Justin and I Dug a Hole

It's the summer of 2003 and neither Andrew "Office Bitch" Chong or Justin "Animation Only" Nichols had landed jobs in our specific fields so we both applied for "hire-a-student" which is an intermediary between us 150-pound useless labourers and any average Joe Shmoe who wants to phone in and offer us a temporary job.

We both started off catering to the upper classes in West Van: Justin with his painting for some lady and even wallpapering her bathroom; Me with my cleaning out of a pottery studio by wheelbarrowing heaps of shiz up a gravel path from the backyard to the rental dumpster.

To up the ante of fun we decided our next endeavour should be Batman and Robin styles so we joined forces at another multi-kajillion dollar pad in West Van. Our job was to sand down the wood panneling on this big ol house using electric sanders. Keeping in mind our qualifications for manual labour we're me using "Manual Shot Aim" instead of "Automatic Shot Aim" on NHL '99, and Justin making his own cheesey nachos iat home nstead of buying them from Sev.

So anyway day 1 is a disaster cause we are both frikin morons and our eyes we're infected with tiny woodchips because "dese goggles do nothing!" and there's not even 2 proper sanders so we have to trade the oldschool 1980's 40-pound bitch back and forth every 15 minutes.

2 or 3 more days go by and we've figured out that swim goggles make work so much better, but three fifteen-year-old punks asking for rides home everyday kinda pisses us off. if not for the glorious mountain-side view of vancouver and the occasional KFC lunch break this job woulda been WJE (worst job ever). Anyways, after a week we reject the offer to continue work on Monday and move on.

Probably the climax or climin or worstmax of the summer was working for our local Unitarian so-lonely-i'll-pay-kids-to-hang-out-here lady Mrs Wagner. I feel bad for her isolated state too but getting Justin to do the dishes is just weird. She did make me a fine peanut butter AND butter sandwhich though which salvaged the job as a 3 out of 10 versus a 1/10.

So Mrs. Wagner has water leaking into the walls and floor of her below-ground-level basement and after much consideration she figures it must be the piping six feet below ground. Except the "ground" is an eight foot long by 2 foot wide section of earth between the house and a cement walkway. So a proper shovel doesnt fit down there. and you can only shovel from a sideways state. with a little garden shovel. and there's big rocks that bend the shovel. and the people assigned to do this job are ME...and JUSTIN... and this job is the WJE.

so Justin works an eight hour shift two days in a row and gets about halfway down this thing while also doing some other tasks (as he'd been doing for about 2 weeks) for our religiously open minded friend who turned hire-a-student-into-adopt-a-son.

so we're bitches and we don't really like brown snot and sore backs and aren't anywhere near the labouring effectiveness of a chris nichols or a jeff clarke or a mowing machine like steve watts or andrew lee. so justin gets another job and i decide to continue digging the hole.

so i spend another eight hour shift plus four more the day after digging to this piping at about the earth's core. plumbing specialist shows up right as i finish to check what the deal is.

ya so the problem wasnt the piping.

hmm.

can't even remember what it was.

but we did dig a hole for 28 hours with a gardening shovel.... that i remember clearly.