I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

"IF YOU'RE WATCHING THIS, YOU ARE NO LONGER AN F-NIGHT VIRGIN!"

(However, if, on a Friday evening, you're at home, watching cartoons in your parents' basement, there's a pretty good chance you're the other kind of virgin.)

(Eh, I couldn't think of a good headline for another boring job search entry, and the promos for Teletoon's The Detour's "F-Night" have been bothering me for a while, so, eh, I thought combining my weak joke with an entry the joke really has nothing to do with was "perfect" synergy.)

It's a negatory on hearing anything back from the stores to which I applied at a job fair in Orleans the other week, so, today, my mother took me to a job fair at the Bell SensPlex in Kanata (more like Stittsville, actually) to apply for the new Kanata Costco.

Costco, the giant American membership warehouse club chain, is a rather unglamorous place, from the two or three times I've ever visited there, and a workplace that is most certainly not on the list of retailers that have the coveted "Ran Kotobuki seal of approval", but the only international chains within walking distance of me that have shown up in Gals!/Super Gals! are HMV, which I did apply to a couple of months back with no luch, and McDonald's, which, as much as I unabashedly love the taste their food, I'm not about to apply to (especially considering that McDonald's mainly seems to hire either people over a decade younger than me or people much, much older than me).

Plus, Costco has actually shown up, by name, as a minor plot device in another one of my favourite cartoon shows. The Arlen, Texas Costco is where the character "Lucky", the hillbilly character who sounds high all of the time (voiced by singer Tom Petty) who used to work at a corn chip factory and who is now trying to date Luanne Platter, had the accident for which he received a sizable settlement.

KAHN: Why they call you Lucky?
LUCKY: True story: I was at Costco one day when the nature called. Yelled is more like it. So I hightail it into the john, and there's some sensitive guy there changin' his little boy's diaper on one of them baby ironing boards. And don't you know, I slipped on pee-pee and broke two vertebrae which had to be fused together. I'm in constant pain, but I got me a $53,000 settlement.
ELVIN: This sumbitch is never gonna have to work another day in his life.
LUCKY: That's why they call me Lucky.

My father came along with us on the trip because, since my mother doesn't care that much for taking the Queensway, usually, to get to Kanata from Bell's Corners and Nepean, we take Robertson road, and it goes through a wooded area with a lot of deer, and there are signs there that say "High Deer Traffic Area", and my father gets a mild chuckle out of the "High Deer" part and wanted to snap a picture of the sign. (Well, it's not really any more lame a joke than how I still find it amusing that one of the most prevalent convenience store chains in the Ottawa area is called "Quickie", as in "euphenism for fellatio". "Quickie: Please enjoy our special service, and come out of our store with a smile on your face.")

My mother wanted to get to the Bell SensPlex, a public sporting/ice hockey rink complex, by going up Castlefrank to get to Maple Grove, but there's no direct link to Maple Grove from Castlefrank, so she ended up taking a bridge across the Queensway to the back of the Kanata Centrum, which was a very advantageous mistake for me because I actually also wanted to drop off a CV to the Chapters bookstore at the Kanata Centrum, but I think the Centrum was just a little bit out of the way for it to have been reasonable to ask. So, I dropped off a CV and had to fill out a form saying when I'd be available and what books I've recently enjoyed (Manga: Gals!, Planetes, and Cowboy Bebop; Non-Fiction: Peace Kills by P.J. O'Rourke, and Plane Insanity by Elliot Hester).

Then, taking Terry Fox Drive back south, we finally found Maple Grove and the SensPlex. Actually, when I arrived there, it was pretty anticlimatic. It was around 2 p.m., and, even though the job fair was supposed to go to 3 p.m., they had already met the quote of people that they were going to interview that day (there were dozens of people seated in the main room they were using for interviews), so we were invited to just fill out an application form and hand it in with our C.V. which I did, though, the annoying thing was that I had a blue Uniball Vision pen with me that I found when I was rummaging through some bags in my bedroom closet yesterday, looking for old photos to scan, and I found out why I hardly used that particular pen; because the ink was overly runny compared to most Uniball Vision pens, and I smudged several items on the application form, including the phone number, so I had to spell out the numbers phoenetically. Honestly, I'd rather just drop off a C.V. than have a preliminary mini-interview, because, when I'm directly competing with hundreds of other potential candidates in the same room, it feels too much like Pop Idol/American Idol/Canadian Idol, and I'd be the equivalent of, no, not William Hung, but one of those people they film during the auditions that are so terrible that they aren't even called back to the studio itself for the first round.

On the way back, we stopped off at this one store called the Scottish and Irish Store, selling items imported directly from Scotland and Ireland (and England). Shades of "All Things Scottish", the old Saturday Night Live sketch wherein Mike Myers is the proprietor of a similar store (though without the Irish component) whose motto was "If it's not Scottish, it's crap!" (I think this was actually the first filmed appearance of the accent he'd later use for Austin Powers's "Fat Bastard" and Shrek.) A store that sells imported Scottish, Irish, and British food items seems like the perfect venue to sell Carlsberg Special Brew, which isn't otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, sold in Canada, but that would be impossible in Ontario because the provincial government is such a pussy when it comes to alcohol sales and won't allow any beer sales in retail venues outside of the government-run Beer Stores (and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario stores). I did get a bar of Fry's Orange Cream chocolate (dark chocolate with an orange fondant centre). It's a bit too rich for me to really compare it to the milk chocolate Aero Orange, my all-time favourite chocolate bar, but it was still pretty good. We also stopped off at a Farm Boy and a Loeb's supermarket. I got a box of Jelly Belly gourmet jellybeans. Damn, the pear flavour tastes almost identical to biting into a real pear. It's uncanny.

We had originally planned to stop off at Mark's Work Wearhouse, so I could exchange the $75 gift card which I had received for my birthday for clothing (probably a couple of sweaters; two of my jumpers/"hoodies" are getting very tatty), but I had left it in a bag with most of the other stuff I received for my birthday, so we'll have to go another time. (Which reminds me, I never did a birthday report... maybe I'll write one on Sunday, though my mother signed me up to go to their church's "Pot Luck Supper", which starts at, and I have trouble believing this, 5 p.m., while I'm someone who prefers eating supper much, much later in the evening, like around 8 or 9 p.m., and post-10 p.m. suppers are not uncommon for me if I'm eating by myself. I guess they don't know about my little rule of thumb that people who eat dinner before about 6:30 p.m. are psychopaths.)

posted by Steve Brandon @ 6:47 AM