Where was I? Ah yes, the Conan Doyle. That was a brief stint – I think I was there for 4 weeks, pulling pints, washing glasses, not getting tipped…a memory of note from that pub was one day I went into the Ladies Room, to make sure there was enough toilet paper and in one stall, on the floor next to the toilet, lay a piece of poo. Someone had missed the bowl entirely and their poo landed on the floor, much to my disgust. I’m sure I have no idea how that can possibly happen, but again, it was a job for management, as I wasn’t about to scoop it up. I left after 4 weeks because I was offered a salaried management position in a student bar. I wasn’t too sad to go, as the pay was dreadful, the hours weren’t regular, and the boss was a typical British male bar manager who spent more time socializing and running “errands” than he did working. (I can make this sweeping statement as I worked in two bars/pubs in Britain, and they were both exactly the same, so it follows right?). The management position I took on was for the “day”shift of the bar/restaurant – day being anywhere between 8 am and 3am. This place was a larger establishment than the previous pub I worked in, and stayed open “after hours”. The upstairs was a generic café type atmosphere with a patio outside, and the downstairs was the club – decorated with morroccan style rugs and pillows, with funky djs and pints served in glasses that must have held at least 25 oz. This may sound like a good idea, but when people are drinking extra large glasses of beer, while seated on the floor, getting up and down proves more difficult that usual. And the rugs! They were hoovered every day, but come on! Spillage and god knows what else on them made the place stink first thing in the morning. There were 4 full time managers – this made for some overlap at shift change, which meant ordering meal and enjoying it in front of the other staff while they scurried around like ants, making their measly 4 quid an hour. I was there all of 6 weeks before I made my way down to London. I had had enough with the bar scene, working til 4 in the morning, then having to pay for a taxi to take me home. So off to London I went.

In London I worked for a publishing company. I had initially applied for a marketing position, but once I was there, they informed me that they had hired someone else for that job, but would I be interested in an administrative position. Since I had already quit the bar, and made plans to move to London, I agreed. I’m sure you’ve all heard about my time there, so I’ll sum it up by saying that I worked 2 members of the Old Boys Club, when they were around, and when they weren’t, I worked on such things as this website. I quit a full year after working there, came home for a holiday, returned to London and found myself unemployed for 3 months. I took on temporary work for a “friend of a friend” type character. He was wasn’t so much of a friend as simply convenient for me, and I undertook the task of Inventory Clerking. I went round to flats rented out by estate agencies and made detailed notes of the condition of the place upon the moving-in of or moving-out of the tenants. When I say detailed, I mean, I had to scour the walls, looking for pinholes, and any shading in the carpet had to be noted. It was very finicky work. I did this for about 2 months on and off (it wasn’t regular work, I was just called up as and when I was needed) After this, I popped in to visit my old colleagues and employers, who were so delighted to see me, they asked if I would come back to work for them as my replacement wasn’t really working out. Against my will, I rejoined them, as I needed a job, and the money. Then I left, after spending 2 and half years in Britain, to come home again.

Back in Toronto, I was dismayed to discover finding work here is as difficult as it was in London. I have registered with some agencies, all of which, so far have been unsuccessful in placing me somewhere, much to my frustration. Temp work is relatively new to me so my first few days of doing it were surprising. Here is how it works. A secretary calls in sick, the company calls up my agency, they call me and ask me to get there as soon as possible. I high-tail it out of bed and into some work clothes, and head over to said company. Someone meets me, shows me my desk, how the phone works and a number or extension to call if I need to talk to them, then they disappear. I sit all by myself in the reception area of company, waiting for the phone to ring. When it does, I answer it and transfer the call. Most places, the phone rings no more than 20 times in a day. Bo-ring. The one busy reception job I had was seriously busy, like “thanks for calling, please hold, please hold, please hold, please hold” etc etc but that only lasted a week. And now we are up to date – I am still looking for work, I have an interview tomorrow…….

