LOND HO ADVENTURES PART TWO

OCTOBER 1992

Day shift at the BVS Towers… ung! Day shifts are the worst for me, even more so than the dumb-ass 18:00 to 02:00 “split shift” nonsense which I despised only slightly less. I leave home at about quarter after six and shuffle through the skywalks from the flat all the way to work. I quickly get dressed in the locker room located deep in the bowels of the parkade below the quad-tower complex and sit reading until about a quarter to seven before I take the lift upstairs to the “+30” level and the tiny closet that is the security office. I bang on the door and say “It’s Idi Amin,” when the muffled interrogative comes through the door. The door is jerked open from the inside by one of the night shift guys who doesn’t even bother to get up from his chair. The scent of fresh coffee only sometimes wafting to my nostrils. I say “only sometimes” because there is only coffee if the night shift makes it. The rotund day shift supervisor never makes coffee for his guards, only for himself, and only after he kicks the day shifters out into the massive foyers to wander about aimlessly. By coffee break there is never any coffee left and Thor would be sitting there, fat ass firmly planted in his chair, chuckling to himself and chanting his mantra:
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, so izzat!”
I squeeze into the tiny room and see that already squirming his corpulent ass away in the supervisor’s chair at the supervisor’s desk is the porcine Thor “The Hutt” Jugg - Security Supervisor extraordinary!
I look around me and wonder how the hell people can be happy working a “day job” for a living. A job should be a means to an end, not something you get stuck doing for the rest of your life.
From an early age I realized that I was not cut out for the work-a-day world. Indeed, the father of my ex-fiancée Karyn, proper Englishman that he was once told me he pictured me in the future being a “gentleman of leisure.” Probably just his way of telling me I was a lazy no-goodnick that had no business trying to marry his daughter.
I look around at the hundreds of wandering zombies as they walk past me, sometimes right into me, (I’m just a lowly security guard, hardly noticeable at all!) going about their fatuous lives in their dull, grey suits, tightly gripping shiny briefcases, strolling the carpeted foyers and sound-proofed skywalks. They stop for less than nutritious lunches in the food courts, incessantly glancing at their watches, or fidgeting nervously on tall wooden benches while people of lesser stature shines their shoes. Thousands of these people stagger through the two mammoth foyer levels of BVS Towers, never so much as a smile on their faces, always their mouths a hard slash, worried lips pursed with pseudo pensivity, or for the most part sagging in a deep, black frown.