Home Again

So now that the trip updates are all done and I have no stories of adventure these updates are going to get a whole lot more boring. I guess this will the start of the “catch up” posts in between our return and the next big adventure we went on which was a trip to the Philippines. I don’t want this thing to become some type of travel blog considering I don’t do all that much traveling and would run out of ammo very quickly!

After we got back from traveling things went back to normal pretty quick. Brit started back at her job and I had to find some work. The original plan was to start law school pretty much right when I got back but during our year (or so) on the road I got too caught up in having fun and didn’t get all my applications in even though I had them pretty much all organized. I was still on the fence about even going because I honestly wasn’t sure if law was something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. I mean, wearing a suit and a tie to work every day? Sounds like torture and up until that point I’d owned 1 suit in my entire life and probably worn it twice (I now have more suits). 

First thing then for me was to find a job and I also needed somewhere to live. The plan was to move back into Brit’s place together but she had it rented out while we were gone and since we came home early the people living there still had a month or so to stay. Brit ended up living with her parents and Mr. Sean Cromie was an awesome friend and let me stay with him in his house till I got things sorted out. For those that don’t know (I assume you all do if you’re reading this) Sean’s house has 2 basement suites and an upper level. At the time he was living in one of the basement suites and I moved in there with him. The problem was it really only had 1 bedroom and a smaller office type room attached to it which became my room. To get to my “bedroom” I had to go through Sean’s room and then into mine. There were no doors and a cut out window in the wall that separated our rooms. Despite the lack of privacy we made it work and I was very grateful he was letting me stay (Sean I’ll pay you back someday I promise). I often got to wake up with Sean peering through the window at me and also had the pleasure of hearing some late night rendezvous he had with ladies on the weekends. 

During the time I was at Sean’s a group of us took a fun Aug long camping trip to Square Lake. The original plan was to go somewhere else but all the camping spots were booked and we almost had to throw in the towel last minute. Thankfully, we were informed of Square Lake where it was free to camp so we puttered out there for the long weekend. That was a fun little excursion that was highlighted by the appearance of the scariest (and darkest) lake monster you’ll ever see…Squarehead Leechhead. The monster lures in unsuspecting campers by bobbing out of the water, campers can’t help but be lured in by the “darkest thing they’ve ever seen” and this is when the monster attacks dragging them down below. For those of you that don’t know the monster is Clayton…and/or his penis I’m not exactly sure which.

Other highlights from that trip included Clayton losing my waterball I bought in Florida on the first throw, lots of nudity, silly stringing Connor while he passed out and him beating Clayton thinking he was responsible, a huge explosion and of course Danssss Bar. 

My living time at Sean’s was pretty short lived and it took me awhile to actually get back on my feet once I got home. I was hoping to find a decent job since I had my degree now and didn’t want to have to go back to school. My first job offer came from the Log Barn in Enderby. They wanted me for some unknown reason to be their accountant even though I had zero experience. They offered me a decent wage and I agreed. Little did I know it would be one of the shadiest jobs I’ve ever had. To start they put me and the meat counter selling beef jerky paying me less than half of what they promised. Took me over a week to actually start doing what they hired me for. From there I was thrown in the deep end trying to figure out how to do payrolls, pay suppliers and manage accounts without any knowledge or training. It was a bit overwhelming and stressful to say the least. This coupled with the fact I didn’t have a car and needed to scrounge a vehicle every day to make it to work made the whole experience not very enjoyable. Once they started asking me to do things I wasn’t very comfortable with like not paying suppliers, calling people who hadn’t been paid in years and asking for more products, and keeping their very unfair wages to the other employees a secret, I thought it was time to call it quits. I told them it wasn’t going to work out and I’d be leaving. They weren’t very happy about it and kept pestering me for a couple days to come back. I was tempted but remembered my time there and how horrible it was and declined. 

After that ordeal I reluctantly got a job back at my old employer Predator Ridge. I was in a new position inside the resort this time but it was still tough doing a job getting a wage I was getting before I graduated. Definitely made me feel like I went to school for nothing. The job was ok, organizing, setting up and helping with all the events at the resort but the hours were crazy sporadic and I never had time to see friends or Brit because our schedules rarely matched up. I did get to enjoy some free golf while I worked up there again though, always a plus. I lasted until the end of the season up there and then I was out of work again.

The majority of my time at Predator was over the summer and in that time I also enjoyed playing whenever I could with the Bunt Smokers and Brit and I also spent a weekend in Penticton for Shane and Heather’s wedding. Which was fun, but strange a bit because they hadn’t assimilated into our friend group fully at the time so the wedding was full of people I’d never met before but Brit knew them all from her time in Powell River.

Once my time at Predator ended I entered into a pretty rough spot…I moved in with Brit to her place which was great but I had very little money and was having one of the hardest times ever finding a new job. It took me several weeks of being broke (thank god Brit was helping me out, thanks babe) but I finally landed a job with a company called DeMara Consulting. I was told it was going to be just an entry level office job where I’d be filing, writing emails and just generally helping out. When I started however, I found things were much stranger than they first seemed. I was actually hired by a couple guys who lived in Europe somewhere and I never even knew their real names (fishy right?) and my bosses were consultants to the company in the office where I was. So out of like 15 people there I wasn’t an actual employee with them but was with these other 2 guys. The guys were very, very shady and communicated with only via Skype chat and told me that everything I was doing with them was to be private and I couldn’t tell the people in the office what we were doing. That wasn’t a problem considering I didn’t even know what I was doing…The company itself helped people who had problems with the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA), but I was just putting peoples files onto the computer through a program they had and organizing everything, that usually took me about 4 hours per day so I spent the other half of the day looking busy on my computer and pretending to work.

 After about 2-3 weeks with the company the in-office manager came into my office and told me they would no longer be working with the 2 consultant guys who had hired me. It came out that they were scam artists the entire time and were just learning the business model so they could steal it and take all the clients for themselves. Apparently the guys had done this before which is why they use alias and never speak to the company directly. Very shady stuff. The manager asked if I wanted to stay with DeMara as an actual employee and I agreed. I spent about 6 months with the business mostly spending my days pretending to look busy because I could finish all my work for the day in about 4-5 hours without even working too hard. That job was weird because where there was no work to do there was literally nothing to do…on many occasions I had to ask the managers what I should do and they had no response for me. It did get very stressful though dealing with clients when I had very little knowledge about the CRA and taxes and could barely help them out on the phone or in person…I still don’t know really what the company was doing to help people. 

During the time I was working there I ended up realizing how difficult it was to get a decent paying job with just my crappy Bachelor’s degree and said “fuck it” and sent in all my applications to a few different law schools. I didn’t really think I had much of a shot to get in considering my grades and LSAT scores were decent but definitely not amazing. 

Brit and I also got a bit of the travel bug again but couldn’t afford to take any extended time off so we planned a little 3 day trip to Vegas. When we were booking though we found a deal where it would cost us only about $100 more to stay an additional 4 days so we booked it up and hoped we could get the time off work! It ended up not being a problem for either of us and we headed down to Vegas to stay at the Luxor for a week! Everyone said we were crazy for that long in Vegas saying we’d be done after 2 days, but since I don’t drink I wasn’t too worried about, I just had to make sure Brit didn’t go tooooo crazy. 

This is getting much to long for even me now and reading back through it damn, it’s kinda boring. If you even made it this far I applaud you for reading. So I’ll cut this off here and return another time to finish talking about Vegas, the following summer where I had to live in Saskatoon and my first year at (shudder) law school. 

As always though, thanks for reading and checking this thing out! 

Dan