Freaky Friday

Well, really no more freaky than any other Friday in the surreal world which is KAF but either my co-workers are getting weirder or I’m not coping as well with their previously extant weirdness.

KAF Vehicle Photo for Today

That oughta hold it.

Sorry, no Surfs missing wheels today. But ya gotta love the enthusiasm for duct tape of these guys. When a colleague broke the window of our van here several years ago (he backed into a garishly painted giant water truck…no, I don’t know how he didn’t see it), the only thing we had to cover the hole was bubble wrap. It looked ridiculous but the tell-tale “pop” was a great obstacle warning system when backing up.

Medical Necessity

Our customer now requires that we get medical checkups prior to each entry into KAF. The mandated timeline for these pre-KAF entry checkups actually means that we have to have the check up while we’re still in KAF…before we depart on leave. Yeah, the oxymoronish nature of having a check up in KAF to determine if we are fit enough to go to KAF is not lost on me.

Anyhow, those of us of a certain age have been asked to provide stool samples as part of the medical process. Despite our much too frequent and much too proximate interaction with stools in our odious washrooms, I still figured that most people find the stool sample collection process to be somewhat off-putting. Imagine my surprise when first thing this morning I hear TG say “I finally got my stool sample. It was awesome. Well, until the guy in the next stall started using the sprayer and the back splash started hitting my feet”. These are the types of conversations I’m gonna miss when I’m all done with KAF. You don’t hear this shit back in reality.

Mail Call

My room in KAF is pretty comfortable, I have a Keurig coffee maker, a microwave and a fridge. Every six months I get a couple of cartons of K-Cups shipped in from the states. That’s about the extent of my mail except for the odd package from my wife. Some of our team, on the other hand, are a little higher maintenance. They’ve got video projectors, comfy chairs, candy, food, big screen TVs, remote control helicopters among myriad other things coming in from Amazon and other on-line sites. C, along with his home theatre and XBox, even had an inversion trainer sent in. D, my fellow traveler on the low maintenance highway, mused: “I’m considering spending my next vacation in C’s room.”

Compare and Contrast

Thank You, Pakistan (I think)

A couple of days ago, one of my readers commented “Maybe the Northline will surprise us with a different kind of ice cream. I’m kinda sick of two straight months of strawberries flavor”. I’m happy to report that, once again, my blog has resulted in real world change. At lunch today they had the dessert guard scooping real, honest to goodness ice cream out of a real, honest to goodness ice cream bucket. We’re not sure what the flavour was but the best guess was “Praline Brittle”. It was fucking delicious. A speculated this treat may be a result of the recent opening of the Pakistani border to NATO shipments. If that’s the case, I take back anything I ever said about Pakistan being a corrupt, repressive, Islamic backwater that cheats at cricket.

This ice cream definitely can’t jump.

The Monti, on the other hand, is still serving the white flavoured “ice cream”. It’s now “even whiter than my spoon and just as flavourful” according to D. A kept trying to place the flavour “It’s definitely not vanilla…it kind of tastes like cinnamon…but it has a powdery after ‘feel’. Maybe it’s almond flavour.” “It just tastes cold” interjected D. I pointed out to A that “cinnamon and almond are hardly similar flavours. You know how you can stare into a pitch black, lightless room and your eyes will start to see shapes and shit? I think you’re getting the equivalent effect…but with taste.”

Tonight’s Dinner Conversation

In the interest of furthering your educations I’m going to try and include more of our high-brow dinner conversations in my posts. Tonight, for example, provided me with my new favourite retort.

A mentioned that our county back home (J, A and I live very near each other), had put a moratorium on wind turbines. After I muttered “fucking luddites”, we all joked about the perceived, yet unsubstantiated, health threats and environmental impacts that cause these types of knee-jerk bans. J, however, brought up the issue of bats. “Bats fly over these turbines and their lungs collapse and they die. They DIE! Don’t you care about the bats”. D looked slowly up from his meal and intoned “The only way that story would make any sense at all would be if it was absolute bullshit”. Game, set, match.

Bottom Line

KAF does strange things to people…

“Is it weird in here, or is it just me?” – Steven Wright