Yorkville

The easiest part of my shift is when I’m outside helping out my customers. The hardest bit, contrary to what most people think, is when I’m in my booth with nothing to do, because that means the customers are out there fending for themselves. Like babies in the bathtub, you can’t leave customers unattended. Our machines aren’t the greatest, or the most efficient, but they’re definitely not complicated. The first step is usually to put the ticket into the machine. This is a step that most people get wrong. I’m not joking.

The tickets are small, credit-card sized, and have an arrow on the face of the ticket indicating which direction to put the ticket into the machine in. In case the arrow is ambiguous to anyone, there’s even a small blurb that says “insert this side up.” Several times today I had customers tell me their tickets weren’t working. When I ejected it out of the machine, the arrows were not facing up into the machine. To me, this is the equivalent to opening the door for someone and inviting them in, and having them promptly walk into the brick wall instead. Whenever I come across a situation like this I just take control and do everything for the customers, because there’s no real hope for you.

Much like how Dante’s Inferno has many layers of hell, so does my job. I have to at least give credit to the above customers, because they have the right ticket in their hand. Several customers today complained to me that their tickets weren’t working. When I got to the machine, I saw that they were trying to insert a receipt into the machine. Now, the receipt, much like the ticket, is credit-card sized. Sure, I’ll admit that you could possibly confuse the two, which is precisely why my company put “RECEIPT” in bright red capital letters on the face of the receipts. If this is somehow ambiguous, your credit card information and entrance and exit information is recorded on this stub as well.

A rather wealthy Asian man was getting fairly angry and frustrated because he wasn’t able to pay at the exit with his credit card. He had trouble at the entrance earlier, and I told him that he can pay right at the exit, like he normally does, only since he had to grab a ticket, he has to put the ticket in first. So here I am, three hours later, face to face with this customer. Accusations start flying:

“You told me the ticket would work at the exit.”
“They do, but that’s not the ticket.”
“Really? The one that says Toronto Parking Authority is not your ticket?”
“Well, not the one that says “receipt” on it. You don’t get receipts at the entrance.” (A real photo of me at that moment)

If this was a Yakuza thing, he would chop off the first knuckle of his pinky for that one.

I point this out because there’s no other parking lot or garage in the city that I’ve worked at that have this many people fail at the first step. Usually, they get tripped up when they have to put their credit card into the machine, or when they have to take the receipt out of the machine to open the gate. That I sympathize with much more because the instructions aren’t as clear. They’re there, but, there’s no arrows or anything to guide you. There’s absolutely no reason for you to screw up that first step. You’ve failed before you’ve begun, and that more or less sums up the Yorkville customers for you.

Introduction

I’ve introduced myself to many, many people, and the first two questions that people love to ask are:

1) What do you do?
2a) Where did you go to school?
2b) For….?

I work at a parking lot, and I took English and History at school. I’m not sure if this is supposed to speak volumes about the person that I am or give them an opportunity to ask me stuff about my job as a means of continuing the conversation.

“You know, I never really see a parking lot attendant do any work.”
“Yeah, that’s probably true. When it’s busy it’s kind of dangerous for you to stand around watching us, with all those cars and all.”

It’s completely inescapable. If it’s not the first thing that’s asked, it’s the second. Maybe if you met through a mutual friend, they’ll ask you how you know, and maybe you’ll trade a few stories, before BAM! So…what do you do? It’s gotten to the point where my About Me section on my blog begins with me stating what degree I have and whether or not I have a job. I was about to re-write it today when I realized that I would only say the same things. I’d start with the degree I have, and what job I work at. Why am I listing my qualifications at all? Am I applying to be your blog writer? I’ll need to fix that section soon, not that anyone really reads it. I’m not even sure if I should have an “about me” up there.

Point Break

I finally got around to watching Point Break today. I’ve wanted to watch it since I saw it parodied on Hot Fuzz, but never got around to it. My first impression is that it was a pretty ridiculous premise. The immortal Keanu Reeves plays FBI agent Johnny Utah, who goes undercover to infiltrate a group of professional bank robbers who are also surfers. The premise is only ridiculous because it completely defies all my preconceived notions of what a surfer and a bank robber is supposed to be like. All professional bank robbers, in my eyes, are supposed to be like the crew from Heat. They are incredibly disciplined, serious people who know the risks involved with their job and thus approach it with the appropriate level of intensity. Surfers, to me, are free-spirited people and I just don’t picture them being disciplined enough to rob a bank the way they do. When the theory that the bank robbers might be surfers is initially floated in the film, everyone laughs at the idea. They’re probably thinking the same thing. “Really? Surfers?” And the movie runs with the idea. When you meet the crew, you realize that, man, they really are your prototypical surfers. They’re impulsive adrenaline junkies who wake up at 5am to go surfing, and who go surfing in the middle of the night as well, because they can! And want to.

