OK, maybe more than a week between posts.  I keep meaning to, but there really hasn't been any noteworthy happenings as of late.  Nothing stressful at all--though I can understand now why I found it so important to write my thoughts down before.  I needed someone to level with, whether it was myself just clearing all the negative complaints out of my system or the feedback I would get from my friends and/or family about the interesting challenges I faced.  The largest motivator by far was just to bitch.  Bitch about the learning curve of my job and the difficulties that included. 

Massive security systems that would take days, small security systems that would still take days, dog shit, cat vomit, messy homes, arrogant people, stupid people, old people, all of the above all at once...

Then, as I grew more experienced a few of those problems dropped out of sight--were no longer bothersome.  Now it doesn't matter how large or small a system is, it can now be done on my own in two hours or better.  I'm no longer worried about my service percentage, or if I'm getting enough installs since I've cracked the 180 mark and (knock-on-wood) I haven't screwed up anything in a long time.  The only service calls that I have been getting lately, thankfully, are types that don't count as a fault against me.  Adding equipment, removing the system or some other unforseen cercumstance that had nothing to do with me or how I had installed the equipment.  There are still those other things that annoy me, but they don't affect my mood as much as they had back when I was also frustrated with the equipment.  I still deal with messy homes and arrogant/stupid/old people, but I have a lot of patience with them when I need to and I am firm with people who believe that just because I'm working--that I'm wearing a uniform--that I don't deserve the same respect they would have given me if we had met as strangers on the street.

The few people that I've had to step-up to have generally respected it.  I think it was because I was honest with the situation and pointed out that were the roles reversed that they would be just as insulted as I was.  If they're men and have that last generation respect that I pride on so much, that and the way I conduct myself in their home usually wins them over and by the time I leave they're offering me a beer and to stick around for the 'game.'  Its the women, especially the over weight, stubborn, arrogant women that don't seem to understand that I too am a person.  In which case I do what all men do for one reason or another in their lives:  I flatly ignore her tantrums.  I don't care if she cancels the next day and I have to return to pull the system because she was too busy turning her attention between her screaming children and me to listen when I explained what I was doing and why.  That is her fault, not mine.

By far, my favourite woman was a few weeks ago.  I knocked on the door, introduced myself, asked for the paperwork and generally went about my routine with mechanical precision.  Her husband was all on board and he and I clicked in a friendly aquaintaince sort of way almost as immediately as the hand shake.  His grip was firm and so was mine.  Instant trust is born.  Now, with his wife; hers was a finger shake.  I understand that this is an accepted feminine practice and is supposed to emphasize (traditionally mind you) that she is a dainty woman and what-not.  Though, this could also be the root cause for why men (stereotypically) start off distrustful of women.  I swear, every time a woman has returned my handshake with every bit as much confidence as I gave it, I have been friends with her ever since.  I think there is a lesson to be had there.

Anyway, this woman:

She started tweaking the very moment I drew my cordless drill from the holster on my belt and dropped in the 3/4" drill bit into the chuck.  He had known that I was going to drill holes in order to run wire into the wall, but she thought that power came magically and the panel was held on the wall with love and not screws.  She bawked about the screw holes, she bawked about the wire-run, she bawked about the jamb-runs.  Anything at all that created a hole made the her hackles raise up.  She was pacing back and forth like someone with an obsessive compulsive disorder that was being kept from satisfying it.  Finally I broke the awkwardness of the situation and asked her how she had expected me to install the equipment.  I did actually mention magic and love, though I used it to lighten the tension in the atmosphere.  After I got her to laugh, her husband sided with me and helped lighten her mood more, but for those first five minutes she was one straw away from snapping in half from whatever--anxiety I guess.

