A few days ago, it was a mighty strange time at my place of work. That is to say my mobile office with a big metal bin on the back.

The story starts with my name apparently falling out of the work schedule for some unknown reason. This resulted in the strange situation of being scheduled to work, yet not being assigned a position. I was rendered nomadic!

Anyways, since the day was shaded in grey, which indicates workage, I showed up at the office. Then, by some bizarre coincidence, one of the other drivers didn't! Some kind of scheduling mishap, as he was only then on his way back from his vacation.

That resulted in an empty driver position, which I was given. It was made weirder by the fact that the driver I was replacing was supposed to be certifying another new hire in the ways of the junk that day. So two new guys were rolling out for a regular work day, one of them uncertified.

Anyways, we're all cool and set to go, but we have no truck, because drivers are supposed to pick up their trucks from somewhere in the city in the morning and bring them in. So the truck was still sitting at it's parking spot, all far away and stuff!

In the end, we got assigned a truck parked at the office, designation: TOR1. The first truck to be used at the Toronto franchise, hence the oldest truck. Old Glory, they call it. There are stories.

Anyways we get our shenanigans together, roll out in TOR1, and book up to Vaughan, the "city above Toronto". I was about to exit the highway and hit up York Metal to do some good old fashioned recycling when Old Glory started giving me some trouble.

First, I couldn't steer. The wheel just wouldn't go, and I had to force it really hard to manage what could only in the loosest sense be referred to as "steering". Then my navigator Mike noticed all this smoke pouring out the backside. I managed to get that sucker off the highway and lurched to the Esso across from the metal yard, which is when I noticed the breaks weren't working either!

So I try my very best to slow and steer even though both are responding extremely sluggishly, and pull into the gas station, where I immediately cut the engine. We piled out and saw that Old Glory was leaking all manner of fluid, and popping the hood revealed that the engine belt had come off.

Neither one of us really knows shit about vehicle mechanics, other than how to open the hood and check a few of the simpler things, so we were scratching our heads about this development. I called it in and we were told to call up a cab to take us to another truck, which, ironically, was the one that was previously parked too far to get to from the office. They called a tow truck for Old Glory.

The cab finally arrives and we slide on over to TOR7, which gives us a decent ride for the rest of the day, despite the fact that we were running two hours behind. Oh, and at one point the load we had on was apparently too much for the hydraulic lift, and we had to hand bomb half of the junk before it finally got it's wussy act together and hoisted the rest of the shit off.

I'm now certain that I've picked the one job where each day is going to be full of wacky adventures.

Labels: live, work

Something creepy happened to me on the streetcar today. I decided to venture forth from my lair to do lunch with myself and also pick up some art supplies at Curry's. Got a sweet new pad of bleedproof paper for a comic I'm working on, plus a few new pricey inking pens.

Anyways, the creepy thing happened on my way back to headquarters. I always have my mp3 player cranked to max when I'm on the TTC, to drown out the annoying people (ie. everyone). Nothing like grueling death metal for such situations. However, there was someone on the streetcar who finally prompted me to turn down the volume on my growling doom music for a moment, just to hear what she was saying.

It was this little girl, maybe six or seven, all dressed in pink, sitting two seats up from me. She was there with her mom for most of the ride, so I had plenty of time to observe the situation and become perplexed. She was extremely fidgety, and kept crawling all over the seat and sticking her face out the open window. She was also jabbering nonstop about something. At this point, however, I was still fully plugged into Dimmu Borgir, so I didn't know what she was saying.

A couple of times, when we were stopped, I noticed that one or two people outside would glance at where she was sitting, while she talked out the window and moved around in her seat. Her mom seemed completely oblivious.

Finally, out of sheer curiosity, I dialed down the volume on my mp3 player to hear what she was going on about. By this point I had formed a hypothesis that she was singing a song or reciting something that would necessitate constant speech. As the dark lyrics of symphonic black metal faded away, her voice came floating into my ears.

