Fog, inside and out

Christmas night, when I went back to work to start my six day on cycle again, I got there and the FNG (Fucking New Guy) we brought on to take over some of my shifts (seven days on, and sometimes more than eight hours a day, all of it at night wears on a person) was there, yapping on the phone. I thought it was weird, but continued on inside to relieve the guy who'd been on all day.

He told me that the other guy was here because he thought he worked at 2300 (there are no shifts starting at 2300, except for his first day we told him to come in an hour early) and was pissed off that I was working the graveyard instead.

He apparently was bitching on the phone to Ops that they ruined his Christmas et cetera. The guy I was relieving apparently told him that he was never supposed to work today, to which the guy replied "I know when I work."

Then I looked at the roster, which we sign as we finish shifts. Shows the schedule for up to two weeks in advance. After his initials for his first shift, it quite clearly shows that he doesn't work for quite a while, and he initialed it. Hard to be sympathetic when you don't bother to read what you sign.

Anyway, I'd had to leave him my keys for the building when I went off shift last, as we don't have any spares for the temp guy. So I lock them in the only locking cabinet in a room full of cabinets, the rest of which aren't ours anyway, and that's that.

I come back to work, unlock the cabinet... no keys. Fortunately he's still in the lobby bitching on the phone, so I go out and ask him where my keys are. He glares at me and says "They're in the fucking cabinet". Well, hello to you too. :P

So I go look again. The other guy looks. We remove everything from the cabinet. Nothing. So I go back out to ask him where the keys are.

He's gone. Shit.

It's pouring rain and I'm in a t-shirt and jeans. I run out and down to the road, and wouldn't you know it the guy is already half a kilometer and moving like a gazelle.

Soooooooo, since I haven't signed on duty yet, I borrow the bike of the bike patrol guy from the other company, who's warming up in my lobby. And out into the rain I go, moving full speed!

I'm in shape enough to pull some serious acceleration, at least in the short term. However, I wear glasses and the rain was pelting down. Add a significant forward momentum and blindness ensues. Nevermind there are no fenders on the bike so I'm getting a wet lash up the front, and one up the back. Lame.

I caught the guy (we measured it later) 800 meters from the site and said "Hey man, we've emptied the cabinet and there are no keys. Where are they?"

Still being kind of a dick, he says "I put them in the cabinet, look again." I said "As much looking has been done as is going to be. They're not there. So check your pockets."

"Well, which cabinet did you look in?"

"The same one I left them for you in. The only locking one."

"Oh, I don't think I put them in a locking cabinet." Then he spins on heel and starts walking. Asshole.

Ah well, I'm wet and irritated and really I can just take the other guy's keys if I can't find mine. And then write this dumbass up and see to it he doesn't come back to my site.

So I bike back. Walk inside. The warm air hits me and only enhances the feeling of being soaked. Yay.

The other guy asks me if I caught him, and did I get my keys. I tell him, and start pulling open cabinets that we're not supposed to be nosing around in. Found it on the third try.

So I wrote up the incident (and let the guy who was waiting to be relieved go home, as he works a brutal weekend) but didn't recommend that the guy doesn't come back. Bah.

Later that night, at 0400, that bike guy was busy telling me how China was going to take over the world. He's Romanian, and has a real stick up his ass about communists. He's also a racist and hates immigrants. A Romanian in Canada who's a racist and hates immigrants. It makes me laugh. :)

Anyway, he figures that China is working on a thousand year plan. I said "Are you by chance thinking of the Thousand Year Reich?" but he's not. He says you can see evidence of it on Robson street downtown. He said that a few times, and I finally asked him what he meant.

He said "You don't hear a word of english down there. When I came here, it was all white but now I never see any white faces down there." He came here eight years ago. :P

Robson street, btw, is a fashionable shopping street downtown. Lots of different people go there to shop, as suits a city with a major port in a country that's completely open to anybody who wants to stop by.

So at first he was talking about the "thousand year plan" as though it was from Mao, but when I asked him about that he said that it was older, and comes from the old Chinese dynasties.

This is the same guy that I mentioned a few post ago that figures he should get WCB for having to work nights and who thinks that aliens (other-worldly ones) are everywhere, and that the Canadian government is covering up that the polar ice is melting.

After that, he started talking about how if the US wasn't where it was, Canada would have been invaded by now.

He's currently citing China as being the main ones to invade us (yeah, because you're going to put eight million foot soldiers in container ships and send them over to... what? Steal the lumber?), possibly by dressing them in Nike sweaters and giving them fake passports and letting them fly over here until they outnumber/outbreed us (I couldn't quite follow him on this point) and then take over.

Then he tells me that Russia would have done it in the 1950's if the US hadn't been there. "They had plans for it man, you can find them on the internet!"

I'm sure they did. You're supposed to make up scenarios and then treat them as real in order to develop strategies. The US had "plans" to nuke everybody they know, including themselves, to develop the kind of thinking you need to respond to a real emergency.

Anyway, so I asked him again what would be the point of Russia invading Canada. He said "For the oil."

Other than a few arctic places, in the 1950's Canada wasn't really known for having much in the way of oil.

"They'd take Alaska back! Then they'd move on to the tar sands in Alberta! They only didn't because it wasn't economically feasable for them to take Alaska..."

Uh.... it's only been in relatively recent years that extracting anything out of the tar sands was possible without running at a loss. And it's not like you can really move troops by ground/railway across a lot of eastern Russia, and certainly not up to the point of land immediately opposite Alaska. And since that's where a lot of the oil is, if it wasn't economically feasable to take Alaska, why take Canada?

"You'd just end up being a satellite state to Russia!"

I can understand his bitterness. He's about 36-37, and remembers growing up in a very different Romania. But... if the Soviets wanted to establish a buffer of countries between it and its perceived enemies, that's one thing. And if these enemies decided to push back in Romania, the USSR could pump troops and equipment into that place, at it's a comparatively small country. Small enough that you could cover important chokepoints at the borders and such.

But... Canada? Just the border we share with the US is thousands and thousands of kilometers. It's not an easy place to hold, as everything (including the major cities) are so spread out. And there just isn't enough easy wealth here to make it worth the cost.

Plus, we're surrounded by oceans. Expensive and distant to invade.

Except for the US of course. When they get irritated enough that we're not sending down enough metal or electricity or clean water, I'm sure they'll invade and take over. Meanies!

Today I was relieved by my S/S. We compared some notes on those mass firing that happened the other week, and I found out that one of the managers up in the internet department had been let go. But the part that struck me was that his late-term pregnant wife/fiance/girlfriend, who was on maternity leave, was also axed. That's cold, man.

Not to sound excessively like a US-basher, and Canadian corporations aren't angels, but you can really tell from observing some of the changes going on around the site that it was bought by a US firm.

Riding the train home today, there was a fair bit of mist. And as I was heading east through Burnaby looking south, I caught a sight that kind of made me wish I was carrying my camera.

The train rides several meters above the highway below, so you can see a good distance. In my immediate foreground it was misty and dim, with just strings of lights from streets and the manufacturing buildings I was passing visible. Occasionally a piece of oddly-shaped industrial equipment would rear up and present a partly-seen presence.

The mist otherwise continued cleanly south until it hit the little hill that the Metrotown complex is built on. The tall buildings there reared out of the fog, looking like they were floating. There was more mist above them, and somehow they were catching just enough sunlight from the side that they looked slightly out of tune with reality.

It was as though I was in a bad fantasy novel and sighting the distant city of Lud or something. ;)

Later, when I got off the train and started trudging up the hill to my place, the mist was quite thick. But as I climbed, it thinned just enough that the sun behind me could highlight the occasional vertical plane and have it reflect a fuzzy cone of whiteness back into the mist. It's always a neat effect.

A few blocks on, a bunch of windows in a dimly-seen apartment block were blazing with sunlight in the mist. Despite me knowing that the windows all faced the same direction, they seemed to be throwing huge cones of light in all sorts of directions and angles, and as I got closer this only intensified. Eventually the building was too bright to look at, as it looked like how the movies would represent an angel or large group of angry ghosts waxing in power inside something before they exploded out of it.

Then in a few more steps it was simply an apartment building, and an unremarkable one at that.

My book quote for today comes from a character that's a British astronaut for NASA:

He warmed a tube of tea and sipped it, as well as anyone can sip from a squeeze bottle. The sun streamed in. Tea was like an unexpected warm hand in the dark. Reeling with Darjeeling, he thought, and maybe, after all, I did become an actor, finally. Icarus had been a straight bit of acting, with Providence kindly providing a busy coda of Significance at the end. And here he was for his next engagement, carefully primed, all the props in place. Opening night coming up, all the Top Secret Clearance audience clustered about their 3D sets. Best of all (until there's a leak, anyway): no critics. This actor, a well-grounded student of the Method School, is noted for his wholehearted interest in and devotion to his performance. His previous work, while controversial, has won him some notoriety. He prefers to work in productions which seem to have a moral at the end, so the audience will believe they understood it all along.

He smiled to himself. A man with his finger on the trigger can afford a few cosmic thoughts. Politics becomes geometry, and philosophy is calculus. The universe winds about itself, snakelike, events plotted along coiled coordinates with a fine, tight geometry, the scrap paper of a mad mathematician.

He raised an eyebrow at the idea. I wonder what they put in this tea, he thought.