Mick and I settled into our unemployed life a little too well some might say. We set ourselves a strict regime to justify our afternoons in the warm Vancouver sun. We both rose at 8am each morning and would ‘work’ the various websites applying for positions and making contact with recruitment agents for the rest of the morning. Then in the afternoon with our conscience clear that we had done everything possible to secure ourselves gainful employment we would meet at Mick’s place to spend the afternoon at our leisure.
Mick’s girl Liz had a great job with the operations team putting together the ceremonies for the Olympics. Her office is on the Downtown east side near the ‘freezone’ and not far from BC Place, the largest air supported stadium in the world, which will host the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics.
Vancouver has undergone some change over the past 10 years with many historic downtown areas having undergone some serious urban gentrification. The two most significant areas being Gastown, which was the original site of downtown Vancouver and is now home to trendy warehouse apartments, bars and eateries, and Yaletown, a former site of warehouses and light industry which has been transformed into a world of high rise apartments and inner-city commercial living.
BC Place forms part of Yaletown and so in the interest of being close to work Liz chose to live in an amazing brand new apartment complex right on false creek. It’s the real trendy place to live in a city that has made downtown living the new black. So much so that some people live downtown and commute out of town to work! The rent is astronomical but Liz can walk to work and is over the road from the stadium in preparation for games time. The upside for Mick and I was that we had this very modern chic apartment on the 15th floor overlooking the water to just, hang out in, every afternoon of our unemployed lives. With a 24 hour concierge and a kitchen most housewives would die for we were really living large for two unemployed blokes on the wrong side of the globe.
Of course our life of luxury was asset rich but cash poor - we had some serious cash flow problems. We needed to entertain ourselves basically for free and then clean the house from top to bottom to hide any evidence of us having had fun throughout the day so when Liz came home the place was spotless. We called them craft afternoons. Liz’s apartment, whilst beautiful to live in, had only plain walls and simple but elegant furniture. Mick took it upon himself, and I just got swept up in the motion, to make some art for the walls.
We got proficient with photo shop and starting producing some simple images to teach ourselves how to stencil. I know Wil El-dropper has ventured into such pastimes before so it was a little copycat of me but it was largely free and passed the time beautifully. With a 6 pack of beer or a bottle of red every afternoon we would turn Liz’s apartment into a studio. It was like we were famous New York artists in our inner-city apartment just without dirty heroin habits or heiresses for girlfriends. We referred to each other as artists and enjoyed our new imaginative persona's.
After some initial test sprays in the afternoon sun we started to get the hang of it and went from simple black on white stencils to trying to add depth, colour and shading into our work. We experimented with painting faces that included multiple skin tones and some cityscape's with intricate window details, layered shadows and long perspectives. Mick was a few stencils better than me (let’s face it I’ve never been the most arty of people) but we were both happy with the rate we were progressing and with each spray we were learning some new tricks from our mistakes.
The two hard parts are finding the right image to start with and the cutting. The photo shop bit takes but a moment with a modern Mac and the spraying is fun but boy the cutting – it does your head in. A complex stencil for me would be nine or ten layers meaning I had to cut about six stencils, cutting different layers of the image each time. Some stencils would be used twice in the spraying process simply covering some cuts with tape to save time and money. Even still it would take two days of solid cutting to get a good stencil with enough detail for a good A4 sized image. Basically we could manage one good image a week. It was the perfect time waster as you felt like you had actually made something and it took our minds off the employment search. We would share music and watch downloaded TV as we cut each afternoon in the apartment. Life was great – apart from the whole no money thing.
Mick and I enjoyed this creative lifestyle for some time. In fact Mick’s still enjoying it as I write this but his world comes to a halt in a few weeks when he must return home to Sydney. He has landed himself a much sort after production management type gig with the Sydney Festival. I’m not sure of his title exactly but he will be responsible for pulling all the details together to make the festival happen in the summer of 2010. It is a great gig and he has worked for years on smaller festivals and productions to work his way up to something as big as the Sydney Festival. If any of you are in Sydney next summer – go check it out – it’s a great event of music and the arts.
Our craft was rudely interrupted one afternoon by the dulcet tones of my cell phone. On the other end was a Japanese guy. I could not make out his initial words clearly through his Japanese/Canadian accent but I had a vague recollection of emailing a Japanese guy about some gardening work so I am sure it’s got something to do with a job. After some clarification and some slow talking to get past the fact neither of us could understand much of what each other were saying despite both speaking English I agree to meet him the next morning at 8am on the corner of Broadway and Cambie. It’s only a short bus ride from my house so it seems easy enough. His main concern as we hang up is that I will actually show up the next morning – it seems the search for good general employment is difficult on both sides of the equation.
I rock up slightly early the next morning and am there before anyone else but I am sure I am in the right place. As requested I am holding a hard hat, some work gloves and am wearing my hiking boots which are masquerading as steel toed boots.