How does a group of people who live life so spontaneously, and impulsively, turn off that behaviour to be cold, precise bank robbers? I don’t see it. These aren’t personality traits that you can turn off. That’s not the craziest thing in the movie though, but I don’t really want to pick on this movie too much because it’s a popcorn flick, and on that level it succeeds. It’s fun to watch and not as cheesy as I thought it would be, and that skydiving sequence was fantastic. How anyone manages to have a conversation while skydiving is beyond me though.

Hot Cola

I was sick about two weeks ago and just about everyone in my family (well, just my mom’s side) recommended that I have boiled coke with lemon to help me out. I’m not unfamiliar with this drink, I’m sure I’ve had it before when I was younger, I’m more interested at how someone managed to:

a) Boil cola to drink. That’s pretty brave of them considering how it tastes like ass when it’s flat and warm.

b) Turn it medicinal (again). I know Coke started out as a cure-all elixir, but this must have been in the late 1800s, and during the era when those drinks were all the rage (and a huge scam too). It hasn’t really been thought of a medicine since.

I tried googling this but only came across food blogs with “recipes” on boiling coke. I saw sites that gave out pretty detailed instructions on how to make this. It’s not that complicated, you don’t need a step-by-step guide, unless you’re an unsupervised child. It also seems to be an Asian thing. I never really notice the quirks in my culture until someone else points it out. While I prefer my coke ice-cold (brain-freezing temperature please), I accept that there are people who enjoy it hot. It never really was that weird to me. I figured there was a cold/hot option for every drink (and cold costing $1 more most of the time for some odd reason). This was probably the craziest idea to my Italian coworker though and when he tried it at home, he came back thinking all Chinese people were complete geniuses.

“You guys have something for everything. He taught me the Ancient Chinese cold remedy by boiling coke and I feel a lot better today than I did yesterday.”

Yes, Ancient Chinese…Coke.

My Knee

I am currently playing in a Fall Softball league. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I’m starting to really hate it. I have a 9:30am game on Sunday, and it’s pretty damn cold out when we play. The ball we use is a soft-ish rubber ball that is a complete bitch to hit. Unless you hit the ball squarely in the middle, its going to distort and spin out, which really makes for a shitty playing experience for me. I’m not the best fielder, but I can at least say that I’m a decent hitter so it’s the one thing I look forward to in all my games. Except, I can’t really hit now either! Some horseshit going on.

Anyway…I guess all this makes what happened to me on Sunday a little funnier. We were getting slaughtered by the first team we were facing. We were down by about 10 runs in the last inning (if we were down 20 – 10, I’d be ok, because at least we were hitting, but we were down 11 – 1) and finally managed to string together a couple of hits and runs. So there I was on first base, after hitting an RBI single, and I thought if I could at least get to second base then we would have a legitimate rally going on. The next batter comes up and in my mind I’m thinking I’m going to run so fucking fast that these guys won’t have a chance to throw me out. She hits the ball and I got a wickedly fast jump on my way to second, only, the ball was hit right at the second basemen. I was DOA. There was no way I was going to be safe at all, so, without really thinking I slid foot first into second base. I was out. The batter was out too. We got doubled up. The play wasn’t even close, I was out before I even thought about sliding, but for some dumb reason I slid anyway.

As soon as I got up I immediately felt the pain. I probably scraped my knee, no big deal. It’s what happens when you slide. When I got to the bench, I noticed a big hole in my sweat pants. Through the hole, my knee looked ok, but I rolled up my pants leg anyway to see what’s up. It turns out that I was just looking at the top part of the scrape, because my whole knee was messed up. That wasn’t even the bad bit. When I got home I had to clean it because I got this when I essentially drove my knee into the dirty ground. Despite the fact that the anti-septic cream said “no burning” that shit fucking burned! When you watch Major League Baseball players slide, you’ll see them lean back a bit, so they can absorb the impact with more of their body. When you do it right, you don’t really feel it at all. Now, when I went for this slide I was running as fast as I could, so my head was down. When I went for the slide, I didn’t lean back at all, and more or less just dropped to the ground. It’s why my knee looked like someone just flayed me, and would explain why, a few hours later, I was completely crippled.

It felt like there was a ball at the top of my thigh. That’s how my friend described it when he tore his groin, and I’m more or less positive that I didn’t suffer the same fate. Although it still hurts like hell. So what’s the moral of the story? Don’t slide for a league you essentially don’t give a shit about anymore.