would you catch me sideways? i don't know."
- flatt street,
what a mantra for 2005. it's a new year. we start tonight's episode with a new series by contributor d.f., an old roommate from the annex palace over the past summer who had some experiences with not-quite-so-sane people in an under the table workplace while awaiting a work permit. he's gone back to indiana to lay low for a while, but he's left us with "a newspaper story", so keep tuning in every day for a new episode over the next three days.
it should be noted than names and places have been changed from the original in order to save my ass from these times of constant threat from lawsuits. i've also edited slight grammatical errors, as it was sent as a draft.
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“It’s a cross between (the movies) Glengarry Glen Ross, Office Space, and Gummo”
- job classified on the music discussion board 20HZ for the Save an Ad
Introduction
A new sub-leasee took over my place in the summer of 2004 which meant that I would have to find a new place in Sept., since it was apparent I was not going to complete my MA before the summer’s end. Luckily for me, I found a place just up the street and the price was right. Two of my new roommates were Michelle and Dan who were a couple but lived in separate rooms. To no one’s surprise, they officially broke up within a few days of moving in.
My first impression of Michelle and Dan was that they were free spirits who cared about others. When Dan told me that he had taken a break from school for a few years, I pictured him traveling the world trying to help the less fortunate among us. Dan and I lived in the basement, while Michelle’s room was upstairs.
My funds were running low and I calculated that I would probably have to secure some sort of employment by mid-October in order to insure my solvency. The only caveat was that I would have to work under the table since my student permit prohibited me from pursuing employment off-campus. My original plan was to ask my half great uncle Ernest, (my grandfather’s half brother) for a job. He owns a Thai restaurant near Eaton Center called the Salad King and he had a roster of 60 employees. He certainly could have taken on another worker since his restaurant was perpetually busy during the lunch hour, necessitating the need for his waiters/waitresses to take orders on a PDA system, and he had recently completed $1 million in renovations. My mom was not too hot on my idea since he was not exactly her favorite relative. My great grandfather had four wives and my grandfather was his first-born son, while Ernest was the baby of the family and was procreated by his mother when she was in her twenties and my great grand father was in his sixties. To put their age gap in perspective, Ernest was born around the same time as my mom. Apparently, the young pearl, or gold digger as some might say, received a higher share of the inheritance than she “deserved,” and she passed it along to Ernest with, according to my mom, a side helping of arrogance.
I asked Dan if he knew of places that would hire me under the table and he told me he knew of two places. He said that he worked as a telemarketer for this newspaper called the Save an Ad Classifieds who hired people as long as they had a pulse. I questioned him point blank if they would overlook my “illegal” status and he said there would be absolutely no worries on that front. I then asked what sort of workplace the Save an Ad was and he chuckled. Apparently, it was in its own unique category as far as jobs went and was the biggest joke there is. I tried to get him to elaborate on details but he did not divulge much, not out of secrecy, as I would later find out myself, but for self-respect. After all, did he want me to think of him as a liar right off the bat?
Later that day, Dan’s friend “Crazy” Morris and his girlfriend stopped by to hang out. As it turns out, Morris is the one who introduced Dan to the Save an Ad a few years back. Dan and Morris were talking about their boss Radk (pronounced Radek) who liked to shove various odd substances into his veins. Dan then showed us some pictures from the Christmas Party at the Save an Ad and they were having some sort of caricature of a bluegrass hoe down. I saw Radk and he showed nothing in the picture that would betray any accusations that he had a habit. Dan also pointed out a guy named Lorne in the picture who shared similar hobbies with Radk and was supposedly going to inherit millions of dollars from his sugar mommy who is sadly dying of cancer, and was only a few years older than him.
I envisioned Radk as some sort of illegal immigrant from Eastern Europe who was a reject of the Communist system. In fact, Radk was a pseudonym, along with his last name Radchenko. To this day, I never did find out Radk’s real name and I never will.
In the evening, all of us picked up some drinks from the LCBO (government liquor store) conveniently located across the street. When we got back, Dan started talking about the pills he had to take. Unbeknownst to me, he had a chemical imbalance known as schizophrenia. If the saying caveat emptor (buyer beware), concerning random roommates, did not have any meaning before it sure did at that moment. Morris was partial to mind altering substances from A to Z and he said that Dan could handle the crazy amount of pills he was prescribed because he was a former heroin addict. Morris quickly interjected that “you knew that, right?” and I was like well I know now and I’ll never forget.
