So,

I get up, get on the subway, get all the way to Kennedy station. At no point on my journey is any announcement made to the effect of "the entire Scarborough Rapid Transit line is down today." I arrive at Kennedy, find the entries to the RT blocked off. There is no signage, there are no announcements, there aren't even any TTC employees around to inform passengers as to where on the platform one might find a shuttle bus. When I ask a TTC employee for that information, he yells at me because he's just gotten on-shift and doesn't know. When I ask a second TTC employee for that information, he yells at me that the shuttle buses load where they always load, at the end of the station. (I presume he had somehow miraculously gleaned from my appareil that I could not, ever, possibly be someone who would not already have that information.) The driver of the shuttle bus announces that he is driving an RT shuttle bus from Kennedy to McCowan, and then drives to Scarborough Town Centre and stops. When I am still sitting on the bus, he asks me why. I tell him I'm going to McCowan. He yells at me, because no buses are going to McCowan and I should know this. I get over to McCowan, and find the station locked. An employee inside yells at me for trying to open the door. (The station is the only on-foot access point to Consilium Place, where I work. Well, the only one that doesn't involve trudging across an unploughed field that is four feet thick with snow.) I walk the rest of the way.

I wish I got to be as bad at my job as the TTC gets to be at theirs.

I arrive at the office to discover that the Tederick.com database has dumped the category information for every post on the site, so after retrogressing the database to Sunday afternoon I spend a half hour manually reconstructing the 20-odd posts created since then.

I receive one cancellation and two no-shows to my morning meeting, and think that perhaps I will go in a corner, drink my egg nog, and contemplate the mysteries of a world in which, on three and a half hours of sleep and in spite of all the aforementioned information, I am still in a somewhat humourous mood.

Posted by tederick at 9:29 AM in i hate the ttc & j-o-b & tederickdotcomdotcom
Permalink | Comments (0)

Not only is Chinese Democracy actually coming out on Sunday, not only can you actually listen to the whole thing right now on MySpace to prove it, but the Dr. Pepper thing is actually happening too. Get your free Dr. Pepper coupon for 24 hours starting at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday morning.

Do it even if you hate the substance, because they owe us, man. They owe us for 1994 through 2008, man. They owe us for the last three tracks of The Spaghetti Incident? and the first two tracks of Lies. They owe us for the rock n' roll.

Here's where we're at as of this week:

• The TTC makes me so angry I want to punch chickens
• Werner Herzog's Nosferatu does not suck
• Harmful to Minors turned out to be a surprising page-turner
• I would be indebted to anyone who knows where I could find peppermint-striped pieces of 8 1/2 by 11 paper.

Meanwhile, here's an experiment you can try at your job. Don't turn your computer on. My computer ate its brain on Tuesday night and it took security and tech support a stupendous quantity of time to stop scratching their ass holes and actually fix the problem, so I spent Wednesday morning computerless, and was inspired to go the entirety of the day in like kind. I'm an e.learning guy. I needs me some computin'. But just leaving that godawful box in a drawer and sitting on the other side of my desk, working only with my phone and a piece of paper, was relatively liberating. I had my feet up a lot of the time, and I looked out the window somewhat, and I listened to music. I had useful conversations and stirred shit up. Give it a try, if only because when the apocalypse comes, you won't have your computer anyway. Be more of a pirate than not, is all.

Cleaning clown-goo off my fingertips and looking forward to an anniversariffic weekend.

Posted by tederick at 11:19 AM in books & i hate the ttc & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & movies & pirates & sex (theoretical)
Permalink | Comments (0)

I would be inclined to call the "I just broke up with Sarah Marshall, and then went to Hawaii and found out that she was staying in the same hotel as me with her new boyfriend!" thing the worst kind of Hollywood cliché, until about 9 p.m. on Wednesday night, when not 10 hours after having seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall in an empty Wednesday morning theatre, and en route to Niagara Falls for a night of decadent trashiness, Sarafina called her ex-boyfriend to wish him a happy birthday, only to discover that he and his girlfriend were in the very town we were about to enter, staying at the casino we were at that exact moment pointing the Land Rover towards. And would we like to get together later for some gambling? So, apparently that's actually a thing that happens in the world. Jason Segel, I take it all back. And your penis is lovely, but please tell your director to stop cutting away from it so quickly. His ratings-board kowtow is ruining the joke.

We did the Niagara Falls thing, a town so named because there's a dirty great waterfall cutting right through the middle of the tourist traps (Ours and Theirs). There was a large Jacuzzi; there was stupendously expensive room service; there was a ginormous bed with lots of pillows. There was the single largest collection of Orthodox Jews I have ever seen staying in a single place at a single time. There was a massage, but no cookie platter cookie platter cookie platter cookie platter. There was a waxwork of Johnny Depp that looked more like me, instead of the other way around. There was a moderately-effective Haunted House that emptied out into an eerily deserted indoor playground - making Sarafina and I wonder aloud if this wasn't all part of the experience, the part where "the real terror begins." Yeah, all in all I'd say we took that town to school.

"A stupid, dangerous prick move" is what I've been calling the TTC midnight strike - wherein several hundred thousand people were left stranded in Toronto when transit when on an unannounced wildcat at 12:01 a.m. That's a pretty fucking terrible night and time to leave people standing alone on bus platforms, unaware that their ride is never going to show up. The back-to-work legislation reputedly just passed, meaning that my Hail Mary drive out to Consilium to get my work laptop for some work-at-home tomorrow was apparently unnecessary. But I'll probably stay home anyway, just to stay off the system an extra day. I don't really think I want to be anywhere near any ATU 113 members in the next 24 hours or so.

Now I've gotta deal with the fact that I'm going back on the clock tomorrow; that my remarks comparing the planetary boringness of The Barber of Seville to Saturn might have made Margaret Atwood think me uncouth; and that even though it feels like we've spent every waking moment together for the last 8 days, I miss my girl. But I'm in a "let's get on with it" frame of mind right now, so I suppose hauling canvas isn't a bad way to round out a long, strange vacation.

Posted by tederick at 2:05 PM in blogTO & hotels & i hate the ttc & jedi antics & movies
Permalink | Comments (0)