Working at the motel blues....

There is an interesting article in the Globe today about the closing of the Hillcrest motel, one of the last three motels which were still running on the old motel strip around Humber Bay. This article brought back some memories I haven't thought about in some time.

When I was in highschool and when I started university, I worked summers at one of those motels, The Universal. It was the last motel west on the strip. Directly to the west of it was John Ducks Tavern, which like the Universal, is long gone.

In the early 80s, the motel I worked at was well kept, but still old. Out front, there were two fiberglass horses, as I recall. Inside the office, there was a fantastic old sofa, that was plastic encased gold glitter. Today, we would call it vintage. There was also an old-school switchboard system. All the rooms had phones, but to phone out, the guests has to call the office and give the person at the desk the number. The desk clerk would then open a line by plugging in two cables and "dial" the number. Even in the early 80s, this was a magnificent relic of days past.

My job became "afternoon guy". I worked something like 4:00 to midnight. Once the owners of the place and the maids had all gone home, I was it, and my job was to do everything. The goal was to try to rent all the rooms every night, but not to rent rooms to anyone who was going to trash the place. This wasn't easy. The first rule was not to rent to anyone who didn't come in a car, and to avoid local people. The guests we wanted were people visiting town. They were the safest.

A lot of our customers were travelers from the United States, looking for a reasonable place to crash. Although even then the place seemed to me like it had just emerged from another time, we filled more times than we didn't.

I had an unspoken deal with a local pizza joint. I always recommended this place to anyone who asked. They were happy to drop off a free one for me from time-to-time. It was a good deal all around, and their pizza was excellent.

One of my strongest memories from that time, was going out behind the motel to clean the pool, and seeing dozens of garter snakes in the grass by the lake. I have never before or since seen that many snakes in one place at one time. It was kind of creepy. I have no idea what was going on. Maybe it was a snake convention. A week later, I saw none.

Even when I was there, the developers had started buying up the old motels for condos. The strip later became pretty seedy. I recall driving along there just a few years after I worked there and seeing hookers plying their trade along Lakeshore. There was little of that going on when I worked down there. The owners of the motels were trying to keep them up as well as they could. Today, there are some newish condos built where motels once were. There are walking and bicycle trails out on what I think was lake back when I worked down there. The trails are nice to bicycle along now, but the area feels very artificial to me.

The strip of Lakeshore that hosted the motels was and is a strange bit of Toronto, because it is separated from the city by the Gardiner Expressway / Queen Elizabeth Way combination. South of the Expressway, there is only a narrow strip of land and then Lake Ontario. Just up the street from the Universal, you could walk through a tunnel and access the street car at Humber Loop, really the only transit link to the whole motel stretch. To the west, past the Palace Pier condo complex, is the Humber River, and west from there, the road spills onto what I guess is the main stretch of Lakeshore Blvd. To the east is Mimico and Longbranch (I never quite understood how those boundaries worked and which was which), and some very interesting neighbourhoods.

The worst job I ever had....

was in a waterbed factory. My job was to do the breakout cutting. That meant that every day, I would be given a cutting list which I would have to extract from the 3rd grade ponderosa pine they had shipped up from Mount St Helens and Susanville, using a nasty chop saw whose blade swooshed up from below to make the cut when you depressed the foot pedal. At the same time, the guard would clank down so you didn't do damage to yourself. While I was there, I had to drive a guy to hospital who had nailed two fingers together with a pneumatic nail-gun. Not long after, a guy was running a table saw with a dado blade-set to cut a slot, and ground all the fingers off one hand. The two guys who did the lacquering in the spray booths worked without a mask. They also happened to be dope dealers (they called their product da best sticky-bud on da island). I don't know why they bothered getting stoned, since they were wrecked up on lacquer fumes all day long anyway. There was a former biker working there, with the full garb, including hand-done LOVE/HATE tattoos on his fingers, like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. He would be a shaking mess in the morning, but at lunch, he would go over to the strip bar and have 8 or 9 beers, which would settle him right down for the afternoon. Once day he went home and his girlfriend was waiting with a cast iron pan, which she clobbered him with, before taking off to Ottawa. Wanting her back, this character rented a car and sped to Ottawa, but was involved with a bad collision on the way, spending months in the hospital. When he emerged months later, he wanted his job back, but his hands were shaking too much to operate a saw.

Jobs

There was an interesting article on the front page of the Toronto Star last Saturday about employee complaints against Susur Lee. Now Mr. Lee runs a swanky restaurant. In fact he is often spoken about as one of the 10 best chefs in the WORLD.
"Some former employees complain that his restaurants cross the line, that Lee has created a real-life Hell's Kitchen where verbal abuse is rampant and several pay grievances have been filed". and "A Facebook group, called "I Worked @ Susur Lee's and Survived!" has 22 members. The group's description reads: "For all of us ... who got yelled @ ... more than a dozen times a night ... or who laughed b/c a revolving door should have been put in for everyone that quit or couldn't cut it."

It seems not all is well in paradise. Mr. Lee acknowledges that he is demanding, but afterall, he is running a very high-end joint. Who is right? I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this story in the coming days.

What's the worst job you ever had? I'm very fortunate these days - I have a good job, and I like the work and the people. The worst job I ever had was right after university. I worked for a while doing break-out cutting in a woodshop that made bad waterbeds. Details to follow, tonight.....