September turned in October and eventually my funds were falling precipitously low. I told Dan that I was interested in working since my MA research paper was coming towards completion, which meant I had time to fill in. He told me to come in sometime to talk to Radk.
Save an Ad
When I entered the promotions office of the Save an Ad I nearly passed out from all the smoke in the room. Everyone in the room except Dan, who chewed Nicorette like there was no tomorrow, smoked like it was 1929. Its not like they couldn’t get up and smoke in the hallway where smoking was allowed as well. I chatted with Radk for a bit and he explained to me what the job involved. We would go through older private listings in a car classified magazine called Car Swap and ask them if they want to get a “better” deal in the Save an Ad newspaper. The ads in our paper would run for 6 weeks for $30 and the hook was that if their car sold before 6 weeks they could use the remaining time to sell another item in our paper for up to three years. Radk told me to come in the following week. When I stepped outside of the Save an Ad I saw what we were up against when I stared at a nearby flashing billboard that said "carswap.ca".
The Save an Ad office is located off Yonge St. in the heart of downtown Toronto. Its located in a lowrise building around many businesses that cater more to the desperate than the rich such as Money Hut and Supadeal Pizza. The building contained offices for the Save an Ad and a couple of other publications such as Performance Racing News and Performance Auto. There was some kind of hierarchy to the place that tangentially resembled the high school pecking order. At the top were two owners of Jewish origin named Warren and Adam. The manager of the place was a guy named Seamus who I’d later discover definitely knew about Sportsline. The people at Performance Auto are mostly younger Asian guys who believe that Hondas with ridiculous modifications are the greatest thing since sliced bread. They dressed well, or at least tried to, and they put on a show of bravado like they actually had pride in what they were doing. Performance Auto contained jokers who were all white. The Save an Ad was the child that got whacked hard with the ugly stick and even within it there were distinctions between departments.
In the main office of the Save an Ad were people that sold display ads to businesses. At a glance, they seemed like relatively normal people who you wouldn’t notice on a subway. Also in the main office, and below them, were people who worked in classifieds. They took calls from people who wanted to place free classified ads and they would try to persuade them to purchase bold ads that cost money and were larger. People in classifieds represented an eclectic cross section of people who were the loonier types in school such as those that liked to play dungeons and dragons, confuse the wrestlers Stone Cold and the Rock with god, and do strange things while under the influence.
And then there was the promotions room where I would be working which was tucked away in its own netherworld. There were 3 types of people that worked there: those with criminal records or on parole who could not get hired anywhere else; people collecting welfare payments who could not legally work at all and students who needed a bit of extra cash. I was in my own unique category since I was a student and a goddamn illegal immigrant or something of that nature.
On the day before I was to start, Dan informed me that Radk had given him a call suggesting that the promotions room was going to be shut down. Even I had never managed to be fired from a job before I started but it appeared that things might change. Dan told me to come in anyway and act like nothing happened. When I came in I was told by Radk that the room was under threat because of lack of sales and that he’d only take me on if I did not clock in until I made a sale. After 2-3 hours I did make one but I never received payment for my few hours of free service.
Despite my lack of telemarketing experience, I was given no training, which appears to be the modus operandi of the Save an Ad. Radk gave me a pitch sheet which even I was astute enough to know was complete rubbish and I chucked it into some forgotten corner. At the time, there were four other people besides Dan and I working in promotions. There was Jerry who was in his upper twenties and was actually quite level headed in spite of his dress style that consisted of black boots and some weird amalgamation of anime and goth that I couldn’t quite figure out. There was Melika who was a thicker black girl that attended York University and who I found out one day was quite pious. I asked her if she did anything fun for Halloween and she said that she doesn’t celebrate it because it’s against her religion. She is part of a Church called the 7th Day Adventist that is against all fun from what I gathered. Melika was a sweetheart and if her goal in life is to save people from eternal damnation she would have no shortage of candidates at the Save an Ad to choose from. Her only sin was that she annoyed me every time she referred to the Save an Ad in her pitch as the “Save an Ad Newspaper Company.”