The guys don't hang out as often as we had at the beginning of the summer, but thats just fine with me.  Its probably because of our living situation, it doesn't lend as much to our communal behaviour as the single kitchen between 14 roomates did in Kamloops.  In Kelowna even, we did things on Sundays since we were four to an apartment with two baths and a full kitchen.  Somewhere along the way though, people started picking and choosing allegiences.  Roberto was the first to switch rooms when the opportunity arose and since then he has been very openly hostile toward me.  Not bothering at all to keep his tongue civil or his temper in check.  Its very strange to me because, thinking back, I can't remember ever stepping on his toes.  It as just a sudden change from, "Ya, I like hanging out with you enough that I'll come back and tech under you as manager next year," to "Thanks for coming to help me at my install last night (joking sarcasm since he didn't)" then he almost cuts me off his response is so sharp, "FUCK YOU! I was at that Vista until 11:00."  With this hard look in his eyes.  I was suprised with myself actually, when I didn't take it any further than surprise.  I felt anger at the edge of that surprise, but I managed to bite it off long enough for my senses to come back to me and I didn't respond.

So, there are some tender relations building.  Some tension between techs that I can't wait to be rid of, come the end of the summer.

Speaking of the end of the summer,  I can't wait to come home.  I've used up all of my enthusiasm for this job already.   I've reached the top pay out for a tech, everything that I manage to install for the last month of the summer is just bread and butter.  I have no go juice.  I just want to come home and see my friends, maybe go camping before the weather really starts to turn for fall.

I miss you guys.

Well, I guess once-in-about-a-week will be the target period of time that my entries will span.  When I had been sitting on my thumbs back in Calgary--waiting for the start of this job--I had a very clear view of how my life would run once I came out here.  I would wake up in the morning, I would eat a good breakfast, have a rewarding workout and then start work.  At work I would run back and forth between installs and the local Tim Horton's and kill time writing in this journal or doodling on my sketch pad.  This was how sequential and serene I thought my easy summer job was going to be.  In actuallity, I've never worked harder or with more self-directed determination than I have in these three long weeks.  My daily schedule is filled with as much sleep and food as I can cram in before the afternoon rush hits and we start installing like crazy.

The first week was all about knocking the rust off and getting into some semblance of a groove.  It was rough and not at all like how I had imagined it would be.  In training, the work was so easy and clear.  The walls were built to be accomodating and modern, with phone and power within the same stud spacing.  Again, the actual outcome is far less simple and more frustrating that you can imagine.  Only 1-in-10 installs are as simple as the training center to mount your panel and of those 1-in-10 only 1-in-5 are as simple as they portray themselves out to be.  Which brings me to my first complaint, as a Carpenter with building code knowledge: Firestops and Kitchen cabinet blocking.  First of all, you don't need firestops in interior walls, let alone every eight inches in an interior wall.  These little pieces of seemingly harmless 2-by-4 can ruin a Technician's whole day.  Kitchen cabinet blocking is also supposed to be mounted with the 3 1/2 inch face of the blocking flush with the 1 1/2 inch width of the studs on the kitchen side of the wall!  Not--NOT--perpedicular.  Its like someone picked up a hammer and just started nailing their scraps into the walls because they thought it would increase the R rating of their insulation.

Speaking of do-it-yourself'ers.

People who love to play eletrician with their phonelines or blatently ignore the boldly embossed "Do not enclose" written into the face of their demark box.  There are reasons for those warnings.  I just love when I open a demark box (which are archaic out here) and it looks like a ball of yarn took up residence in the '60s and had copper-wire offspring in recent years.  After pruning all those wires, you find out that you've spent 45 minutes on a demark box that you can't even seize because the outgoing lines to the home's phone jacks are only three wire cord downstairs and are spliced somewhere within the walls to come out at the jack with modern CAT5 cables.  Its beautiful.  Seriously.

So again, not the serene summer job that I had envisioned, but I think I've become a better person due to these trials so I'll take it in stride.  I still haven't solved my problem with needing a packed lunch.  It is mostly out of laziness that I haven't gone to Wal-Mart and bought a lunch pale or sandwich containers, but honestly when I'm not sleeping I'm working; when I'm not doing either of those, it's Sunday and all I want to do is recharge my mental batteries.  There is a reason the regular weekend is two days long and not just the single day.  You need those two days to fully regain your mental acuity.  Friday night is when you get to stay up late and participate in mindless, face-melting entertainment; followed by sleeping in on Saturday and hanging out with friends.  Then, Sunday rolls around and you've gotten all the "play" out of your system and you can have a little 'you' time with a good book, a movie or your significant other while you do laundry.

