Work

The workplace is an interesting social experiment. You are often thrown together for long periods of time with people whom you might not otherwise be exposed to. I work in the construction industry. I am pretty sure that the relatively low educational requirement to high pay ratio makes it attractive to people who might otherwise not be able to function in society. I have been lucky enough to be put in the path of some truly strange, weird and bizarre individuals. I often entertain my wife, who is from the corporate world, with stories from work. I thought I might share a few.

These are in no chronological order and names have been changed to protect the insane.

A lady on my job site goes into the standard public womens washroom with individual stalls. She proceeds to get naked from the waist down, throw a foot up on the sink (in the open part, not in the stall) and vigorously washes her vagina with a handful of paper towel. If any other women happen to walk into the public washroom at the time she yells and curses at them for interrupting her.

A husband and wife are working on the same job site but on different crews. They have a "domestic dispute" the night before. In the morning, the husband is still full of steam and goes to his wifes crews area at the morning safety meeting. They begin to shout at each other and then POW she gets punched and goes down. The other members of her crew don't take kindly to this and drag him up to the main office and make sure that he bounces off of every obstacle on the way up. The ambulance comes and takes her away. The RCMP take him away, they have to stop just off site to allow a train to pass. He breaks out of the cop car, runs and hops the train to escape.

A gentleman that I have working on my crew approaches me and asks if he can go home early. When I ask why he tells me that "I greased my pants". I am not entirely sure what he means so I question him and he tells me that he shat himself. I have a hard time understanding how a grown man can poop his pants, but really don't get why he had to tell me about it. A simple "I am sick" or "My wife called" would suffice.

A very nice, very religious young man on my crew gets married and goes on his honeymoon. Him and his wife have saved themselves for marriage until the age of 23. After he gets back from his honeymoon, he asks me for a private moment and expresses concern that his wife gets sore during sex. They are both inexperienced and he wants to know if it is something to worry about. I am trying to be mature and helpful and I ask for more details in order to better assess the problem. He claims that the first 3 or 4 times in a day they have sex it is OK. It is the 5th or 6th time that it starts hurting.

We are let out of work for one night and drive to the nearest town (Ft. St. John). We go for supper with the crew. There is one man with us who is not completely sane and we all know it. He asks the waitress for a "steak and a plate". She offers him potatoes or side dishes. He says that he won't eat them, he wants a steak and a plate. When the steak (and plate) arrive, he picks up the meat with both hands and starts gnawing away. A co-worker smacks him in the head and tells him to stop embarrassing us. He puts the steak down until the co-worker looks away and then begins cramming it down again.

A young man from PEI comes out to northern B.C. to work. He has never seen a bear and is very excited to see one. He steals a pork chop from the cafeteria and hangs it in the window of his camp room. He leaves his camera on the ledge in hopes to attract a bear to his room so he can get a picture and send it to his mom. He got a bear but didn't get the picture.

A man removes his hard hat and safety glasses at work. He is approached by a safety officer to put them back on. He refuses saying that he talked to god and if "you won't follow gods laws. I refuse to follow yours." He was fired.

I worked in a gold mine in northern Ontario. The underground miners were predominantly french Canadian and were all career, generational miners. Mining underground is extremely dirty and wet work. After the shift they all disrobe in the "dry room" and then shower and change before heading home. After many years of this they become very comfortable with their nakedness. I, however, am not comfortable with their nakedness. I did my very best to avoid being trapped in the dry room, but my job often took me in there or through there. On these occasions I would be surrounded by large groups of cigarette smoking, french speaking, buck ass naked, flip flop wearing men who would try hard, in broken english, to inquire about the new guy on the job and what was happening with our contract. I became an expert in maintaining eye contact.