Let me take this opportunity to tell a little story about my early employment. The summer between grade twelve and my first year of university, I worked as a page (a shelver, basically) at the public library. It was a decent job but because it was unionized, the longest shift I ever got was about five hours long, and usually I'd have a three-hour shift four times a week. The point is, it wasn't enough hours for me to make much money, so I got a second job that I only had to work in the mornings. My job was to go through the phone book and call businesses to find out whether they had any need of a collection agency. The shift was four and a half hours long, because by law, if you work a shift of five or more hours, your employer is obliged to give you a fifteen-minute break. We worked in the basement of the collection agency, five women -- women only, mind -- per shift. We all had to introduce ourselves on the phone as "Mrs. Sanders" (I was seventeen at the time, so I'm not sure how well I pulled that off) so that if anyone called back, whoever was on at the time could say, "Yes, I'm Mrs. Sanders. How can I help you?" There was only one way out of our hole, and that was up a flight of stairs -- which is clearly against fire code. The whole thing was pretty much a nightmare, and definitely not worth the dollar over minimum wage that I made. After I quit, I would always scour the newspapers to see if there had been a fire in there, killing all the employees because they had no fire escape. In conclusion, I wish someone had called the Canadian equivalent of OSHA on that place; it never occurred to me at the time that I could have done it myself. I think that was the worst and yet most colourful job in my career.













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