I only have a Sunday to work with.  This means that my Friday Night, Saturday and Sunday are all vying for the same block in a very limited time slot.  What isn't dominated by sleep must be divided into two catagories: want to do and need to do.  I want to play some Halo 3 Multiplayer on my brand new Resident Evil 5 Edition X-box 360, but I need to do laundry (a bad example, since I can do both simultaineously.)  I also need to put gas in my car, buy more groceries, do the inventory for the entire office before Monday morning rolls around.

Because that is exactly how I feel working this job.  I have never, ever felt more focused on finishing by the end of the day than I have been at this job.  It is just so insane.  I don't know how the 2nd year Tech's can install in under 2 hours.  I'm busting my ass to get the systems finished in under 4.  On the positive side, the installs are coming in at a pleasant rate and so long as I can continue to improve my installation time I should be more than able to secure a steady income.  Getting paid per install kinda sucks, though it does motivate you to work hard, fast and efficiently.  Most of all it means DO IT RIGHT the first time, every time; because there are incentives at the end of the summer for those who keep their Service Percentage below 6.

Negative side of a steady flow of installs is that I barely have time to eat after breakfast.  This is how my life works on APX:  I wake up around 10 or 11AM, I eat, I S.S.S., I attend a meeting, I pack my car with equipment that I had used the previous day, I wait for my first install which comes in around 5PM normally, I finish my first install around 8PM and don't have time to eat before I have another install.  I'm out until well after midnight because of our silly Marine motto "No man gets left behind."  This means that if I'm finished, I have to go to someone else's install and help them finish before I can go home.  No one can go home until everyone can go home.  It sounds great when you're the one who will be needing all the help at the end of the day, but it totally sucks when you've worked by yourself all day with no help from anyone else and now you have to loiter around while this guy mosies along.  Especially when, at this point, it has been 12 or more hours since you last had a chance to eat anything.

So I get home around midnight usually and check my paperwork, check everyone elses paperwork and then print off and fill up everyone's float with the equipment that they used that day.  I get to my room around 1AM and all I want to do is inhale a sandwich and fall fast asleep--very fast.  These are the reasons why I haven't been updating with the stories of my adventures in la-la-land.  At he end of the day I just want to hit my pillow like a cruise missile.  In the morning I'm so stressed by the thought that I'm only barely making enough money to keep my ass fed and my car fueled that I am really in no shape mentally to go to the gym and concentrate on what I'm lifting.  Tomorrow, I think, I'll try to swim.  The problem with that is: I don't know if I'll tucker myself out too much with regular Non-work exercise that I'll crash later on in the evening.

I don't even get breaks, or time to hit a drive through for caffeeine.  Sweet, sweet java... Mmmmm. *trance*

Anyway!

British Columbia is still super nice.  I do have some pictures, not many, but some and I will try to get those uploaded as soon as I can find the energy with which to do so (even though the camera is sitting next to my elbow this very moment.)  I got to see Wolverine, got to critize it relentlessly and then I got to attend a Barbeque, because apparently the sales team met their projected sales goals for same-day installations.  Which makes me feel kind of worthless if these parties are only held when the sales people do something semi-important.  Where is the Tech 'challenges' where we compete to get additional cash? 

It just seems less fair.  Though, some of the sales team make up for it by being smoking hot--though not by much.

What else has happened that isn't work related?  Nothing.  Of course nothing James, you're a Technician, you're not supposed to have a life outside of work, what do you think you are a regular 9 to 5 worker?

Long story made short.  I'm still hopeful that this job will end up producing the amount of money that I was made to expect of it.  Which it does stand to do.  Only I'm not sure if I'll be able to survive and meet all of my expectations and goals while still chasing the dream of earning tuition on top of keeping my ass fed.  Of couse, when you only have time to eat twice a day, that does make your expenses considerably less...

P.S.

