After a short stint of absence due to some per­sonal issues I had to deal with, I finally got back into the swing of things the last few weeks at the pup­pet­show.  You start to miss all the char­ac­ters and all the odd-ball things that hap­pen over the course of a shift, and even though you dread drag­ging your back­side to this place called work.. some­times, you kinda want to.

So this week I was given my sur­prise employee review, which def­i­nitely sur­prised me because I wasn’t aware that I was under sur­veil­lance like that.  The pes­simistic side of me was expect­ing to hear the worst, but to my sur­prise.. I scored the high­est out of all the new peo­ple since I’ve been there (and some even before me).  I scored a 30/32, with a “Kareem’s an out­stand­ing worker and a great peo­ple per­son, but his 4 lates and 2 absences need a lit­tle work” hah.  I guess I could work on that for sure, but I explained that I had the Sun­day shift’s start time all wrong for the first few weeks, so that changed that right up.

You’d think my team-leader Ming-a-ling would have my name right by now right?  Ah nope, I’m still Karen at work #fail

#work­fail

I’m start­ing to ques­tion management…

I don’t think any­thing is more bolder than this right here! And the fact that this hap­pened WHILE TAPING, classic

I don’t quite know if I could put the FAIL stamp on this one, cause I mean he DID give her advice on her car issue

If you’re a guy, you know exactly where I’m going with this one and I’m sure we have all (men) been in a sit­u­a­tion where we were like “errrrkz, ?”

So today at work, a fel­low co-worker of mine (whose name and even given nick­name I shall keep anony­mous) decided to break the uri­nal code. And after feel­ing quite vio­lated, I felt it nec­es­sary to just break down the do’s and dont’s of pub­lic uri­nal usage.

Let’s look at Photo A (for the record, I rep­re­sent the “1” in this photo).  Now if I was already in the wash­room and doing my rain­bow trib­ute in uri­nal 1, and you now decide to come into the wash­room dur­ing this trib­ute.. the safest uri­nal to choose would be uri­nal 5. Uri­nal 4 is also accept­able and uri­nal 3 is reach­ing a bit, but still alright.

Now let’s look at Photo B (for the record, I rep­re­sent the “2” in this photo).  For what­ever sake, I chose to pick uri­nal 2 as my piss-pot.  Now if you enter the scene ready to do your thing and already see me at uri­nal 2, your best bet is to once again choose uri­nal 5.  Uri­nal 4 is again reach­ing, but not too sus­pect.  Any­thing else is questionable.

Please turn your atten­tion to Photo C (for the record, I rep­re­sent the “3” in this photo).  I wouldn’t nor­mally choose the mid­dle uri­nal if I had all 5 options, but let’s just say I did because I felt like being cen­ter of atten­tion here.  When the next patron enters the wash­room, you have two choices.. uri­nal 1 and uri­nal 5.

And lastly, we look at Photo D.. well X (for the record, I rep­re­sent the “1” in this photo).  This is a DO NOT DO. This photo is actu­ally a true story, my true story sadly.  Any­how I am play­ing piss darts with uri­nal 1, do not come in and choose uri­nal 2 while leav­ing 3, 4 AND 5 vacant!  Fur­ther­more, do NOT hold a con­ver­sa­tion with me, because what­ever you’re say­ing is dis­tracted by the mere fact that you’re stand­ing beside me, talk­ing to me in one of my pri­vate moments in a pub­lic place.

And that is our Pub­lic Uri­nal Les­son for this morn­ing.  I hope I can save one man’s pri­vacy in the near future, because there seems to be a few wash­room lurk­ers that thrive on liv­ing out Photo X, and that’s not cool.  So let’s keep it funky and fol­low these sim­ple guide­lines to a bet­ter golden release experience.

Thank you.

Ever have one of those moments and later ask your­self “Who does this?”, because that was basi­cally a result of how today went.

It all started when I woke up at 2, and I instantly thought about how quickly the day had already whizzed by.  But not think­ing any­thing of it, I got up for a bit, checked some emails and then decided to take a lit­tle nap before head­ing to work (which I’m sup­posed to be at for 7:30).  So I get back up at around 4:30 now, and I start to get both my stuff and myself together… so I make my lunch, and I fully pre­pare my scram­bled eggs break­fast but hold off on the tea because I didn’t want to be late.  Hop in the shower and get out at around 6:30 or so.  It takes about 30-45mins to drive to work, and today I just wanted to cruise con­trol it all the way with­out being in a rush rush and that’s exactly what I did.

Even as I am dri­ving, I notice that out­side it a bit light out, lighter than usual.. but didn’t think much of it because I usu­ally work at 11:45pm and it’s dark then, so I just chalked it up as if the days were get­ting longer.  I even asked myself if we were sup­posed to turn our clocks back or some­thing, and I didn’t get that memo.  So I finally reach work now and I punch in and head to the lunch­room.  Nobody was in there, not a sin­gle co-worker.  Find­ing this weird, I head out on the actual work floor and peo­ple were work­ing, but not from my shift.. but there was nobody from my shift even on the floor by the side­lines wait­ing and it was almost 7:30 now.  Now I’m really try­ing to fig­ure out what the heck is really going on here.

