All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night, part 1

I know what you're expecting. You're thinking "This is going to be one of those stories about how John tried to eat enough food in one meal to survive for several days, and experienced acute and lasting discomfort as a result of his actions."

Well, you're wrong. I did quite a lot of spaghetti, but there wasn't really a critical mass of big eaters to help me push the envelope, so I didn't eat more than was prudent. In fact, I got home a few hours after the spaghetti meal and ate a snack, so clearly I wasn't too ambitious.

Instead, this post is about two things, the culture of competitive eating and why a tip based service industry is weird. However, since this post is turning out to be very long, I have decided to separate my thoughts about the culture of competitive eating into a different post. Which means, for those among us who like to be irritatingly pedantic, that this post is not actually about the culture of competitive eating.

So, let's consider a tip based service industry. I accept that there are many complaints about service in Australia. Let me say outright that I'm not someone who shares those complaints. Yes, I've been to places where it took a long time to get served. That was a bit annoying, but I accept that sometimes it's busy and the staff don't get around to you as quick as you would like. No doubt you've got some story about the time the staff took ages and your meal was so cold your tongue got frozen to your fork and when you tried to call for help the waiter-folk got angry and spilled tepid water filled with live jellyfish all over you. Guess what. I don't care. This is my story, and I'm tired of pre-empting your interruptions.

So, back to customer service. I don't like to be bugged. If I'm eating a meal and talking to people, I like to do those things. I do not want to be quizzed by the staff about whether I enjoyed the meal. If your restaurant is any good then I probably did, and the staff should probably just assume so unless told otherwise and move on. Besides, what if I didn't enjoy the meal? I'm much too Anglo to actually say so to the staff, so asking would just make me uncomfortable. I've already made a big effort by leaving my home to come to your restaurant. Please don't make it any harder by actually talking to me. I know you're trying to be friendly, but if I wanted friends I'd be nice to people. What I want is a kind of professional, distanced indifference.

Besides, if someone actually didn't like the meal, and was un-Anglo enough that they were willing to tell you so, do you think they'd wait for you to ask them? No, they'd stand up in the middle of your establishment and bellow their disappointment and anger like a wounded wilderbeest that has been hounded into shallow water by a pack of wild dogs, ready to make their final kill. Asking me if I'm having fun just seems like a way of feeling good about your work, and the last thing I want in life is for other people to feel good.

This is made even more awkward in situations like tonight, where you're the only customers in the restaurant. For a start, being the only customers when you enter a place is unsettling. One immediately wonders why no one else has come in. Is the food terrible? Are the staff unkind? Will I wake up in a bath-tub full of ice with an empty feeling in the small of my back?

A tip based service culture only makes this discomfort more intense. Tonight, we were asked by three different staff members whether the spaghetti was good. Two of those staff members appeared from the back of the restaurant just to ask us this question. There was a degree of desperation in their desire to please us. Normally, such enthusiasm would be spread across a busy room and it would just be a bit odd as described above. When it's all focused on one table, however, this becomes creepy. And speaking of creepy, one guy told us that the pasta sauce had been brewing for several days. Clearly, we didn't realise the deep significance of this fact, so he went on to explain that leftover sauce from each week was saved and used as the base for the next week's sauce. This means that the sauce has some kind of Jung-esque proto sauce deep within it that remembers the very first All U Can Eat Spaghetti Friday at Clansey's Restaurant. In any restaurant there will be a range of facts that are best kept to the staff, and at Clansey's this is certainly one of them.

Besides - no one goes to All U Can Eat Spaghetti night expecting gourmet food. They go expecting a monumental quantity of spaghetti. They want to be awed by the sheer magnitude of your pasta. They want, in short, to eat a lot. Telling them that some small part of their pasta sauce is ten years old won’t make them happy, telling them that you have 4 cubic metres of cooked spaghetti out the back that you can bring to their table on a moment’s whim will. They want portions that will make their bowels move in mere anticipation of the bombardment that awaits. They don’t want a meal, they want an epic journey through the writhing landscape of gluttony.

And on that note, Clansey’s restaurant does quite well. It’s not clear exactly how much pasta there is, but they seem happy to produce more on request. Of course, I didn’t push their limits at all, but that is an issue for another post.

Zombie Hostel

Zombies are very fashionable at the moment. There’s a popular new TV show here involving zombies and a host of computer games, parades and all kinds of other undead stuff. In keeping with this theme, Rossland has a zombie hostel. Not in the sense that it is a hostel for zombies, because the undead do not shower, sleep, or use communal cooking facilities. Instead this hostel is what a hostel would be if it was infected with zombie-ness. “But that’s absurd”, you’re no doubt saying, “How can a hostel be like a zombie?”

Let’s start with:

1) Disaggregated decision making

Zombies are characterised by a breakdown of the usual decision making processes. Instead of the brain acting as a centre of thought and decision making, zombies’ body parts are animated and governed locally. Each limb and organ within a zombie makes its own decisions and regulates its own behaviour. The actions of the organism as a whole are determined by broad, common desires that are shared between the decision making loci within each body part. This explains both a zombie’s inability to formulate and act upon complex intentions and their durability. Since a zombie’s arm is self-regulating, it will continue to hunt for fresh brains even after it has been severed from the rest of the organism. Zombies act the way they do because each of their constituent parts wants to eat brains, shamble around and moan.

