A Moment of Stress

The Western Board of Music, where I served as Executive Director for about a year and a half in the mid-90s, had a suite of custom-built software I used to schedule student exams and record their grades. It was cumbersome and awful, and as you can see here, caused some frustration. 

Return to Lister Hall

For a brief week sometime in...1994, I think, I rented a room in Lister Hall because Dad was out of town and I couldn't commute with him from Leduc to Edmonton for work at the Western Board of Music. I wound up staying in the Main Kelsey Dungeon, which was part of the Main Kelsey floor I'd lived on for four years while earning my B.A.

I'm not sure what I'm lamenting here, but I'm amused by the dot-matrix printer and its full box of tractor feed paper, as well as the ancient Windows PC, which may have been my first or second computer after retiring my last Atari. Note the box of 3.5" floppy disks on the shelf to my right.

I find it kind of amazing that I dragged all that hardware from Leduc to Edmonton for a week. 

Shine

Way back in 1996, when I was working at the Western Board of Music, someone - I think it may have been board member Carol Mellors - gave me two tickets to see a sneak preview of Shine, the biographical dramatization of the life of concert pianist David Helfgott. For whatever reason I didn't go.

Today, over 18 years later, I finally watched the film. Of that year's Best Picture nominees, I would rank it above winner The English Patient, but below all the other nominees (Secrets & Lies, Fargo and Jerry Maguire). It's a perfectly serviceable film, but Helfgott's descent into madness comes rather out of the blue. Yes, there are scenes of domestic violence and certainly Helfgott faced tremendous pressure to perform, but in the context of the movies, Helfgott-as-character suffers torments no worse than legions of other film heroes. This is not to trivialize the character's suffering, based as it is on real life, but the film could have done a better job of showing how Helfgott's illness developed.

Mystery of the Missing Magnet

I was nearly finished Tarzan and the Golden Lion this morning when I noticed something caught between the pages of the decades-old book. My eyebrows leaped for my hairline as I recognized my Star Trek: First Contract soundtrack fridge magnet, long thought lost. I slapped it onto my office refrigerator as soon as I returned home.

Star Trek: First Contact hit theatres in late 1996. My friend Leslie accompanied me to the film. She probably didn't enjoy it as much as I did, but I do recall she found it interesting that Star Trek's utopian vision required a nuclear holocaust as part of its backstory. (I find it pretty interesting too.) In the instant before Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix lifts off from Montana, I knew with absolute certainty that he was going to play Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," and sure enough that's exactly what happened.

So impressed was I with this choice of music that I bought the soundtrack shortly afterward. When I opened up the CD package, I discovered the First Contact fridge magnet.

"That's odd," I thought. "Why would a CD include a fridge magnet?"

Not knowing what else to do with the odd bonus, I took the CD to work - coincidentally, the Western Board of Music, where I'd worked with Leslie only a year or so before - and stuck the magnet to a filing cabinet, where it stayed for the year or two.

Months later, I moved on to a new job at Hole's. And months after that, I realized that the fridge magnet had gone missing. Why I even noticed its absence I cannot say, but for years afterward, every few months, a small corner of my brain would ask "Whatever happened to that fridge magnet?" "I must have left it at Western Board," another part of my brain would reply.

Until today. My edition of Tarzan and the Golden Lion was printed in 1997. I must have read the book and used the fridge magnet as a bookmark. Or perhaps that's the book I was reading when I left Western Board and I tucked the magnet into the book for easy carriage.

This is probably the most inconsequential post I've ever offered here at The Earliad, and that's saying something. I wouldn't have written a thing about this event if the magnet's unknown status hadn't plagued me, in the mildest way, for years.

I didn't particularly care about the magnet; it's not some valuable collectible. I've lost plenty of things with far greater value, and I'm not particularly thrilled to have found this one.

And yet when I saw that magnet peeking out between the covers of my book, it felt like an accusation of some kind, like I'd deliberately abandoned the worthless geegaw. I could have thrown it away, but instead there it hangs, on my fridge, the baleful eyes of Picard, Data and the Borg Queen mutely watching me type this.

Duly Noted

Many moons ago, I served as Executive Assistant for the Western Board of Music, a charitable institution that organized music exams for students of piano, drums, woodwinds, brass, etc. I answered many phone calls and took plenty of messages for my boss, Leslie. To amuse myself I sometimes overdramatized some of the more banal calls, as seen above; the student pictured needed to postpone his exam due to a minor injury.

I think the funniest part is Leslie's matter-of-fact note, neatly scrawled in red. Like all of my coworkers (and friends) over the years, she quickly grew accustomed to my eccentricities and learned not to encourage me.