So I head back to the lunch­room area and I call up one of the guys from work, and after a few rings he answered and I could tell he was dri­ving.  So I’m fully ask­ing buddy if he’s com­ing to work and he kept reply­ing “Yeah, we’re work­ing tonight” and I kept respond­ing “Yeah, so.. are you on your way?” and he must have been mad con­fused because he’s like “Yeah, tonight.. when we work”.  Why at this point do I still think it’s the PM?

WHY?  Until finally I’m like, “Wait a sec­ond, what time is it?” and my co-worker is like “It’s 7:30 in the morn­ing”.  Pause.  It’d be one thing if I made it down my street and then real­ized that I had the AM and the PM all mixed up, but to have fully got­ten out of my bed, got­ten ready and reached all the way to work, parked my car and punched in?  My oh my.  That gets a seri­ous WOMP WOMP.

Today I had a lot of run­ning around to do, as lately it seems there are not enough hours in the day to get any­thing done.  After re-entering the pup­pet­world, you learn to appre­ci­ate days off and just want to do a gazil­lion things, but more­times end up doing one or two of ‘em

Had a cou­ple of client meet­ings dur­ing the mid-day, which had me dropped off on the other side of the city.  After my last one, I was dri­ving home when I past by a Chap­ters that was ran­domly placed along Bloor St. W, and I remem­bered that I still have my gift card in my wal­let, so I decided to pop in.

As lit­tle as this place appeared to be from the out­side, you walk into this joint and you’re instantly taken back by how big it is inside.  Then on top of it’s spa­cious inte­rior, you are then taken back by how dif­fer­ent this Chap­ters is from any other Chap­ters I have ever walked into.  Maybe I’m just fas­ci­nated by such lit­tle petty things, but hah.. impressive

Sadly though, the pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tion was a HALF shelf, not even a full one which was highly dis­ap­point­ing.  So no luck in find­ing the book I have been so des­per­ately try­ing to get my hands on.. and there were really no other books that I felt com­pelled to pick up either.  The search continues.

After Chap­ters, I had it set in my mind that I wanted to get my incense vibes on.  For those that really know me, I’m not a fan of can­dle burn­ing at all and the Glade plu­g­ins are a’ight.. but some­times the smell is a bit tough and too syn­thetic.  So I remem­ber being at a client’s house late last year and her place was smelling real nice, so I had asked her what she had going on in there that was caus­ing such nice smells and so she told me about Nag Cham­pas.  So as I do every­thing else, I took to Google to find out what this stuff was and where I could get it from.  I ended up on this ran­dom web­site where this chick was writ­ing some tes­ti­mo­nial about this place called Shanti Baba, located down­town Queen St. So I made note of it and headed there

Def­i­nitely some inter­est­ing things going on in this store, but I knew what I was there for so being side-tracked wasn’t one of ‘em.  The female work­ing there (if I only remem­ber your name, I know it starts with Geeta.….…) was quite help­ful, as she proved to be quite the incense pro­fes­sional.  I wanted to get a sim­ple incense holder-ma-jig and end up walk­ing out this joint with smelly sticks and this native indian look­ing pot­tery cre­ation.  Also thanks to Steff Ivory for pop­ping my incense move­ment, and start­ing me off with the same smell I was drawn to, as she gen­er­ously gave me a bit of her stash ear­lier today.

Couldn’t wait to get home and bom­bard the place with such new aro­mas.  And that was all ready to be the plan, until I decided to stop by the stu­dio first.  And what I thought to be a sim­ple lit­tle chill ting, cause I haven’t seen these guys in awhile due to work, ended up being us (well them really) decid­ing to go BACK down­town to chill for the night.

I relunc­tantly agreed, but fully knew I wasn’t really going to drink or any­thing much due to the sim­ple fact I have a huge day ahead of me tomorrow

Now this is Mikey, we’ve all met Mikey before.  Mikey appar­ently loves life so much that by the time I real­ized it, I notice this guy smok­ing in my car at the gas sta­tion, SITTING in front of a propane tank pile with NO SMOKING signs lit­tered all over the place.  Oh yah.  Should have put this as a FAIL pic bro, you get the bozack.

Any­way, we headed down­town and first decided to get some­thing to eat, and we end up at this Viet­namese joint

After that, we then went over to this place that looked straight out of a washed out Fast & Furi­ous : Tokyo City type of movie

Asians every­where! At first I thought I was the only col­ored guy there, but that was eas­ily out­done as another ran­dom col­ored guy popped out and had this seri­ous ‘I’ve never been this drunk before’ moment all night.  Buddy was loud, danc­ing, show­ing peo­ple his tat­toos that he doesn’t even know, and seemed to have come alone.  Or maybe his friends were just so embarassed that the just left him there and went about their busi­ness, poor guy.  Prob­a­bly woke up the next day in some ran­dom alley way robbed, cause some of the asian peo­ple he was harass­ing looked a tad bit seri­ous still

We stayed here till a good 3am, and all I could think about was how I have to wake up for 8am and do a shoot tomor­row before going to work and doing a 12hr.  Nice, real real nice.

One of the signs at work, must I really explain why? FAIL

“hedo you cost us the game..”

“yes coach”

F A I L