This disaggregated decision making structure also applies to the hostel in Rossland. This hostel is unique in all the businesses I have ever seen in that it seems to have no centralised decision-making system or any way of assigning responsibility or tasks to its staff members. In most business there is a boss, an owner, a manager, or someone who basically decides what’s going to be done. Here, no one decides what will be done. Instead, there are four people loosely affiliated with the hostel, none of whom seem to take any kind of meaningful responsibility for the operation of the place. Somehow the actions of these people magically coincide to ensure that when things do inevitably catch fire (and a few small things have caught fire while I’ve been here) nothing of importance burns down.

For reasons I don’t properly understand the people who would normally assume responsibility and command in this situation don’t do so. And the people who are left over, to whom decision-making power might conceivably fall, are not really empowered to fill this void. I am one of the people who might possibly be expected to take up such a managing role but I don’t actually get paid to work here and I certainly have no idea how the business normally operates. It thus seems slightly unreasonable for me to, say, decide to spend the owners money replacing the chairs with ones that are bit less fall-overy.

The net result of this is that the hostel stumbles ever onward, maintaining the basic functions required to keep operating without ever performing any of its tasks well. Each process that the hostel relies on has been put together by a number of different people over the last twelve months without any of those people every communicating their thoughts and intentions to the other “staff”.

For example: If you go to clean the bathrooms you’ll find that someone bought a massive tub of toxic cleaning goo a year ago. Someone else found this tub some time later, but couldn’t find any sponges, so they used an old tea-towel to apply said cleaning agent. Realising that the next person would also have no sponges, they kindly left the tea-towel in the tub of toxic goo. When you finally unearth the tub some months later, the tea-towel has partly dissolved into the goo, leaving a kind of crusty discoloured residue. This raises concerns about the safety of the goo, and you buy a box of latex gloves – bequeathing this to the next person who comes to clean the bathrooms. Eventually, the goo will run out before the gloves do, and someone will be left trying to rub the filth off the sides of the showers with nothing but a pair of latex gloves. At this stage, the toilets will go uncleaned indefinitely.

I should say that it’s great that zombies lack the capacity to plan and actualise complex tasks. Otherwise they could ride bicycles, and that would be bad. However, if this hostel could plan and actualise complex tasks, I might not have had to install 20 light bulbs when I first started working here. And my room might have had a door handle. And those guests who turned up the other day might not have left with a grumpy look after their first night when they’d booked to stay longer. Who can say?

This common organisational trait also explains another similarity between this hostel and a zombie:

2) A dishevelled appearance

Zombies need to look shabby. The whole point of being undead is that you get to let yourself go a little. You can bleed and rot and have bits falling off and no one will ask you dress more appropriately for work tomorrow. Zombies can handle the small, day to day tasks of shambling around, eating brains and wearing enough clothes to cover their naughty bits (consider: you never see zombie naughty bits – and if you’re about to send me some website that proves me wrong I’d rather you didn’t), but if one of their limbs falls off they don’t really have the capacity to stop shambling and sort that out.

In a similar fashion, this hostel is quite run down in many ways. Brad and I (the two grunts who stay here for free in exchange for a few hours work a day) can keep the usual tasks of washing sheets and cleaning the kitchen ticking over. We cannot, however, fix the window in my room that is supposed to be double glazed but instead manages to be single glazed in a way that allows a continuous stream of cold air to blow in from outside. Nor can we fix the heaters that don’t work in some guest rooms. Nor, it seems, can we authorise the annual audit of our fire safety system, which worries me a little.

These cosmetic challenges would normally hinder a hostel. Potential guests might decide to stay elsewhere, robbing us of valuable funds. Fortunately, the third zombie feature of this business steps in to save the day, because this hostel...

3) Does not require normal sustenance

Zombies do not seem to require food. Yes, they certainly seem to like to eat brains, but it doesn’t look like they suffer too much if there aren’t any brains going around. Similarly, this hostel manages to survive with no guests. I’d say we have a paying guest here (and I literally mean a single paying guest) maybe 50% of nights. We’d be pretty damn fortunate to have two guests at once. Three people? All paying? At once? Certainly not on my watch. That means this whole building generates a whopping $100-ish of revenue a week. If that’s not an iron clad get-quick-scheme then I don’t know what is.

Of course, the most important test of the zombie-ness of this hostel would be to see if it would devour the brains of any other hostels in town. However, there ARE no other hostels in town. Coincidence? I think not.

Lost and Found

One of the neat things about the small towns I'm shuffling around in is their online notice boards. Revelstoke has "The Stoke List" which has a pretty simple (and slightly frustrating) layout, but it's absolutely packed with people trying to buy and sell stuff or annoy each other. In Rossland, they have the "Bhubble List" which is much niftier in terms of design and function but doesn't see as much action. I guess Rossland is a fair bit smaller than Revy, so that makes sense.

