| 12 Years - 19 Years Mississauga is a great town to live in, that is, if your idea of a great town is suburban hell. We lived on Barcella Cres. which is located in a subdivision known as Sheridan Homelands which was fairly recently converted from farmland. It was a particularly sterile and unappealing place. It has improved somewhat since then as more ethnic groups have moved in. It is now (2001) possible to get Vietnamese food in Mississauga. I went to Homelands Senior Public School for grades seven and eight. I then graduated to Erindale Secondary School of which the less said the better. In high school I was a sometime member of the swim, track and volleyball teams for which I performed quite poorly. While in highschool I purchased my first computer, a Sinclair ZX81 with 1kB RAM! It was on this computer that I first learned to program (in Sinclair Basic) a skill which was to serve me well in future years. Interesting trivia - at that time high school in Ontario went to grade 13! Academically I found high school quite easy, I did not have to exert myself too much and performed quite well. In addition to school I had various jobs. I got my first job at 14 from my father who was employed as a financial comptroller at the Canadian Jewish Congress, a non-profit organisation which raises money for Jewish causes. I mainly worked in the mailroom but due to things being slow in the summer also spent a good deal of time hanging around with the maintenance guy, Joe. He used to tell me stories about his sexual conquests and generally kept me entertained. I made $2.15 per hour at this job and did it for the summer between grades 9 and 10. The next summer I obtained employment at Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips as a short order cook. I ended up staying at this job for about a year and a half. My duties included deep-frying fish, chips, chicken, shrimp, and clams in peanut oil. I used to smell quite disgustingly of oil after a shift. During slow periods I would also have to perform various cleaning tasks. The fish filet was cod but we were supposed to refer to it as North Atlantic whitefish when talking to the customers. Cod, at that time was considered a cheap fish, this was before the stocks were depeleted due to overfishing. It wasn't a single piece of fish; it was the equivalent of a fish burger, ground up fish molded into an attractive shape. Despite this, the food wasn't too bad. The rule was that we were supposed to get food for half price, however, I usually dined for free on "broken pieces". Occasionally I would trade jobs with the cashier and work the register. I quit Arthur Treacher's (which had changed its name by this time - there are no longer any AT in Ontario that I know of) shortly before my eighteenth birthday and did not work again until the subsequent summer. Things were tough that summer (1982) and I had several short term jobs. The first was with Lawn Rangers ("First in Lawn and Order"), a lawn spraying company. While the sprayer was doing somebody's lawn I would knock on neighbours' doors and try to sell them lawn spraying. I thought the job was going to last all summer but it turned out the boss really only hired me for the early summer in order to round up business and had probably always intended to let me go after about a month or so. After that I found a job helping some guy build an elabourate deck for his house. This ended up taking considerably longer than he had originally intended which was luck for me. During my final high school year I obtained a job as an usher at Cineplex through a friend. This was back in the days when the movie theatre business in Ontario was dominated by Odeon and Famous Players and Cineplex was effectively shut out of good quality first-run films. As a result we showed a lot of crappy movies like "losin It" (1982) starring Shelley Long and a then mostly unknown Tom Cruise. Our showing also included a steady supply of low-end soft-corepornography. Eventually Cineplex went on to win a lawsuit against the film distributors and came to dominate the move theatre business in Ontario, however, this was after my time. One of the duties of the ushers was to answer the phone. Every night the woner of Cineplex, Garth Drabinsky, would call and without any preamble, would ask "What are the numbers?". Rude bastard. Currently (2001), Drabinsky is going through many legal hassles due to his company Livent's financial woes. I can't help but believe that a more polite person would not have gotten himself into this mess. An usher's duties are mainly ticket-taking. In addition one is supposed to check to make sure no one is smoking or talking in the theatres. The projectionist should be keeping an eye on the movies in order to ensure they are not misframing or otherwise screwing up. Projectionists belong(ed?) to a union and were thus the best payed employees at Cineplex. We had two, the full-time guy during the week and the part-time guy during the weekend. The former was quite unreliable and I was often forced to go searching through the Mall when something went wrong with the films. Invariably he was flirting with some Mall employee in the foodcourt. The latter was an immigrant from Jamaica who never ventured away from the projectionist's booth during films (as required by the rules) and was therefore much easier to work with. In addition to his projectionist role he also worked at a factory during the week. How he got that job (sometime in the early 1970's) is an interesting lesson in how economic times have changed. Shortly after immigrating he was walking down the street and saw a line of people. He asked what the line-up was for and upon being informed that it was for factory jobs, he joined it. He received the job that day and kept it for many years. Contrast that with the modern job-search experience! On elast point about being an useher, it is a great way to amke friends, or at least suddenly everyone is your friend! Next Return to Biography Index Back to Philippe's Home |