It turns out Takashi is a super nice guy who manages the installation of vertical gardens for a modern landscape architecture company in downtown Vancouver. They make green walls or vertical and rooftop gardens for inner city developments. Most notably they built the vertical garden in Seattle on the outside of the original Starbucks store which was a giant living mural of the companies ‘twin tailed siren’ logo and a large rooftop and vertical garden in the new Shangri-La Hotel here in Vancouver.
Takashi is cool mix of modern Vancouver and old Japan. He is a blend of white and blue collar worker with a wonderful work ethic and gentle persona – once I’m working for him he seems forever concerned that I am comfortable at work and reassures me I will be paid on Friday by cheque. I’m not sure if I am over sensitive to how pleasant the work environment is having dealt with Marty over the previous few weeks but I am certainly more comfortable in this environment of mutual respect.
Before us stands a massive vertical garden which stretches half a city block down the side of Whole Foods which is one of those urban supermarkets with lots of great fresh food and organic products and prices that make your eyes water. It turns out one of the species of plants that makes the second highest row of the garden did not survive the super cold winter we just had - the same cold spell that took the end of my nose earlier in the trip.
My job was to re-plant all the dead plants. I had to dig each dead plant out with a fork, clear the hole for the new roots and jam a new plant where the dead one once was. It was a simple task that I needed to repeat about 3,500 times along the length of the wall. I was given an electric scissor lift to get me up about 15 feet above the ground which proved to be quite a safe and fun working platform. I lied that I had worked in one before and just hoped it would be simple to operate so I could live out my lie. Turns out it had a simple joystick operation and very clear pictures on the controls so I looked quite comfortable despite not having a clue what I was doing.
After a few hours it was clear that the two days they had budgeted to get the job done was not going to be enough – the task whilst simple was quite slow and they were keen to do a good job to avoid the embarrassment of having to re-plant any sections a third time. They had only hired the scissor lift for two days so there was concern about how we would get the job done. Takashi was confident we needed another person to help me. I spoke with him about the inconsistency of workers he found on the Internet and that he was happy with me so I offered to call Mick to get the two of us on the job. A quick call to Mick and he was on his bike heading our way. For the second time in a fortnight I had hand balled Mick a few days work – it was perfect.
We spent the next few days taking our minds off the tedious nature of our task by talking through every aspect of our lives which had landed us up on this scissor lift. We were working in an affluent part of town and it was quite a fun exercise in people watching. From our perch above the sidewalk we watched the crowd of mainly university students, young professional couples and yummy mummies making their way into the store - it was good cheap entertainment. Mick and I seemed just high enough off the ground to be out of everyone’s view and thoughts and not so high as to attract attention to ourselves. It was a fun few days.
At the end of the job Takashi was happy with our efforts and despite not having enough work for the two of us he offered me two weeks full time out at the airport. I was stoked – two weeks of full time work would take the heat out of finding that month’s rent.
The job at the airport was enormous, a giant 70 foot high wall that would greet all international arrivals at the newly renovated Vancouver Airport. They have spent billions getting the airport up to scratch for the games next year including a train service from the airport to downtown and enormous additions to the terminals and car parks. Over the next two weeks I planted a wall that millions of visitors to Vancouver will see as they step outside on Canadian soil following their arrival. It’s an awesome structure and I am quite stoked to have helped build it. By the time I got involved with building this wall the steel sub-frame was in place and we were simply hanging the stainless steel boxes which hold 13 small plants each and building the reticulation to complete the structure. I was working with two Canadian guys harnessed in to a giant diesel powered scissor lift 70 feet in the air – it was not for the faint hearted but I quite liked it.
True to his word Takashi has a cheque for me every Friday and even gave me a raise for the airport job as he was so happy with the way we had replanted the Whole Foods wall and my ability to pull in Mick on short notice.
The whole time I worked on the gardens I was continuing to make applications in the evenings for professional work. Every few days I would finish work and listen to a voice message from one recruitment agent or another usually offering me nothing or telling me I had missed out on an interview again. There are plenty of skilled Canadians competing for work with me so I was an unattractive candidate on paper in this climate.
Conveniently on the second Thursday out at the airport I finished work to find eight missed calls on my phone. I don’t even know eight people in Vancouver so something was up. They were all from the same number – a good recruitment firm downtown. I knew it was good news because recruitment agents are obvious in their choice of communication. They usually email bad news and telephone good news – I hate that.
I called her back and left her a message. When she called me back I was on a packed bus travelling home from the airport. The feeling of having landed a job when it seemed like the impossible was overwhelming. Everyone on the that bus knew the call was good news, I hung up, cranked the volume on my i-pod and floated back into the city – I’d done it – I don’t think I have ever been so proud of myself. I think I learnt more from this experience than I have from anything else so far.
I had interviewed for the role two weeks earlier. I remember leaving the interview confident that it had gone well but also a little disheartened by the one hour, three bus commute to get to their office. I hate commuting.
So here I am. Travelling to and from work each day reading my book and happy to be working in an office environment and taking home a weekly cheque with a comma in it justifying years of education.
I’m living in an apartment in Kitsilano with an actor. I found my place during the whole job search process – I’ll write a little post about my place and the search for it soon.
