Finally, Some Recognition!

Two weeks ago, my sister, Jenny, phoned me and told me about a radio show on CBC Radio 1 that was asking for pitches for an episode of their show dealing with jobs.  Specifically, the moment that you realized you either loved or hated your job.  Since my current project was this blog and my related twitter feed (@hyperferrianism), she figured it was right up my alley.  The show is called Definitely Not The Opera, or DNTO for short, hosted by Sook-Yin Lee.  I watched a lot of Much Music in the '90s, so I'm familiar with Sook-Yin.  My sister had also been on the show a bunch of times over the years, so I listen to the show pretty much every week on my way to work.  So I wrote a pitch about the moment I realized that I hated working at the Birch Lodge and sent it off the next morning, which is when the deadline was.  They e-mailed me back the next day and said they loved my pitch, and I talked to a producer on the phone the day after that, and I was in a CBC studio in Calgary that Friday recording the story.  They also accepted Jenn's pitch, so we were both on the same episode.  That episode aired this afternoon.  My story was the lead, which was really cool.

While it's easily the most interesting event that has happened to me in my years in the hospitality industry, I haven't yet told it on this blog because I couldn't think of a way to make it funny, and humour is the main goal of this blog.  You can listen to the story in the DNTO episode, but I'm going to retell it here, too.  I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I've updated it slightly (changed the actual hotel name to Birch Lodge, updated my current age).  It's not funny, but it goes into a lot more detail of the event, plus I analyze my reaction and feelings about it.  Enjoy:


I arrived at work 15 minutes before my shift actually started, as is my habit, and found the girl working the 3-11 shift before me (Shaylene was her name) trying to solve a problem with her cash-out.  I was somewhat of an old hand at this, and I quickly helped her find it and sat down in a chair off to the side while she finished counting the float and preparing her deposit at a work desk located on the back wall behind the front desk.

Shaylene’s friend, who had been there keeping her company during a relatively slow shift, was there with us, and we all chatted amicably while Shaylene counted out the money to deposit into the safe.

The chair I was seated in was situated in a place that was hidden from the front door by the pay phone alcove, so when the door opened, the woman who came in couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see her.  She started yelling at Shaylene and her friend as she completely ignored me.  I didn’t understand what the woman said, and I initially thought that it was someone who knew the two other girls and was either fooling around with them or was pissed off by something trivial.  Shaylene’s friend—whose name I forget—had been standing in the lobby in front of the desk.  Once the new arrival started yelling, she dashed around the side of the desk and hid on the floor.  That was when I realized something was not normal, and the woman who had just arrived (Danielle) stepped further into the lobby, and I saw a pistol held in her outstretched arm pointing at Shaylene.  She held out an orange canvas lunch bag in the other hand and demanded that Shaylene fill it with cash.

There was a split second in which rage tried to drive me to action, but something else more sensible took hold instead.  All emotion accept for a sense of urgency seemed to drain out of me as I jumped to my feet.  Shaylene’s reaction to the robber’s demand was to throw the deposit money, which happened to be in her hand already, on the front desk and duck behind the counter.   Danielle could see the till drawer full of $600 in cash sitting on the work desk, so Shaylene’s hasty offering of $250 wasn’t enough to get Danielle to leave.  She seemed surprised to see me stand up.  The gun swiveled to point at me instead of at Shaylene, and I was ordered to fill the lunch bag.  I took it from her and turned to the work desk.

I quickly began emptying the cash drawer of all of the bills: hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, fives.  As soon as my back was turned to Danielle and her gun, I heard the front door open, and a man joined Danielle in yelling and cursing at me to hurry.  They crammed a lot of profanity and urgings to move faster in the five or ten seconds it took me to fill the bag.  I distinctly remember the man saying, “Do you wanna get shot, you fat fuck?”

Once I was done shoving the paper money into the sac, I grabbed a handful of toonies and dumped them in, and then started scooping up the loonies.  “That’s enough,” the impatient robbers ordered, followed by an expletive-rich demand to hand over the money.  I turned around and handed them the sac with my head bowed in a show of utter meekness.  It was as if they were wild dogs, and I was afraid that eye contact would be interpreted as a challenge, which would be met with brutal violence.  Even as they took the lunch bag out of my hand, I started to kneel down behind the desk.  “Get down on the floor!” Danielle and her male companion ordered.

“I am,” I said evenly.  They were the only two words I spoke during the whole ordeal.

“Don’t touch the phone!” they ordered as I heard them open the door.

After the robbers fled, Shaylene, her friend, and I stared at each other in wide-eyed shock.  “Did that just happen?” I asked.

