There hasn’t been much to report about this week. It’s been pretty tame except for the seeming lack of any progress on the work. It’s going to take me the full three weeks to do my part of the program. If everything we asked for initially had been ready for us then it would have only taken a week and a half at most. Oh well. That’s just the way things go.
I’ve seen a little bit more of downtown Toronto this week. It’s actually a pretty cool city. We went down to Yonge Street for dinner a couple of times. The first time was to go to the Toronto Hard Rock Café, which is apparently the first HRC in North America. It was ok, but if you’ve been to one HRC you’ve been to them all. And since I’m not a gigantic music fan a lot of the memorabilia was lost on me, not that I went around the joint looking for it. Another night we found a giant mall in the middle of downtown. I thought it was just an office building, or at best a stand alone Sears, but it turned out to be a full-fledged mall on the inside and it wasn’t a small one. I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to explore it a little more thoroughly. I may not do a lot of shopping, but I do like to explore these monuments to capitalism, except at Christmas.
There’s a store here called HMV. I guess the only thing I could compare it to would be like a Virgin store. It’s huge, and there are two of them within like three blocks of each other in downtown Toronto. Those are just the ones I’ve been to. It’s the Starbucks of music stores. The guy I’m with buys a lot of CDs, so we stop at just about every music store we come across. Lucky for me they also sell DVDs. I only bought Superman. Well, Superman and two CDs, but they had a great sale going on.
The highlight of my week was my trip to see the Maple Leafs play a pre-season game against the Canadiens. The CFO of our Canada division heard that I was interested in going and just gave me his tickets. Thanks, Ian. I had a hell of a time finding someone to go with me though. My boss was going to come, but he decided at the last minute that he didn’t really want to go. He said it was because he had a lot of work to do, but I think he may have just wanted some alone time or that he really wasn’t interested in hockey. I know he doesn’t follow the Stars. But, really, how can you go to Canada and not go see at least one hockey game? The people here are nuts for it, which made my difficulty finding someone to go rather strange. All the accounting people were dealing with month-end close. I asked all of them and they all said they couldn’t go. I ended up going with this guy in Operations, and he pretty well summed up what I thought would be the general sentiment regarding free Leafs tickets. He said that he would miss out on five hours sleep or come in early the next day or just come back to the office after, but there was no way he’d turn down free tickets to the Leafs. Needless to say, the Canadians in our accounting department up here are the worst Canadians ever. I mean, I thought they ate, drank, and breathed Maple Leafs hockey. Guess I was wrong.
So the game was great. I think the new rules they’ve instituted have really opened the game up a bit. We saw seven goals scored (that’s a lot for you non-hockey people), and that’s not even counting the shoot-out they did at the end. That was some cool stuff.
We had a debate this week about whether to go home for the weekend. Well, it wasn’t really a debate. I was going home. If the company is willing to pay for me to return home on the weekends, then I’m taking advantage of it. The travel people told the boss that if he went home for the weekend then it’s possible that he wouldn’t be able to return on time Sunday thanks to Hurricane Rita. I’ve seen enough newscasts to be fairly sure that all the hurricane hitting D/FW was over-hyped. So the fear that I might not be able to get back by Monday is, I think, completely unfounded. I think he really just doesn’t like the idea of only getting to spend one day at home. Me, I think that being able to spend even one day at home is worth it. That’s just me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment