The Red Herring

My Parents Said to Get a Real Job

Pretty much everybody that I have talked to in the last week had the best summer EVER. They learned six languages while volunteering for the UN in Botswana, rescued four hundred prisoners from an Iraqi prison, and ended hunger in the Congo by planting magical fucking beanstalks. Then they flew around the world and went shopping. I installed sheet metal in Port Alberni, voted “Canada’s Worst Town” three years running by some magazine based out of Toronto. My social life consisted of dollar beers on Thursday nights at the local “Club FX” where I watched a forty year old woman in a tracksuit snort coke out of her hand while dancing to country music. And I did all of my shopping at Wal-Mart.

Working sheet metal this summer meant the following: my name changed - to dumb-ass or fuck-stick - and I was encouraged to be racist, curse unnecessarily and flirt with Frank, my boss’ best friend and self-proclaimed “operator.” It also means that I went to the dump a lot. I made a bit of scene at the dump once - imagine,the metal bin and me throwing cardboard in it by accident. This was, according to the dump lady, totally unacceptable and she let everyone know that I was a bad person. I told my boss that I couldn’t go to the dump in the afternoons anymore because that’s when she works and I was scared of her. Because safety was not particularly a paramount concern at Bob’s Heating Ltd - our motto being: don’t spend half the day setting up pussy scaffolding when you can throw up the 50 footer and git ‘er done in ten minutes - my boss told me to get over it and to not pay her the next time if she was a bitch.

One day I stopped at a gas station to fill up my pickup truck. While doing so, I looked down and noticed that the fronts of my steel toed boots had worn through. At the same time I noticed the rips in the knees of my jeans, the cloud of construction dust that poofed out from me every time I shifted my weight and the stick of pepperoni in my hand. I was pretty much a forty-five year old man. Not that I want to be one of those girls that thinks their waitressing job is SO hard because Tiffany, the new totally under-qualified hostess, triple-sat their section during the rush and how impossible groups of lunching middle-aged women are because Judy wants two and a half ice cubes in her glass of water and Linda wants four cubes halved and Shelly wants a slice of lemon-lime fusion in her room temperature water and Sandra wonders if it would be too much of a hassle if the entire menu could just be rewritten because nothing seems to be gluten-free and that will give her a rash. Giving salads to a couple of women that play bridge and take golf lessons in their free time is not difficult. Moving a five hundred pound furnace into position is difficult. It takes about two hours to move it six feet, which makes you cry.

What I’m saying here is that I don’t have time for chicks that whine about ice cube counts. The shit that I had to deal with on a daily basis was just slightly more traumatizing. Like being attacked by centipedes in a crawlspace. Or bashing your head against the metal duct that you just installed because the fucking drywall crew thinks it is HYSTERICAL to stick their heads down through the holes in the floor and yell BOO to startle you. Or having a nail insert itself into your shin as you navigate a pitch black crawlspace because idiot landscaper boy has unplugged your power for the third time in a row and you have to crawl out to go yell at him and plug your shit back in. And then on your way back to your dungeon, having to entertain Hillbilly Hank and his shirtless buddy Jason’s idea that you care about their new “little hot rod four-banger real curve-huggin’ sex machine”, AKA a 2002 Pontiac. Or having your fucking retina annihilated by a stray chunk of sawdust and not being able to open your eye for 24 hours, but still having to scale rafters like a one-eyed monkey, cradling a cordless drill in your neck so that you can hook up the bathroom exhaust fan, while the moron below shouts up stories about guys that have fallen out of the attic and died. Or trying to overcompensate for the fact that you are a weak little girl and having an surprisingly heavy bundle of galvanized six-inch pipe fully wipe you out in front of all the guys that you work with, including your arch-nemesis, a bitter old British sheet metal worker that loves to tell you how incapable you are and throw ladders at your head. Or getting stuck between two floorboards and not eating carbohydrates for a week because you feel like the basement just called you fat. And I never even got fifteen percent off a plate of sweet potato fries and a fuzzy peach bellini.

But I’ll probably never again get to work with guys that think you’re a hero if you come to work hungover, use duct tape as band-aids and don’t know or care what MCATs or LSATs are, but are the smartest guys I have ever met. I don’t think I have learned as much in my time at a world-class university then I did this summer in a workshop that always had to have the door closed because we weren’t technically allowed to be doing what we were doing in there. Life is not that complicated if you have a beer, a fishing rod, and can get a 350 dollar ticket to Vegas for the weekend through your online poker club.

Port Alberni, thank you.

- Katie Burrell
The Red Herring
Vol. XX no. 0.5

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• Posted on September 17th, 2008
• Written by editorial staff
• Articles, Katie Burrell, Web-only