stuff. I became bored. I read my book (The Vampire Lestat, and fuck you, Anne Rice is kickass). I went to Wendy's (chicken BLT salad and a chicolate frosty dairy dessert). And then we went back to work.

Legislated back, in fact. By court order. Bam! So our shop steward told us to go back, and that we wouldn't be the only division out there. This was 3:30. The other divisions started showing up around seven. Fuckers. Do you know what it's like to piss off eight hundred thousand people? It wasn't cool. I wasn't assaulted, myself, but one of the guys on the line I was working was. Feck.

This is really dumb. Maybe if there'd been some kind of warning to the public? The issues here....

Fuck the issues. Since when am I about the issues? The issues here are important and valid, yes, but I think there are better ways to go about this.

Wait, did I just make a rational, reasonable comment? Shit, what are the people who read this (all three of them) going to think? I better finish off with something wild and unpredictable.

Yeah, so I says to him, I says, "Why don't you take your War Crimes Tribunal, and stick it up yer ass!" and he says to me, he says, "Not before your, uh, momma did, um, first!" So I smacked that punk bitch up.

The End.

6 Comments:

Blogger Andrew said...

Wow dude! I was wondering what the hell was going on. I just woke up yesterday and saw an article on thestar.com. Thank you for clearing all of that up.

By the way, you are right. There are better ways to go about getting yourself heard.

5:59 PM  
Blogger Junk in the Trunk said...

Yeah like lots of F-bombs

7:09 PM  
Blogger I am being paid to do this said...

Well, yeah, but honestly, the main issue was the maintenance guys getting put on night shifts... and they could have just greived that with the union.... douchebags.

8:00 AM  
Blogger Lydia said...

Yeah, I was reading about it in the Toronto Sun (I would never read the Sun unless it was the only newspaper at work...which it is) for about three seconds, and just said, "I wonder what Chuck's thoughts are on this," and closed the paper.

1:27 AM  
Blogger Meredith said...

Dude, sounds rough. (something about people living through situations like that makes me want to call them "dude", so you've earned one Dude!)
I can't wait to see you and Tanya in the summer, are you guys in for the Jays game?

5:19 PM  
Blogger Junk in the Trunk said...

ha ha Tony andd Guido - good times. Seriously dude, why did you go to Wendy's when you could have gone to THE DELI

11:23 PM  

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