After a week of enforced luxury, I am now very much back into the working life, and spoken for until at least midway through October - basically the remainder of my time in Canada. Gone are the days of drafting letters, organising meetings, feigning importance and dealing with expenses. Now I am learning about the world of stocks and shares. While my title is technically 'Administrative Assistant', I am doing nothing similar to what I had been doing at Mercer. Today was my first day at Computershare. My training included billings for business name changes, some basics in consolidation and the Canadian stock exchanges, and more encoding than one can shake a binary stick at. It promises to be entertaining and educational, but also gruelling, as I have to get up an hour earlier than I am used to.
To help fill the time on Wednesday, I undertook a one-off day working at Highland Transport. This brought back fond memories of CTC Trading, where I used to while away ten hour shifts with Matt by watching Football Focus, playing table tennis and driving to the takeaway. This job was just as demanding. All I had to do all day was answer the phone for Milan, by extraordinary supervisor, and tell clients that he wasn't there. This amounted to about 15 calls for the eight hour shift.
Milan, a tall, loud Serbian was full of laughs and close-to-the-bone jokes (some involving his Bosnian friends, and "that bastard" Slobodan Milosevic). He knew fine well that I was being paid for doing absolutely nothing, and was all the happier for it. "You going to enjoy yourself today my friend", he announced as I introduced myself to him. We spent the first hour-and-a-half messing around with my PC, attempting to add RAM to it, so that Windows would run faster. In the end, after plenty of half-hearted fuss, we gave up and I began to use his laptop for my internet surfing instead. A good, productive couple of hours.
As I got settled into my book, and occasional news checking on BBC, I began to find increasing interest in Milan's 'hectic' work schedule. He had said that, "I needed to help him with the phones so I can sort out this fucking pile of paperwork, my friend", but in reality, he invited some of his Eastern European compatriots into the office and nattered about 1990s politics, football and differences in their languages, for the FULL day. Not that I was complaining, I found this whole fiasco hilarious and one that I was glad to be getting paid for.
As the day winded down, another tough task was given to me. Milan offered me some spicy Indian tea, but I was required to put my own teabag in the already boiled water. Stress! A great day's work, I have to say.
It was finished off with a soiree I had half-setup, through Mercer. I had been planning to go to the Vancouver Whitecaps vs. Toronto FC 'soccer' game for a while now, and had had the ingenious idea of seeing if I could get a group from work to go along with me. Two days later, they informed me my contract would be up soon. So I hastily palmed off the organising to Gemma, who sorted out 16 now-ex-colleagues to go with. The match was as hilarious as the work had been. Everyone in the crowd seemed to know nothing about what they were watching, apart from maybe a couple of middle-aged woman a few seats back. None of us had any idea who was playing (apart from Lauren Robert, which I thought was just an addition to the hilarity), but of course we wanted Vancouver to win. The amount of crowd knowledge was complete when the line of (drunken) lads in front of me began chanting "M-S-L! M-S-L!" as a nod towards the fact that Vancouver should be in the top North American football league, the MLS, and not the subordinate league they are currently in.
The match turned out to be a good one, with Vancouver taking the lead, before Toronto went up 2-1. A last minute goal for 'Caps meant that the match was a draw, but the action had been pretty impressive.
A great day of chuckling, and even some outright laughter! Just a shame Vancouver are out of the running for the Canadian Championship.
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