I called 911, even though Shaylene was apprehensive about touching the phone after being ordered not to.  As I hung up, a motel guest came in the lobby and found the three of us kneeling on the floor behind the desk.  He was a young guy who had been flirting with Shaylene earlier, and they were supposed to go out for drinks, but Shaylene explained what had happened and cancelled the date.  The police showed up just a couple minutes after I called them, and Danielle was apprehended within 15 minutes.  The gun turned out to be fake, but we didn’t know that while it was pointed at our faces.

I always tell this story as if it’s something cool that happened to me at work once.  And it is an interesting story that filled my dull job with a few minutes of excitement.  I never really let on that the incident had a profound effect on me.

All my life, I have avoided violence.  Not violence in movies, video games, and literature.  That’s fake violence, which is fun.  I enjoy R-rated movies and M-rated video games.  It’s real violence that I find so disturbing.  In elementary school, I was terrified of bullies, even though they rarely picked on me, and even forged somewhat of a shaky friendship with me at times.  Nothing terrified me more than the possibility of being punched, especially in the face.  The combination of avoiding violence  and not being a nerd (that came later in life) made it possible to get through childhood without ever getting into a fist fight.  Once I was a teenager, it was my uncanny ability to disappear into the background that kept me flying under the radar of most bullies, and the ones who did notice me relied on psychological bullying rather than throwing punches.  As an adult, I generally don’t put myself in situations that I might have to punch my way out of, and I don’t hang around with people who will get me into that kind of trouble.

So here I am, 34 years old, and I’ve never punched a human being.  I’ve never been punched, either.  I still have the deep-seeded aversion to real life violence.  It’s not just pain-avoidance, either.  I have experienced a lot of physical pain in my life, from my son head-butting me in the teeth, to kidney stone attacks, to ingrown toenail surgery with no anesthetic, to a broken jaw.  I have developed a respectable tolerance to pain, so it’s not the potential pain from a punch to the eye could cause that makes me afraid of violence.  It’s more the idea of one person wanting to inflict pain on another person for no good reason that disturbs me.  The primal urge to damage another person, to make him bleed.

Imagine how someone so terrified of being punched would feel with a gun shoved in his face.

It was 11:00 at night.  Two people with at least one gun.  (I never did see the guy, so I don’t know if he was armed or not.  More on that later.)  My only potential allies were two skinny 19-year-old girls who were quivering on the floor.  This may sound cliché, but I could feel the gun pointing at my back as I filled the lunch bag with money and wondered if I’d ever see my newborn son again.

Shaylene took two weeks off after the robbery.  She came back for one shift, during which she jumped in fear every time the door opened.  She quit the next day.  I, on the other hand, worked my entire eight-hour shift immediately after being robbed, and was back the next day for more.

Besides my ever-present fear of violence, something else disturbs me about that night.  Who the hell was the guy who came in and supported Danielle while I emptied the till?  My theory was that they were either working together, or he was her pimp or something.  She would come in yelling and waving the gun around, get the employees to hand over the cash, and he would watch outside to make sure no one came in behind Danielle and to come in to assist if it looked like she needed it.  When they approached the Birch Lodge, they didn’t realize I was there because I was sitting out of sight.  Once I stood up to come to Shaylene’s aid, he realized that Danielle, who was no more than 100 pounds and armed with a fake gun, was up against a 250-pound man, and he came to back her up.  This theory is very probable, and I would be surprised if reality proved to vary much from it.  There’s something that has been nagging me for the past six years, though.

Does the guy even exist?

He came into the lobby while my back was turned.  When I turned back to hand Danielle the money, my eyes were cast down, and my only visual memory of him is a dark shadow on the very edge of my peripheral vision.  The only real memory I have of him is his voice.

When Danielle robbed a Mohawk gas station a few days before paying me a visit, there was no report of a male accomplice.

When Danielle was arrested, she insisted that she worked alone on both robberies.

Strangest of all, though, is that Shaylene and her friend don’t remember a guy being there at all.  They never saw him, and they say they never heard him.

Were Shaylene and her friend so panicked that they didn’t notice a second, much deeper and forceful voice threatening to shoot us?  When we were talking to the police, they recounted some of the things Danielle said, so they were coherent through the ordeal.  Why wouldn’t they have noticed a second voice?

Did I imagine the guy?  Was he some sort of hallucination?  Why would my mind deal with being robbed by creating a second robber to yell at me?  Maybe, deep down inside, I’m sexist, and can’t bare the humiliation of being robbed by a woman, so my subconscious created an imposing male to go along with the crack-whore with the gun.

In some of my more ridiculous moments, I wonder if I was hearing the devil urging Danielle on.  Either that, or a foul-mouthed angel trying to make sure I didn’t do anything foolish.  That is obviously not what happened, but there’s a small irrational part of me that clings to that.

But, as I said, I’m sure my mystery robber exists.  So he’s still out there.  And Danielle is out of prison by now.  And I still work evenings at a motel.