Alien Ambush Poster

The tagline for the recent remake of Clash of the Titans was "Titans Will Clash." The idiocy of that drove me crazy, so of course I've emulated it here.

500 Envelopes

Summer student and pianist Gloria, hapless EA Earl and ED Leslie at the glamorous Western Board of Music offices.

It was the spring of 1995. I was twenty-six, unemployed, and living in my parents' basement. A young woman I'd once dated took pity on me and told me that a friend of hers was looking for some temporary help at something called the Western Board of Music, which I later discovered was a charitable organization fostering music education.  Temporary or not, a job was a job, so at the appointed hour I showed up on the doorstep of a little old house on the east side of the University of Alberta campus, right across the street from the HUB mall parking lot.

The Executive Director was Leslie, a brilliant woman about my age whom I'd met in passing back in 1991, shortly after I graduated from university. After some words of welcome and a brief orientation, she ushered me upstairs and sat me down at a small desk, upon which rested a large box of newsletters and a stack of envelopes.

"Just fold these newsletters and stuff and seal the envelopes," she said. "Have fun!" 

Simple enough. I dove into the box, folded the first newsletter into neat thirds, slid it into the first envelope, licked the enveloped, grimaced a little at the taste of the glue, sealed it, stamped it, set it aside. I repeated the process for the next newsletter, and the next, and the next, and the next...

After the first half hour, my tongue was numbed by a thick coating of envelope glue. As the afternoon wore on, glue was the least of my worries - my tongue  and the corners of my mouth became crisscrossed with tiny paper cuts. The stack of newsletters diminished as the stack of sealed envelopes grew, but my endurance was waning. How many newsletters were in this box, anyway?

At last, in the late afternoon, Leslie reappeared - just as I was dragging my tongue across the last envelope. Her eyes widened as she shrieked in horror, wrapping her hands into her long brown hair in consternation.

"I can't believe you licked five hundred envelopes!" she exclaimed. "You were supposed to use the envelope sealer!"

I froze in mid-lick, tongue bloody.

"Uh?" I said, not comprehending her meaning. She pointed at the desk - or more specifically, at a small bottle, filled with water, with a sponge on top: an envelope sealer. Leslie had helpfully placed it in plain sight before I'd begun my task, but having never seen one, I didn't understand its purpose: to seal envelopes without risk of lacerations or glue poisoning. My tongue grimaced in annoyance at my stupidity.

Displaying immense compassion, Leslie hired me to serve as her Executive Assistant. There was no lasting damage to my tongue - only my dignity.

Still, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything; not only did I earn valuable experience during my time as Leslie's EA (and later, after she moved on to bigger and better things, as the organization's Executive Director), we developed a friendship that I treasure to this day.

Inanimate Arch Enemy

From 1995-1998, I worked at the Western Board of Music, an educational institution for music instruction. The Board's headquarters was an old house in the Garneau region of Old Strathcona, next to the HUB Mall parking lot at the University of Alberta.

This photocopier, located on the second floor, was my nemesis.

While working at Western Board I could often be found photocopying handouts, newsletters and the like until the copier inevitably jammed. On one memorable day the magnitude of the paper jam was such that one of the interior paper rollers was stripped to the metal core, most of the rubber shredded into the bowels of the machine. I called for a service technician, who was understandably baffled when he saw the damage.

Changing the toner was even worse; the cartridges were of such shoddy construction that they leaked inky black soot all over the place. Each time I attempted this task, I'd get black toner all over my hands, my clothes, the photocopier, the floor, the walls. It was a nightmare. Thanks to this photocopier I know what toner tastes like. I'm pretty sure I inhaled a bunch of it, too. You wouldn't think that serving as an executive assistant would be hazardous, but it became so anytime I ventured to the second floor.

Even worse, not long after I was promoted to executive director we ran out of money to pay for any other staff, so I still had to battle the copier.Thankfully, I'd done enough freelance writing at this point to make the leap to a professional writing career, and I've fought with photocopiers only rarely since then.

My Most Dangerous Job

I graduated from the University of Alberta in 1991, during the last recession. Good jobs were hard to come by. For three years, I delivered auto parts to Edmonton garages, searching for more fulfilling work the whole time. I finally quit in 1994, and I was lucky enough to stumble upon a very odd transitional job before moving on to the Western Board of Music in 1995.

That transistional job was the most bizarre and dangerous I've ever had. I was one of many workers whose task was to empty a huge warehouse and move all its odds and ends, everything from office furniture and files to industrial equipment, to another location across town. It should have been simple, but this jobsite was so dangerous I quit after three months, fearing I'd be killed or badly injured.

