Thursday, July 24, 2008

Trip Report

A pretty smooth trip up. From Vancouver to Jasper, my dome car was reserved for the use of tour group comprised of wealthy Americans. This tour company has a special arrangement with my employers to do this, and no doubt it helps to pay my salary, but it's not a very cool thing for the other paying passengers who are excluded from the dome and forced to crowd into the other two. The director of this tour has a rep for being a nuisance, but I've found that nuisances are easily disarmed, if you know what you're doing and don't insist on butting heads with them.

After Jasper, it was pretty quiet. I had a few Australians in my car, two of whom took to calling me "Curly" and have christened Kaleb "Curly Jr." We got along very well.

After some anti-social time, a shower and a nap, I went out to see The Dark Knight with some co-workers. On many levels an impressive action film, but not the Second Coming a lot of the critics are making it out to be. Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is very worth seeing, however.

Tomorrow, I have to report an hour early for a "Hazard Prevention Briefing." This promising to be extremely dull, but I should get paid 6 hours for it, since it's "over and above" my regular assignment, hence time-and-a-half, and the minimum number of hours for a callout is four. The extent of my employers' penny wisdom and pound foolishness never ceases to amaze me.

Can't wait to get home. I got a report from Rachel that Kaleb is now looking at things in a focussed way.

3 comments:

GM said...

I love how Australians do that. They always call me "Bluey".

Zachariah Wells said...

Yeah, they said if Kaleb had read hair, they'd have to call him Curly Bluey.

Anonymous said...

Too bad he can't talk - I'd like to know how that's done...