species under glass

[the_siobhan]

Axel is passed out, and I'm sitting ony my computer with a bottle of wine instead of going to bed. I always do this the night before my day off.

I think I miss working for myself.

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You know, if I judged soley by the people I work with, I would conclude that car drivers are a bunch of real sad-sack whiners.

See, the office block where I work has parking - for a few hundred people. There are somewhere between three and four thousand working here. They tell you this right during the initial interview. Parking for maybe one in eight people. Do the math.

So people know this and they take the job anyway. And they drive in from Whitby or Burlington, or whereever it is that they live. And they park in the side streets and get tickets, or in the local malls and their cars get towed. At breaks they scramble around to move their vehicles or try to wipe the marks off their tires. And they bitch and moan every single day about how the company doesn't have enough parking for all the employees. To the point where even the people who don't drive will kvetch about it, saying, "I think it's rediculous that the bank doesn't provide parking blah, blah blah".

It's starting to seriously get on my tits.

I mean, these are generally really nice people. I like them. I like working with them. But for some reason they have this idea that because they chose to accept a job in a town where they do not live, it's the company's fault that they can't find a convenient place to stash their vehicle for the shift.

I mean, I travel by public transit, and if I am offered a job in a location where I can't get to work, I take that into consideration and DON'T TAKE THE FUCKING JOB. I have yet to spend any time kvetching that my employer doesn't spend money on sending a private bus to my door to pick me up. I have also yet to hear any of the other public transit users make any such a complaint.

So recently I finally said to a couple of the guys in question, "Why don't you organize a car pool? Several hundred people who live in reasonable vicinity of each other work similar shifts and could participate." They laughed it off. I don't want to ride with him, he smells. Etc. And the next day they were running outside at break and moving their cars so they don't get a ticket from the mall security.

I don't get it.

I'm starting to wonder if the suburbs aren't genuinely an alternative universe.

What I'm listening to right this second: The Clash

Comments

[dan-the-tax-man.livejournal.com]

Had a similar discussion with a friend, about why my wife and I take the bus to work when we could drive. We tried to explain that there is limited parking at any downtown office, and that the government doles out parking passes based on a point system - the further you live from an urban area and from public transit, the more likely you are to get a parking pass, likewise you get more points if you can prove that you are car-pooling (note that access to a park-and-ride site counts as access to public transit, so you have to live really far out of town).

Our friend blew up at us, and started ranting about how our employer doesn't have the right to tell what form of transportation we can or can't use, and that we have the right (yes, you read that correctly, we have the right) to drive our car to work. For us it makes no sense - a city bus starts its route about 50m from our door and drops me off about 10m from the entrance to my building; my wife has to transfer once. All in all it takes us about 30 to 45 minutes depending on the weather and traffic, but is much faster than trying to drive. If we need the car immediately after work, we drive to the nearest park-and-ride and still take the bus downtown.

Are the suburbs a different universe? Possibly. We live just on the edge of the 'burbs, and I think in our condo unit we are one of the few families that don't take our cars to work. People in live in the suburbs are strange. When we can afford a new place we're moving closer to downtown so we can walk everywhere.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I think my co-workers must be operating from the same assumption of "rights". What has me flummoxed is how their rights creates an obligation - and a multi-million dollar obligation at that - in somebody else.

I really really want Toronto to bring in a congestion tax like the one in London. And pour the cash into the public transit system. The smog in this city in the summertime is going to kill me young.