She was singing J-E-S-U-S to the tune of the song Bingo. She just kept saying the letter part repeatedly, never quite getting to the "And Jesus was his name-o" part. While she was singing it, she continued to fidget in her seat, looking forward and back, and sticking her face out the window to look at the people outside. She wasn't singing loudly, but still with enough volume that people in the immediate vicinity could hear it.

At this point I'm just about to shake my head and turn my music back up when she launched into "Oh the bad men want to kill Jesus, oh J-E-S-U-S, J-E-S-U-S, the bad man wants to kill Jesus, oh".

After that I was tensed and ready for some kind of unholy event of biblical proportions to unleash itself on our frail mortal realm. Clearly the child was possessed or something. I was fully expecting her head to start going all 360 and the pea soup to start gushing. I glanced at the guy across from me, and he looked kinda freaked out, which I thought was pretty funny, despite the fact that pretty soon we'd likely all be dead.

At the next stop, however, the succubus rose and took her demon spawn off the streetcar, and they crab-walked away into the shadows.

Things could've gone much, much worse, but we were lucky this day.

Labels: live

This is the strange story of a series of events that unfolded in the distant past. These events strained the very fibres of science and boggled the minds of all who were present at the time.

It all started with a corpse that appeared randomly in our midst. See, there was this weird sound like "DHHUNNN!", and I got distracted and tripped over this random corpse! It was soon discovered that the corpse was none other than Dun, a very annoying individual. This created a bit of a problem, but let me back up a bit for a second.

You see, Dun was the illegitimate son of Din and Jub, two of my compatriots. That mismatched couple also sired another progeny, known as Jin, brother to Dun. Then, through some bizarre circumstance, an evil clone of Jin created himself. He was called Jib. Jib was quite evil, and used evil DNA from his "uncle" Dun to create another evil clone named Dub.

Then Jib, again crossing lines man was not meant to cross, went and used malformed DNA from Dub to create another clone named Dob, who was, as expected, quite malformed. In addition to all this craziness, there is a member of the family named Bud, the dyslexic one. Nobody knows how he's connected to everyone else.

To quote Tyrphanax: "This shit is clearly bananas."

Anyways, back to Dun, the corpse guy. When he was alive, he was quite an annoying person. He would always show up, shout his name loudly for all to hear, then leave unexpectedly. Because of his annoying ways, we all plotted to kill him. We then executed our grim plan and did away with Dun, burying him out in the woods behind the storage bins.

Imagine our surprise when his corpse randomly showed up, causing me to trip over it! It was soon after this that we realized we hadn't killed Dun, but rather the malformed clone-of-a-clone, Dob. Oh, silly us.

Well that was one mystery solved, but the question of where Dun's corpse had come from was still lingering in our minds. While the others discussed the matter, I went ahead and pillaged Dun's wallet. He wasn't going to need it. Shortly after this, though, Dun's body faded away!

Nobody really saw what happened clearly, so of course we flew into a bout of accusations of corpse theft. Finally, Din got fed up and killed me to replace the corpse on the ground, to solve the problem of not having a corpse to discuss. I then respawned and re-joined the discussion.

Ultimately we decided to check the ID of the corpse on the ground, and it indicated that it was, in fact, me! A few moments later, there was a weird sound like "DHHUNNN!" and the corpse of my previous self swirled off and time traveled back to where I tripped over it originally in the past. We still haven't worked out why that happened.

So in essence, I was Dun all along, and the ill-executed plan to kill me succeeded after all when my future corpse broke the laws of the universe and traveled back in time and landed in our midst, only to fade away due to paradox-type stuff and, in doing so, spark the heated debate that brought about my death. Even after all of that, I respawned anyways!

By the way, this was all made up in the TGi chat room, after someone typed "Dun" instead of Din (who actually exists in real life, by the way). It all probably doesn't make much sense. We're just odd like that.

Labels: write