Graham was in his late thirties and he looked like a typical street guy waiting to get a room at the Scott Mission. Apparently, he was a former alcoholic and every time the smoked wafted from his No. 7 cigarette I wished he’d become an ex-smoker as well or switch to a less disgusting cigarette. And then there was Lorne who cannot be placed in any category and who defies all meaning of logic. He was also in his late 30s, and shared a place with Graham as well as his girlfriend and he sold unregulated painkillers otherwise known as heroin. I also think he was on parole or probation because he kept on asking Radk to give him a letter. He was a husky guy with his hair in a ponytail and wore ugly designer label shirts with big lettering. He had one Parasuco shirt that was especially hideous with its combination of puke orange and yellow. Whenever I talked to Lorne, he’d have this wicked smile and look in his eyes, akin to Don King, like he was trying to charm my soul away from me or something. If Lorne ever had a conscience he left it at the side of the road many moons ago. Dan (my roommate) was known as Gary, or alternatively as Flong which is a derivation of his surname. It is company policy to give you a new name if someone else at the Save an Ad has the same one.
There was actually another person working in the room named Alicia but she sold display ads. She is of Jewish origin and in her early 50s. Apparently, she did not get along with the people in the main office, including the owners, so she had her own makeshift partition at the corner of the promotions room. From what my ears told me she used the tough love approach to selling ads. She’d spout out expletives like they were going out of style and yet she had a whole stable of clients ready to renew their ad space. She also had the propensity to complain about how smoky the room was without irony as her ashtray filled up. She was really nice, in a motherly way, and won me over forever when she said that she did not want the new microwave to be placed next to her cubicle because her health would be harmed by the radiation. She was the Jewish mother I never had!
Later on my first day, Jerry told me I had some messages on my phone. I checked them and it turned out they had actually been sent to Radk by Lorne’s sugar mommy who proceeded to forward the message to everyone in the whole office. In the message, she said that Lorne had conned her because she provided him with a $170,000 down payment on a house even though he was still living with his girlfriend. She confirmed that she did in fact have cancer and did not have much time to live. She also stated that she gave Lorne a $5,000 ring and that today was supposed to be their wedding day. The kicker was when she said that her Lorne stole her son’s bike and I noticed that bike right next to his desk. She talked for ten minutes, until the message was cut off, and then she proceeded to leave another one. This time, she was saying how Lorne was living in a “lap of luxury” thanks to her and that she was in Penthouse, which I choose to believe is a figment of her imagination. She even managed to take a potshot at me when she said that Lorne is a loser for working at the Save an Ad when even her 16 year old son earns $800 a week. That message also went on until she was cut off. Lorne claimed that within a month of meeting her she tattooed his name in big letters on her lower back, which meant to him apparently that he had free reign to take full advantage of her. It seems that she did not give Lorne enough cigarettes because according to Alicia he would scoop up her butts from her ashtray. This allegation was confirmed after work when Lorne picked up a used cig outside the front door.
Radk was the boss of the room which meant that he typed out the ads, did our payroll, and other important things like download music and games and look at bizarre pussy pictures. He was working illegally because he was on welfare. Once when Alicia was on the phone with an important client he played these animal noises from a website called Zooish.com at full blast. Radk is around 40 and grew up in various Ontario locales like North Bay and Sudbury. Despite his gaunt looks, he had good bone structure and it appears if he took a different path in life he could have kept up a handsome appearance. At 22, he enrolled in an alternative high school in Toronto, which is for at risk teenagers, and the principal tried to kick him out because he messed around too much. According to Dan, Radk was a talented drummer during the 80s but his life went down the tubes due to a combination of excessive drug use and bad luck.
Apparently he suffered a bit of brain damage when he fell down a fire escape while he was on ecstasy. Dan told me that Radk, along with Lorne, smoked crack and/or did heroin in the bathroom regularly. When I asked Dan why they’d be stupid enough to smoke crack in the bathroom he asked me if I knew what it smelled like and I said no and that was the end of that.
- d.f.
PART 2
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