There must have been dozens of workers, ranging in age from twenty to sixty. We were mostly left to our own devices; imagine a horde of workers without gloves or helmets or direction hauling heavy boxes every whichway. Now imagine that many of these people knew nothing about moving safely.

Many of the items in the warehouse were stored on high shelves, shelves that consisted of rickety wooden boards laid down upon metal frames. We had no ladders or lifts; we had to clamber up the shelves, which themselves were not secured to the wall and rose to the ceiling, some twenty-five metres high. Workers near the top would pass down boxes to workers below. One of my coworkers was a nice young man from France, who was stunned when a heavy box slipped from another's grip and hit the Frenchman square atop the skull, nearly knocking him from his precarious perch down to the hard cement floor below. "Mon Dieu! Ma tete!" he shouted as the box bounced off his head and fell to the ground, bursting open to spew its contents all over the floor.

Just a couple of days later, two of the older workers were carrying a chandelier from one end of the top shelf to the other. Somehow the wooden shelf slipped halfway out of its frame, causing one worker to lose his balance. To avoid falling off the shelf, he overcompensated, careening to the right and throwing off the balance of his coworker. To this day I still don't completely understand the physics of how this happened, but in effect the first worker wound up bouncing off the shelf as if he were sprung from a diving board. The chandelier whipped around and gashed open the face of the second worker, who understandably lost his grip, blood oozing from his stunned face. The first worker wasn't strong enough to lift the chandelier himself, and so the chandelier toppled over the side, smashing into a million pieces on the floor, showering the rest of us with glass and metal shrapnel.

Not long after that, I helped load a massive industrial blueprint printer onto a forklift. This machine had to be over five metres long, and I have no idea how much it weighed; it took a dozen of us to push it the few inches needed to give the forklift access. The forklift operator lifted the forks about halfway, which seemed high to me, but what did I know? I wasn't a trained operator.

Apparently neither was he, because he took off at high speed and hit a bump on the warehouse floor. The centre of gravity shifted and the printer rolled precariously forward; the rear of the forklift rose high into the air, then crashed back down violently as the unsecured printer fell off the forks, bursting open with an ear-splitting crash and a spray of glass, oil and mechanical parts. The operator fell back into his seat so hard that the impact bounced him back into the air, and he struck his unhelmeted head on the roll cage hard enough to give him a concussion.

For some reason, the business owner had a classic muscle car stored in his garage. I don't know much about cars; all I can tell you is that it was blue and looked sort of like the car they drove on The Dukes of Hazzard. I guess the engine didn't work or there simply wasn't any fuel in the vehicle, because one worker had to steer while four or five others pushed. Unfortunately, the man steering didn't do a very good job, scraping the car's side along a support beam to create a huge dent and a long gash in the door. The business owner himself arrived on the scene just in time to witness this accident, and he wasn't happy.

Then came the last straw. I was one of a few workers asked to stay on for some additional weeks at the new warehouse, presumably because I hadn't destroyed anything or injured myself too badly to continue working. Our first job was to set up the shelving system - the same one that had already proven so dangerous at the first jobsite.

I've already mentioned that the metal shelving frames were very tall. They were also very heavy. The frames were lying on the floor, and our job was to lever them upright. Four of us were positioned at the base of the frame, and another four, many metres away, at the tip. Those at the tip walked forward, gradually lifting that end of the frame higher and higher into the air. Of course, as they walked toward those of us holding the base, more and more of the weight at the tip was unsupported. As the centre of gravity moved, we all found it harder and harder to hold onto the frame; the more the angle steepened, the harder it got. Once the frame stood perpendicular to the floor, we had to hold it in place while another team repeated the process with a second vertical frame. Only then could other workers lock the horizontal frame pieces into place, giving the structure some measure of stability.

We repeated this process several times, but eventually our tired muscles couldn't hold. We levered another frame into place, but we couldn't hold it perpendicular. The top swayed back and forth dizzily as we struggled to hang on, but in just a few seconds I felt the frame slipping from my grip, tipping over. We screamed at everyone to get out of the way of the falling hunk of metal, trying to hang on to give people time to escape. The frame hit the cement floor so hard that we felt the vibrations through our feet, and the clang of impact made our ears ring for several minutes. If that frame had hit anyone, they would have been killed.

That was enough for me. I walked to the foreman's office and gave notice. Six months later I had a much safer job, where the worst danger would turn out to be a possibly rabid bat...ah, but that's another story.

