Last weeks of Van - Part One

I'm in Edinburgh finally.

My last few weeks in Van were eventful and enjoyable.

I worked two jobs for a couple of weeks before ditching one. Weekday mornings I would hand out free newspapers on a street corner for 3 hours. In the afternoons I worked at iconic computer games makers Electronic Arts, where I was a production assistant for the soccer games (Fifa 2006 etc).

Handing out newspapers was interesting for a little while. I worked for 24 Hours, which required me to wear a bright orange smock. I resembled an anachronistic Ulster Unionist marcher. This state-of-affairs was made worse by the fact that the hawkers for our competitors, Metro, wore dark green smocks and looked like Catholic parodies of the same. Being of mostly Irish Catholic stock I felt like I was working for the wrong team. Luckily the Metro bosses tended to be Nazis while ours were more relaxed. The green supervisors instructed their lot not to speak to us at all. Many of the Metro people did just that but, thankfully, the guy on my first corner was a nice kid who preferred a pleasant working environment to the safety of following orders.

Ryan and I worked on the corner of Burrard and Georgia Sts. It was pretty busy there and there were lots of attractive young women (or as my French workmate Bruno would say, 'ze pretty girls'). In fact, I could tell you exactly how many. 55 on both the first and second days, 49 on the third and then about 40 each day on average after that. I had to pass the time somehow...

Working on this corner felt like a mix between the Truman Show and Groundhog Day. The former because the same people would often walk past several times over the course of each morning (making us think that we were on a tv show that couldn't afford a lot of extras). The latter because the same things would happen at the same time each day - the young bum would turn up at 8am to start begging; at 8:45am a middle-aged man would walk up to the corner with (presumably) his father, say goodbye to him then hello to us; at about 8:50 a young asian girl would stop to give the beggar money & have a chat; and so forth...

After a little more than a week on this particular corner I was told I had to move. My next couple of posts kind of sucked before I was put on the corner of Homer & Georgia Sts - next to the central library. This was a great spot because most people were really friendly and, as I had no competition, the papers gave themselves away. The solitary drawback was that I counted only 12 attractive women on that first day. Oh well, can't have everything - and it's not like ze pretty girls were going to stop & flirt with a scraggly Antipodean wearing a fanta coloured pinafore.I casually mentioned to my boss that I liked this corner. She said, 'It's yours. Just tell the woman who usually works there to go to your old corner'.

When I turned up for work the next morning there was conflict in the air. Sure enough, a middle-aged woman came up to me and said, 'I thought this was my corner. What are you doing here?' She was confrontational from the start so I decided to stand my ground.
'Oh, I was told to swap with you,' I replied - suggesting forces beyond my control.
'I'm not going to your corner. I'm going over here,' she said as she bustled off to a previously untapped slab of pavement.

Fifteen minutes later she came back and said, 'no, this is my corner. I think it would be best if you went back to yours'. I didn't say anything and just left - only to discover that my corner had been colonised by a stoner coworker with less aptitude for the job than even I. I wasn't going to argue over the territory so I wandered off to find the supervisor. When she discovered that the woman on at the library had refused to move she took off prepared for confrontation. I was back outside the library the next day - and it was there that I witnessed a man pull a 10" knife on a woman at 8am on a Tuesday morning. I spent a third of my shift writing out a witness statement for the cops.

Shortly before I finished working for 24 Hours we had a meeting in a skybox at GM Place, home of the Vancouver Canucks. Unfortunately, we weren't there while a hockey game was taking place but, fortunately, the meeting was hilarious. We had a marketing guy talk to us about the best method of 'killing the competition' (I kid you not). Apparently we of the Orange Order were pasting the Metro crew. I put this down to the fact that we were never told to push papers in people's faces like the green team did. Their methods were so annoying people preferred to take papers from the human newspaper boxes that we resembled - you want the paper, you take the paper.

So the marketing guy's idea for us to do even better was to push papers in people's faces like the Metro team. Brilliant. He asked us if we had any ideas. Two hawkers had lots of ideas. The first said we should say to unhappy looking people, 'c'mon it's Friday! It's not that bad!' and a half dozen other such suggestions. Bruno wanted to kill this guy when he worked with him one day because he kept saying, "get your 24 Hours, half price today" then laughing at himself. The other guy said that if we just behaved like good citizens people would want our papers more. At least I think that was the point of his story, which went like this: "The other day a seagull flew into some hot oil. A lady and me helped the seagull by wrapping it up and taking it to a vet. I talked to the vet today and he said the seagull is going to be okay".

Anyway, the Electronic Arts job more than made up for the mundanity of the paper job.