So psyched for Star Trek, I hope it takes the hype that the previews have made for it and just RAISES THE BAR with it, because Wolverine was sadly lacking in all ways that are good.  Cheese acting, cheese lines, thin plot, etc.  They just seemed to be trying to make Wolverine another Ironman sensation and they ended up with something that seemed cluttered and unfocused with CGI abusing your eyes every several minutes, if not seconds.  I'm all for CGI, because some things just look awesome and can only be possible through CGI.  However, what many directors are sadly failing to realize is that I want to watch a movie, not watch what amounts to the opening sequence to the next top-of-the-line video game.  You lose the immersion that you need in order to sell your audience on the action.  If your main character's death defying motorcycle chase looks like he's riding the coin-operated horsey in front of a projector screen, you aren't doing it right.

So I arrived in beautiful Kamloops, British Columbia in one piece.  It was a fun, if nerve racking, seven hour trip from Calgary just after the Comic Expo.  I would like to say that it was thrilling to see the price of gas jump marketedly with each kilometer I traveled west, but I think I was just confusing it for shock.  Here, I had thought that $1.00 a litre was something only to be seen during the highest demand months of the summer.  Not so.  $1.00 is standard issue for the slow months in this mountainous crevasse.  Scary fuel prices aside, the countryside is amazing when you have time to spare inbetween the twists and turns and steep slopes.  Honestly, I felt like I was playing a game of Initial D--minus the drifting of course.  Going around some of those endless left/right curves at 70km/h (the speed limit by the way) made the little hairs on the back of your neck stand rigid as the centifugal forces gently tugged on you.  The only thing that made the trip harrowing was when the sun had set behind the mountains (which are looming everywhere--I don't even think B.C. is a province, its just the nickname for the Rocky Mountain Range) and people started coming around those corners with their high beams on.

Great, just what I need.  The road lines have faded into oblivion long ago, there is a sheer wall of blsated rock on my right and a jump into a bottomless pit on my left.  Yes, I want you to blind me with your high-beams at that oh-so-crucial moment when I've just lost where my lane is supposed to be.  Stare at the rocks, stare at the rocks and try to keep them about the same distance from your passenger door as they were before the jackass blinded you.  Big rig truckers were far more mindful their headlights.  I thank them.

It turns out however, that my trip to Kamloops was not the worse however.  Some of the other techs drove through the winter storm that was only just reaching Calgary by the time I had left Saturday afternoon.  They say that it was much worse in the snow fall department when it was still stalking the mountains.  By Glacier National Park I had seen the wet trails of what may have once been snow, but it had long since melted in the sunlight.  The worst trip however, was made by a tech I have yet to meet.  Possibly won't, ever.  He was involved in a car crash with a deer somewhere along the #1 Highway coming through the mountains and was hospitalized.  His car is totalled, but he is fine aside from minor injuries.  The horrible thing was that Daniel, the rest of the techs and I were all sitting around the dinner table at Boston Pizza Sunday night laughing an joking about how he had supposedly left Saturday morning and how it was either a bold-faced lie or he was at the bottom of a valley climbing his way out.

Scary how close to the truth we may have been.

Its Tuesday now and I got my very first install yesturday.  Bad news is that I have to go back there in a few hours to finish that install.  You see, Monday started off such a good day.  We got up for a meeting at 0900 and got our gear together, etc, etc--then went for lunch.  By 1500 we had still not received an install and thus began a game of Crackdown, followed by a lengthly stint of Halo 3.  At 1834 I got my install.  At this point, as you can imagine I was very gung-ho.  I had just spent the entire day bored out of my tree, having my cousin hand me my ass on a silver platter in Halo. Now, I was going out to pay for the meals that I had been eating (only 1 a day other than my continential breakfast) and possibly make enough for gas!

Roberto buddied up with me to make the install go faster with the promise that I scratch his back the same on his first install.  Turns out, I'm very glad he came.

