The 75th Congress, part 4

Day 6, Friday May 26

Sorry to you all for missing a few days of recounting all of York's bullshit and stupidity but nothing too exciting has been happening here.

Can we go home yet? That's pretty much what the whole Federation staff is saying here. Everyone one of us have had it up to here with dealing with the fucking morons here at York. It seems to me that there are two different congresses going on here: the Federation's Congress and York's Congress. They are operating on their own little fucking schedule and the Federation can pretty much go to hell!

An example: on Wednesday, my colleagues at the Registration desk needed the computer system up and running by 9:30 am because they were going to train the students that will be working at Registration during Congress at noon on that day. They called the tech guys, who took their sweet ass time getting there and my colleagues informed them that not only was the system not working, but they didn't have enough fucking monitors for all the stations! The guys asked them when the Congress started and we said Saturday. "Oh well," they said, as in "Oh well, there's no rush (the facial expressions and tone of voice said alot). So after explaining about the training at noon, the tech guys said alright we'll come set it up. It was by now 8:30 am. At 11:15 am, they arrive with the extra monitors and the tools to set up the system, which they had up and operational ... at 3:30 pm! A whole fucking day wasted! You may say, maybe they ran into some problems. That's true, but the whole thing should've been done on Tuesday anyway, like we had originally requested.

Now, on to my domain: the Book Fair. today was move-in day for the publishers, so that they could set up their booths. This was chaos, but a kind of controlled chaos. All went relatively well. I spent most of the day running all over the place back and forth. On the plus side, I'm going to lose some weight while I'm here. The down side: my feet are killing me.

Also, my dear, dear friend the fire marshall finally decided to show his fucking face and do his job and come look at the set-up to see if it can be approved. When I met him in person, I immediatly hated him. He was tall, skinny, blond hair, glasses and on a power trip. He was fucking Steve Watson, my old manager from my Loeb days. Now it wasn't really Watson but he looked exactly like him. He looked around and was taking notes. We came to a booth where a publisher was setting up and FM (fire marshall) tells the publisher "You have to move your counter back." in a rude tone. The publisher asked why and FM replied that there needs to be a clearance of 1,29 m between the counter and the wall. The publisher said okay, and asked if FM could measure the distance so that she knew how far she could go. He said "move the counter". They kept this up for about 5 minutes and then FM took out his measuring tape (cause he had on in his pocket, and measured the current distance from counter to wall ... 1,29 m! Five fucking minutes of arguing for nothing. He is the perfect example of the Toronto mentality: we are better than you so fuck off!

I also spent most of my time setting up a make shift curtain idea to cover the front of the booths after hours, to discourage people from taking any of the books. I figure "Out of sight, out of mind". On top of the security personnel York put in the mall and the lockdown time of 10 pm during the Congress, I figured it will be good enough. Can you all tell where this is going?

Tonight, I was told that someone crawled under the curtains of one booth and took a whole box of books. York security saw this happening on camera and sent people to the scene. The people got into a car and York security pursued to the limit of the campus. But they said they got a license plate. What the hell is that going to do?!

"Hello, Toronto police."

"Hello, a box of books was just stolen."

"Alright, we'll get right on that. Who cares about all the other problems, gangs, drugs, weapons going on in this fucking shithole of a city."

I'm sorry, I'm just fucking pissed off. I'm pleased that security was right on top of this and did all they could do. But in the mean time, I will have to deal with a publisher who has just lost hundreds of dollars worth of books before the book fair even officially fucking opens! This is my first year as book fair coordinator, and while I know I shouldn't, I feel like I failed. I take great pride in the work that I do and put alot of effort in it and this is a blow that I take personally. But I have to remember that it is York's fault. Their stupid insistance that the mall remain open after the book fair closes, so that the stores don't lose any money. Well maybe they can explain their retarded logic to this publisher now.

I can't wait to go home and forget about this nightmare.

Stay tuned...