I thought I had found the perfect job: reception at a small construction and design firm, 24 hrs a week, and I could choose the hours, through an agency, so a temp employee for 3 months, and then on permanent staff with an accompanying raise in hourly rate. It all looked good. Nice people. Quiet location. Typical office work, sorting years worth of papers into files, updating addresses, Xeroxing, dealing with couriers, that sort of thing. Mostly mindless jo-job work that didn’t require thought only thoroughness and care. Leaving me free to explore the ideas ranging through my mind, free to consider what to write next, to think about my art, my kids, my life...
So I picked afternoons. I would go in from noon to 5 every day, except Friday, when it would be for 4 hours. Everyone seemed amenable.
But it was in an industrial area that is not serviced by buses except at rush hour. I hadn’t figured on the difficulty of getting there mid day into my plan. That hour and ten minute trip became more difficult as the weeks wore on. I got sick, too. There was the stress of catching a bus to get me to another bus that only ran every half hour; miss that bus on Marine Way and then I’m late getting into work.
So I went early every day and sat at what has to be the world’s worst bus stop. Oh, covered, yes, at least that, but not much use on rainy days when the splash coming from the trucks' enormous tires was worse than anything falling from the sky. And polluted and smelly. Huge trucks rumbling by without emission controls. And cold. I don’t know why that spot at Victoria and Marine Way is so cold, but it is. Sunless too. When I had bronchitis I could barely breath there; I would stand on the other side of the bus shelter, away from the fumes, trying to ingest whatever oxygen the hills of shrubs and trees were emitting. After the 5 minute bus ride, there was the 2.5 kilometer walk, down roads with more huge trucks careening, across that artery of pollution, Marine Way, again, where I sometimes feared for my life, literally-- those huge trucks and their crazy drivers crashing through the red pedestrian traffic light. Continuing on through a back road leading into the lot of a warehouse where boxcars were often stationed, being loaded or unloaded, and men looking at me in ways that didn't make me feel safe, especially with the private railroad land and thick bushes behind. And no matter how fast I walked, I was always 5 minutes late for work, something one of my bosses duly noted and held against me. I tried so hard to make it work, really I did.
The
break-in did me in- I felt so helplessly far from my children due to the lack of bus service mid-day. And then last Thursday the Victoria Street bus broke down. I had to take the one behind it. And, as fast as I ran down the hill from Hastings to Marine Way, hurting my knees in the process, I saw my once-every-half-hour bus fly by. Drat. I was panting in the invisible but heavy pollution of that road and breathing hurt. I sat on the cold bench and waited, misery incarnate. A taxi – oh a solution to getting to the weary job on time, ran to the next road where he pulled in, jumped in, drove for maybe 4 minutes to Boundary Road, and the meter already said nearly $8.00 – and I wouldn't even make that much in the half hour I was trying to get to work for. I told the taxi driver to stop, to let me out, that I wasn't paying any more for the ride. And then I still had a hike to get to work, where I arrived 10 minutes late, and at the end of my tether.
I told my two bosses my tale of woe. And said that I cannot do the half day jaunt anymore, that the transit doesn't service this area, that I can only come in 3 full days a week. A bus comes into the area during rush hour. It takes me 35 minutes to get home. Over the period of a week, I would save 5 ½ hours of traveling time, a whole afternoon’s worth of time.
The next day I am told that I won’t be coming back, that they have called the agency and hired another woman to work half days.
And it was my painting, my painting that has sat for 2 months, untouched, and which I looked at that morning, wishing, wishing, and so I know it was my muse that cut this job short for me, because it just wasn’t working, I need whole days to paint, and, while I could have had that at the beginning of this job, when they were open to flex hours, they got too used to having me there every day, and wouldn’t consider any options other than the one I had originally created.
Anyway, I was just a nameless woman who was hired to make coffee, do dishes, take out the garbage, answer the phone, xerox blueprints, pack a pouch of invoices and timesheets off to head office once a week, clean up an awful filing mess, update a list with addresses 4 and 5 years old (SuperPages came to my aid), chase after tardy submissions of bids on construction projects, they even took away the little ceramic heater that kept me warm, and no-one knew that I wrote, or painted, or took photographs, or have the equivalent of 3 degrees (two BAs, but from a university that doesn't grant double BAs, an MA minus the language requirement, an A student...sigh & ho hum, plus the graduate degrees I didn't finish-withdrawing from a PhD program in my mid-20s, the fiascos with Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies in the intervening years, etc. ho hum), or that I was capable of so much more than they could ever possibly imagine.
Yes, I was bored. But we could buy groceries every week without worry.
Now I have to finish that painting. Not sleep from the stress of financial worry. And find another temp job for next week so we can eat the week after.
I won’t miss that truck heavy highway one bit.
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Dear Readers, I am usually not like this: Was I really pushed to my edge with this situation and was there there anything I could have done to make it work? Or am I simply PMSing?
My best writing occurs when I am just coming out of a meditative nap. A place where I let go of everything---discovered this being lulled in a hammock strung across my tiny studio. I like to be lying down, with a notebook and a pencil on my lap, or my tiny pocket pc, something private, that only I can see, and drifting dreamily in and out of stillness. It is in this deeply relaxed state that images begin adding their vitality to what I am writing about... It is in this quiet state of mind that my imagination has most freedom... And I have learnt to trust the flow of words, even if they don't 'pull together'; when I come back later, I find nuggets in the tumble of jewels that I can take out, polish and wear...