Trail of the Skulker

Yesterday I startled two coworkers out of their seats.

First, I innocently walked into Amanda's office to ask her a question. The words "Amanda, would you mind..." left my lips and prompted her to shriek and leap out of her chair.

Barely a couple of hours later, I walked into Michael's office to ask him a question. This time, my inadvertent victim coughed up some food, did a spit take and yelped, "Earl! Gah!"

A few years back, while working at the Western Board of Music, I scared Gloria coming up out of the basement and Leslie coming around a corner - or perhaps it was the other way around.

I routinely scare Sylvia at home.

None of this is deliberate. I would have thought that someone of my girth would make more noise while stumbling around the office, but apparently not. In any event, my apologies to all I have startled.

Giggle.

Bad Poems Unfit for Human Eyes

Holy Smashamoley! It's been nearly a month since my last update. Perhaps some bad poetry is in order.

Eye
An EYE
undying
lies amongst
the cries
and anguished
sighs of
those who
failed to
snatch the
prize that
only truth
or courage
buys; and
sees that
ichor in
the skies
rains down
to strike
both witless
and wise.

Silly Nelly and the Jelly
Willy-nilly, silly Nelly spread some jelly on her belly
“Ugh,” she said, “this jelly’s smelly,
But I’ll apply it just for Kelly
So he’ll see me on the telly.”

Poor, poor Nelly! Wed to Kelly
Who’s nothing but a boorish bully
From the wrong side of the gully.

Kelly, scheming, spoke with Sully
(Also from that ghetto gully)
“When those smelly proles see Nelly
With that jelly on her belly
Displayed upon erotic telly
They’ll scream for more, and surely, Sully,
We’ll rake in money willy-nilly.”

“A perfect plan,” chortled Sully,
“Our future’s looking bright and sunny
Our eggs well cooked, no longer runny.”

“And as for Nell,” replied foul Kelly,
“She’ll twitch and grind her sexy belly
Turning men’s minds into jelly
Exploiting supple assets fully.”

Meanwhile, Nelly, feeling sorry
For herself and sick with worry
Consoled herself with rice and curry
Her vision clear, no longer blurry.

“Why should I expose my belly
(sexy though it is) for Kelly?
I should see some of that money
And it better not be funny –
Or they’ll find out in a hurry
Worse than Hell is woman’s fury.”

A tragic trio, watch them scurry
Their lives exploding in a flurry
And unless all three are wary
Their dreams and hopes they soon will bury.

The Individualator
Here I sit at head of class
Flopped upon my flabby ass
Eyes sharp-peeled to catch a cheat
And grind their papers into meat

This I do not want to do
It would leave me feeling blue
So I pray with all my might
That these students know what’s right.

I used to drive a truck
Now I drive a desk
I do not need to say
Which I like the best
I don’t know if it’s permanent
I don’t know if I’ll stay
But while I’m on the firmament
I’ll take it day by day.

Ted Hole, 1926-2003

Mr. Hole died last Wednesday, and today I was one of the thousands who went to the Winspear Centre to pay their respects. It was a beautiful memorial, held in a beautiful building, with beautiful music.

I really only knew Mr. Hole as Lois' husband, but despite our casual acquaintance I did feel a connection with Ted. He made a point of telling me what a great job I was doing, and I admired his quiet dignity and wry sense of humour. He was a philanthropist, a gentleman, a man who appreciated the fine arts, a man who never hesitated to give anyone a helping hand. Family friend Donna Powell, Ted's sons Bill and Jim, his granddaughter Kate, and U of A President Rod Fraser all spoke eloquently of Mr. Hole. It was probably Bill who moved me most, if only because he was so obviously distraught; the Holes generally keep a tight reign on their emotions in public, and it was a little shocking, if understandable, to see Bill cry.

At the reception, I ran into Carol Mellors, who had been playing timpani with the Edmonton Schoolboys Alumni Band at the beginning of the program. Carol used to serve as a director of the Western Board of Music, the outfit I used to work for. As we were chatting, Lois passed by, and she touched my shoulder; I almost didn't see her, and all I had time to say was "Hello, Your Honour" before she and her escort were off. Then, just a few seconds later, Bill passed us, and he reached out and gave my shoulder a firm squeeze, saying, "Thanks, Earl." And then, almost as if they'd timed it, Jim came by and squeezed my shoulder as well, giving me just a nod.

I'm not a touchy-feely kind of person, but for some reason, those three brief moments of human contact really meant a lot to me. If anything I did (and I really did very little for this sad event) made any of this any easier for them, I'm very glad, and very grateful.