Labour Day is coming, a time when friends and family gather together to honour and celebrate the ancient tradition of “Yay, day off!”
Not too many people spend Labour Day thinking about all they learned in social studies class about early labour organizers trashing their spinning jennys or getting walloped by billy clubs or whatever it was they did to earn stat holidays so that we could spend a long weekend going paddleboarding and testing margarita recipes. But maybe there should be some room over this long weekend for all of us to recognize a hard day’s work. Because work can be tough.
Last week I met a young family friend who told us about his job working at a small-town Tim Horton’s on the side of a very busy highway.
“It’s … interesting,” he said. “Lots of truckers.”
He told the story of a trucker throwing a coffee at him earlier that day. Apparently the truckers don’t have anywhere to legally park close to this Timmies, and so they park illegally nearby and rush in to get a quick coffee and get out before getting a ticket from the very active local bylaw officers. This time the coffee didn’t arrive as quickly as the trucker hoped, and he returned it with some vigour.
“I mean, he didn’t, like, gun it at me,” our friend explained. “But it was definitely aimed at me.” And apparently, this was a relatively calm day at the coffee shop. That sounds like a tough job.
But then again, being that trucker doesn’t sound like a perfect job either. You drive your 18-wheeler all the way from Vancouver to some Prairie poke town, dodging deer and Teslas all the way, and the local Timmies is crawling with clipboard cops handing out parking tickets. And then after 20 minutes in line, some punk kid hands you a lukewarm double double when you clearly ordered an extra hot triple triple? Infuriating! No wonder they snap.
And what about those poor bylaw officers? They show up for work, and the boss tells them to go make truckers angry all day? That sounds like a tough job.
Most people have stories about horrible jobs. One summer I put my name in with a “hire-a-student” program and the first job they gave me was working with a painter. I showed up on Day 1 on a farm and the painter pointed at a huge barn and said “we’re going to paint that.” I gulped and braced myself for a long day. “But first we need to sand it,” the painter added. I clearly had no understanding of the intricacies of modern barn painting.
One hour later my arm was rendered virtually useless by the electric sander I was using, and I’d stripped the paint from approximately 0.0005 per cent of the barn. The next day (yes, I somehow made it to a next day), they put me to work sanding in a pen next to a bull. Like, a real bull. The pointy kind. That was a tough job.
Later that summer the hire-a-student sadists sent me to work for a farmer. When I got there, he told me I would be helping him replace his – and I think this is the technical term – pig poop shoot. Dismantling old equipment really hits a new level when every nut, bolt and screw is coated in decade’s worth of pig poo. I’d come home every evening and strip down in my backyard to get hosed off, leaving all of my clothes in a bucket. You could see smell lines wafting off it. I lasted one week, and I think I may have set that bucket of clothes on fire.
Those formative job experiences led me on the career path that brought me here, to a place where I can almost completely avoid manual labour, and I can completely avoid pigs that are not yet in bacon form.
But there are many tough jobs. Think of North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma, who in her first summer as British Columbia’s Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness has been tasked with handling the worst fire season on record. No matter what your political affiliation, you’ve got to admit that’s a tough job.
Or even more so, think of all the firefighters who have been protecting our province over this scorched summer, and will be tasked with doing that every summer for the foreseeable future. That’s a REALLY tough job.
But someone has to do it. And there are thousands of other demanding jobs out there that require herculean efforts. Kudos to everyone working hard for their money, and to those still fighting to ensure everyone makes an honest wage for honest work. We all deserve that, no bull.
Andy Prest is the editor of the North Shore News. His lifestyle/humour column runs biweekly.
