Saturday, July 08, 2006

A Saturday of High Speed, Sprocket Holes and Descrimination In Fast Food














Went to a trade show down in Sydney today. It’s a four hour drive each way and I rode down with my young colleague in his Nissan Skyline. He stuck mainly to the speed limit but it still cost us $110 in fuel. This is the Skyline he bought on-line from a clearing house in Japan and had shipped to Australia. The radio tunes in some crazy Japanese bandwidth and is basically useless here and for some reason the CD player refuses to keep its disc down. There was also a cassette deck but who has cassettes to play? (for you younger readers, cassette tapes were tiny reel-to-reel tapes encased in plastic. They were placed in a machine which would un-spool the tape for you, so you could wind it back up with a pencil stuck through the sprocket hole – hehe I said “sprocket hole”).

So we had no music and spent the time doing funny impersonations of other people at work. He said I should do stand-up because I “notice stuff, and stuff. You know, funny stuff”. I thought that was nice. He’s a smart, funny kid and I also found out today he was a talented amateur boxer, which you’d never guess. Just shows you should never assume you’ve got somebody all worked out.

On one of the three fuel stops we went into a McDonald’s and once again my accent let me down. How hard is it to understand “two cheeseburgers, large fries please”? ‘Cause I had to say it three times. My friend got the perky blonde ‘team leader’ - all teeth and sunshine, while I got the deaf-slackjaw trainee who fair threw my 50 cents change at me. Bloody anti-Canadianism, is what it is! Worse still, sometimes they call me American!

5 comments:

Sweary said...

Shut up yer complaining, yank.

Amanda said...

it's a worldwide sport, calling Canucks American. If you don't have maple leafs(!) all over your clothes and a canadian tattoo, then you're asking for it.

SkookumJoe said...

yes, the world quakes before the mighty leaf - almost as scary as a shamrock

exile said...

et tu skook-eh?

why you gotta hate just because we speak american? it's not like we're mixed with a bunch of flithy french (just mexicans).

i hope you get an infection from sticking your pencil in your sprocket hole.

hehehe

(btw, i still have an AM/FM cassette player in my truck. even in the worst neighborhoods no one wants my stereo)

exile said...

btw, i get a lot of that "you should be a comedian" stuff too.

you show just the slightest bit of wit and people think you're the next Seinfeld. i mean, "who are these people? where do they come from..."