Now its a week later and I am working for a stock photography agency right at Yonge and Bloor, which is fairly “downtown”. It was a good job, and I enjoyed it, although the department was almost all female, and this led to the occasional bitch session/high drama scene. I don’t really have a crazy story about this job, except maybe the Christmas staff party. The whole company plus dates (so around 250 people) went to a local bar for a meal and dancing, only those of us who ate the pad thai with shrimp were ill the next day. Oh yes, and there was the girl I worked with who would say the most insensitive and rude things without batting an eye (for example, asian people are not good drivers because they don’t have as good peripheral vision due to the shape of their eyes, (!!) or, another colleague mentioned that she loved driving around with her parents when she was young, to look at all the houses done up in lights, and she said to her, oh, so your parents couldn’t afford to buy you real presents, so they did that instead? Nice! Oh yeah – she was a treat. She came in one day and marched right up to me and told (not asked) me not to wear perfume anymore because she was allergic to it. Um, piss off. Anyways, then I moved to Mexico where I was going to work as a teacher in an English school, but they weren’t going to pay me until my papers came thru which would have been 3 months of unpaid work – no thanks. Then I moved to Edinburgh, where I landed a job in a pub. It was called the Conan Doyle – there was a statue across the road of Sherlock Homes.

I am looking for a little sympathy here folks – been in bed the last two days with a migraine. No fun at all. Today I am trying a new drug cocktail of Motrin and Excedrin to see if the combination will help alleviate the pain and throbbing in my brain (seeing as the potential side effects of Motrin include mental confusion, I could be onto something here…) Now back to work (and by work I mean the task I have set upon myself of listing past jobs, not the real kind where I get to leave the house and am paid for what I do).

I really did have another job – it was at Coles bookstore in the Eaton Centre. Three words – Retatil, Eaton Centre. My little piece of trivia for the day is that over one million people pass through the Eaton Centre every week. That’s a lot of customers. My job was to sell books, stack shelves, dust shelves, etc. nothing too out of the ordinary….oh, except that one time, when a homeless, legless man in a wheelchair came in and asked about some random topic while his COLOSTOMY BAG leaked all over the floor. Clean up of that was a job for management, let me tell you. Then I got a temp job with an agricultural magazine doing data entry. Essentially all I did was go through their client list and make sure names were spelt correctly and record their subscription record. I saw a lot of names like Donald McDonald, Steve Stevenson, Ronald McDonald, Rob Roberts – seriously, lots of names. Finally a permanent full time job appeared in the shape of administrator at a wholesale company which sold things like kites and wind chimes. I gave myself the title of administrator since there was no job title for the position. What that boiled down to was because it was a family-run business, I worked for whatever “department” needed my expertise in! I did customer service, I did order entry, I did accounts receivable, I worked at trade shows, and I even did a pick up one day – I piled into a big ass panel van and drove off into the suburbs to pick up instructional tapes on how to fly the sport kites. Wheeeeeee. Ok, so technically, this is the second job I was fired from (after the golf course fiasco) but again, I can qualify it! I was growing bored with this job, as there was no potential for me to move anywhere within the company, I wasn’t being paid well and it was hourly, not salary, and I was doing far more work than I could have done, especially in the accounts receivable department and I wasn’t compensated for it. One day, the wife of the husband-wife team asked me if I had air miles as she was booking my ticket and hotel room for a trade show in Alberta several months away. As I had no intention of staying with the company that long, but not wanting them to be out of pocket for my ticket and hotel room, I told her that I would be in Scotland at the time of the show, as one of my cousins was getting married and I was to be a bridesmaid. She said that I wasn’t allowed to take time off during that season as it was their busiest, but I said I was going to this wedding. She said she would have to talk to her husband about it. All day he sat in his office looking tired and upset. I didn’t even think this had anything to do with me until he called me into his office at the end of the day. He said he would have to let me go as I was in violation of my contract for booking holiday time during the trade show season. I didn’t really know what to say, but I had had an interview a few days previous to this for another job, so I thought, well, this saves me having to give notice! So I left, with an extra weeks pay in hand (they weren’t so bad after all, were they?). When I got home that night, I promptly burst into tears at the realization of what had just happened. The next morning, at 7, my boss called, asking me to come back – he felt he had made a mistake in letting me go and would I reconsider – and I could even keep the weeks severance pay he had given me!! I said no, and started my new job at Masterfile a week later (luckily!!)