Let's Meet Another Crew!

One time back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman we went to Edmonton, Alberta.  The trip was atypical for two reasons: first, it was a big city, which travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen tend to avoid.  Second, two crews from the Vancouver office met up there at the same time.  I'm not sure what the thinking was, except maybe to give us a chance to compare notes and pitches and see how other people do their selling.

I remember four folks from the other crew in particular.  The crew leader was a short skinny friendly athletic kind of guy with a big laugh.  He kinda reminded me of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas.  Then there was a girl woman die-hard chip-on-the-shoulder angry feminist.  (How do these people end up as travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen?  For that matter, how did I?)  I remember I asked her once what she thought of Camille Paglia and she almost had a brain aneurysm right there in front of me.  I avoided talking to her about anything but dinner after that.

One night we all went out to a bar for dinner.  Several months on the road with my crew had made me so crude that I shudder to think of how I used to speak back then.  It took me several months  after quitting and a number of notable missteps to reintegrate myself into polite society (and some might say that I still have a way to go).  The feminist lady person had gone to powder her nose, and I leaned over to Ray and asked him what it was like to be on the road with her all the time.  He kinda shrugged and smiled and said that she was nice but it was just important to avoid topics that made her angry.  "What a b**ch!", I exclaimed.  Ray was shocked into uncontrollable gales of laughter which the more he tried to suppress, the more he laughed.  He just managed to get himself under control before Gloria Steinem returned.

The third guy from the other crew was Crazy Sheldon and the fourth, and his interaction with Andy Bailey, will have to wait for another post.  Stay tuned!

Prince George was Smokin'

Disclaimer: as before.

One time, back in the days when I was a travelling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Prince George, British Columbia.  Good thing somebody brought weed.

Prince George is an old logging town that grew into a small city, and occupied that perfect middle ground where it lacked both the excitement of Vancouver (and other cities) and the charm of all the little towns and villages where we did most of our work.  We were there for a week or so.

It was only my second or third road trip, so I was still just getting the hang of it, and I was still basically a pretty innocent kid.  In my two years of University before taking this job, I had smoked weed a total of two times, and had never really gotten stoned ("got stoned" for the British readers of this blog).

As luck would have it, a one-tripper that I remember almost nothing about except that she looked like a sitcom lesbian and brought a baggie of twiggy swag.  Betcha didn't know how many different kinds of people end up as travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen for at least a road trip or two.

Our first night at the Prince George motel, Ms. Crewcut pulled out her baggie and rolled a big fat doobie.  We passed it around and I enjoyed it, but once again wondered if there was something I was missing.  After a little while, I was felling a little hungry, so I decided to go to the gas station down the road to get a little snack.  It's when I got down to the street that I realised just how profoundly stoned I was.  I couldn't wait to get back to the motel room to share the good news, but of course I really had to get that snack.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, snack!  Where was I going again?  Ooh, look at the pretty sky!  Needless to say, it took some time before I made it back to the motel room with a full belly and ready to boast to all who would hear about just how stoned I was.  My crewmates shook their heads at my puppy dog naivete.

By the end of our week in Prince George, I was an old hand at that whole weed-smoking thing.  Just wait till I tell you about how we moved on to Andy Bailey's bong.

Guilty Pleasure

One time back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Kamloops, British Columbia.  In fact, many times.

Kamloops is about a 4 hour drive from Vancouver on the way to most of the places we would go in Alberta and Saskatchewan, so it was often a convenient place to stop to eat, and more often than not do an evening's worth of door knocking while we were at it.  I remember it as a kind of unexciting working class town, which made it a perfect place for travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen to ply their trade.  Its population of not much less than 100 thousand would generally work against it (cities hate door to door salesmen), but its isolation in fact meant that au contraire, it could simply be worked over and over without killing territory.

One of the things I remember best about Kamloops is how many really old cars one would see on the road.  Neither collectible antiques suggesting a wealthy area nor nasty old junkers suggesting a slum, but simply old cars in decent shape that in most of the places I'd been would have rusted to dust years earlier.  Lots of AMC Eagles and such.  I was told it was because Kamloops gets very little rain or snow because it's in the Coastal Mountains' rain shadow, and they don't salt the roads in the winter.  Certainly when I was there in April, it was hot and dry and seemed like a desert.  It was fun to see all those classic middle class cars on the road.

One time, we were driving through a residential neighbourhood when I saw a hand painted sign in someone's front yard that made me laugh until I cried, while at the same time feeling like a lowlife for finding it so funny.  I just saw it out of the corner of my eye for a moment, but that was all it took to burn itself into my memory forever.  I guess it was the pathos, the innocence, or maybe the passive-aggressiveness (a term I had never heard yet back in those days) of the sign that struck me as so funny.  Probably the pathos.  Whenever anyone mentions "guilty pleasures," I think of my laughter at that sad little hand painted sign somebody took the effort to create and put on their front lawn in Kamloops, BC.

Please return our boat.