When we got to the house, the sales rep was still walking out of the driveway.  Yes, we responded that quickly... due to the house only being 3 minutes away from the dorms--where the office is.  He told us that the owners were a casual bunch of people at that we had a pretty big system to put into the place.  A Lynx system with 13 pieces of equipment.  Now, a Lynx is supposed to be the system where I go, "Yes!  Easy."  And it certainly seemed that way when we first walked in, had a little tour, talked about where he owner wanted his motion detector and glassbreak, etc.  Then Roberto set to work on installing the sensors while I handled the phoneline seizure, running wires, installing the keypad and programing in all the information.  Due to some fun studs, a phone jack I had never seen before, much less been trained to use; and a few forgotten and very key points of information from the training that I took in February... Fico (Roberto's nickname--a play on his surname) and I were at that house until 2300 that night.  Right up until the owner, who was super understanding, suggested that we just go home, sleep on it and come back the next day with a frsh head because he knows we're trying, but no one had work well tired.

So we did.

It wasn't the confidence builder system that I was hoping for.  The ones that go in so smoothly that even your mess ups end up helping you in the end, but it certainly was something to learn from.  For now, I'll just have to wait until our scheduled return and hope that after talking to Daniel I can get in and out of that house with pay in under an hour, which would rock.

I'm totally nerding out behind my shiney new laptop of awesome and win.  Its an LG, a brand that I've never owned before and a laptop; which is another first.  After spending the first 48 hours just playing around with the settings: customizing the mouse pad to a left-handed user, picking a neat, high-definition wallpaper; installing a few essentials (iTunes, Gimp, OpenOffice, K-lite Codec Pack, Windows Live Messenger) it comes down to the real fun part.

What fun things shall I install?  Games and other quirky, entertainment for sure, but how can I really own this computer.  Make it say something.

I never was one for accessorizing, though in recent months I've been coming into a phase where I feel it neccessary to add a personal touch to things that I normally would be content leaving blank--very minimalist.  Perhaps it was always there, the need to carve out a "ME" in everything I did--to make it mine--but it was repressed by the nagging responsibility of being a spotless role-model to my siblings.  The embodiment of my family's expectations.

And it brought me down, it stripped away all of my colour and personality and voice.  It made me cloister and become socially paranoid.  Always mindful, to a detrimental degree, of what people would think of my actions at every given moment.  Today, though, I am still very much a plain man.  I wear shirts with no logos or brands, no smart-assed comments or clever designs.  My wardrobe is very bland and tasteless, with little to set me apart or to broadcast that I care about anything at all.  I use to think that this was my style.  That I was the boy next door, or just a very traditional, unassuming bloke.  Then I went shopping with a few friends this Spring and I learned something about myself: I don't like wearing boring clothes.

That day I bought one shirt.  $30.  It was more money than I had ever spent on a single shirt that wouldn't be considered formal wear.  I also bought a pair of cargo shorts, but it was the shirt that landed the real hammer blow on my coccoon.  I wanted to express myself, my tastes at the very least--which brings me back to my shiney new LG.

The damn thing cost me $1, 551 and change.  It was something that I toiled over at the sales counter for nearly forty-five minutes about, and in the end I told my nagging shoulder angel to go to hell and slapped down the dough.  It was $400 more than I had walked in there prepared to spend and sadly, the most liberating thing I've done for myself since I stopped following the Words of Wisdom.  It was something that was risky, it was new and totally more than I needed (or honestly should have been able to afford.)  It was something that I wanted.  It would serve a purpose, which was why I had even gone in to buy a computer in the first place, but it was capable of so much more.  More unneccessary things.  Unneccessary things that could, if I wasn't successful in my upcoming job, cause me to accrue some serious interest payments on my Visa.  So it was also a gamble, and again; refreshingly uncharacteristic.

Posting my thoughts, is likewise uncharacteristic, and strangely rewarding.

Now, Mallory may be the only person to ever stumble across this public display of my mind, but to anyone else who finds this:  leave a comment or send me a message about something that you did that was totally unlike you, that broke your habits and left you feeling unshackled or free to express yourself in some small way that you were previously afraid to.

Because in the next four months, I plan on having a lot of world-altering firsts and I would love to have some wild suggestions!