I've always felt like getting involved with these lists will help me assimilate into the local community, but I've never had anything good to say. I should point out that "Wanted: Room to rent for winter" screams "I'm a visiting tourist and I've come to ruin your pleasant little town." so that doesn't count as something good to say.

Fortunately, as part of some work that I'm doing at the hostel in Rossland in exchange for free accommodation, I've finally found something worth posting. You see, one of the rooms at the hostel is notorious for having local youths sneak in through the window and sleep the night without paying. It's very very quiet here outside of the ski season and it's no suprise that people get away with this pretty regularly. It turns out that I've been treated to an extra special variant of this ruse, because recently it appears that not one but TWO local youths snuck through the window, and they did more in the bed than just sleep. My suspicions were first aroused that some bedroom gymnastics had occurred when, after washing the sheets from that room (I'm currently washing and remaking all the beds here, since I'm the only guest) a pair of impractical women's underpants fell from the newly cleaned laundry. A more detailed examination of the room provided other fairly convincing clues to confirm my suspicions.

All this presented me with an excellent opportunity. Someone had lost something (their undies) and I could use the Bhubble list to reunite them with their forgotten G-string. And, in so doing, I could helpfully point out that usually people who stay overnight at hostels are encouraged to pay for that priveledge. Yes, I can assure you that the light of righteousness shone from my eyes and the fire of justice burned in my laptop as I prepared to enter into Rossland's finest online forum.

Behold! I have posted on the Bhubble List!

As an aside, it baffles me that women bother to wear underwear like this. It clearly lacks the structural integrity to perform any kind of standard underwear functions. It also looks pretty damn uncomfortable (and before you ask, I haven't tried them on and won't because they're way too small). As mentioned in my lost and found notice, I suspect that the same function could be served by simply drawing one blue triange below your belly-button and another just above your bum crack.

As a further aside, this is the second pair of leopard print undies that have randomly turned up on my travels (look carefully at the photo - there's a section of leopard print across the top at the front). Is this a sign?

Cultural Differences: Part 1, Parties

Last Saturday I attended a Halloween party in Rossland. This was a fine opportunity to observe the locals in a time-honoured native ritual. I was a bit caught out because Halloween was actually on Monday, and I thought I had all of Sunday to prepare my costume (I was planning to go as a lounge chair). But people here are pragmatic about timing and the party ended up being on Saturday night. I cobbled together a costume out of things that were lying around the hostel, including a hat made from a pizza box and a T-shirt, but I felt a bit outclassed by the other costumes in the room.

1. When it comes to costumes, people here go all-out. Just about everyone dresses up: There were maybe ten people in the pub throughout the whole night who weren't dressed up (out of well over a hundred), and I suspect that they didn't realise the party was on until they arrived. But not only do people dress up, they also put heaps of effort into their costumes. This is not some lame-arsed "I'm just wearing what I normally wear, WITH THIS CRAZY HAT" costume event. One guy came dressed as a LEGO man, complete with gigantic yellow papier-mache head and hands. There were two girls dressed as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum complete with roly-poly stomachs (and watching them dance in those costumes was awesome). There was a lady dressed as a jellyfish. It was nuts.
2. Nobody cross dresses. The men all dressed as man things, and the women all dressed as woman things (except Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum). If you had a costume party in Australia, you could guarantee that there would be a bunch of guys in drag. In fact I don't think I've been to a costume party at a pub or nightclub in Australia and not been in drag. I was certainly the only guy at this party wearing a dress (although I wasn't really in drag - it was part of my "robes").
3. People here stick with their costumes. It was pretty warm in the pub, and the dancefloor was packed, but the dude who was wrapped up in a blue foam mat didn't abandon his costume for a minute. In Australia, if people get into the whole costumes thing they usually turn up dressed to kill, but as the night goes on they typically revert to more normal clothing. Or they end up wearing bits and pieces of everyone elses costumes, which leads me to...
4. Everyone here wears their own clothes all the time. Maybe this is just a feature of who I end up with at parties, but in Aus there's always at least a couple of items of clothing doing the rounds among the crowd. Whether it's a particularly cool hat, or a wig, or a pair of hotpants, there's usually something being passed from person to person that you don't need a urine test to identify. Here, everyone enters, parties and leaves dressed the same way.
   
5. Over here, the character from the popular kids-book series "Where's Wally?" is called "Waldo". Some cultural barriers are just too big to comprehend.
   

Adventures in dubious automobile purchasing

As the days roll by here in Canada and I wait for snow to fall, job applications to be rejected and potential landlords to decide they don't want me to move in, I'm developing a kind of cabin fever. Not only am I stuck in limbo, waiting to see if I'll get a great job offer that directs me to one place or another, but the big theme that is emerging during my time here is that no one will return my calls, emails, or friendly anonymous tapping on their windows while they're cooped up inside on a dark stormy night. I've probably had a one in ten success rate with phone calls. For every ten calls I make, I might get to talk to a real human being maybe once. And it's more than likely that that person is calling me back after I've left a message on their answering machine. It got so bad at one stage that I actually had to confirm that I was giving out the right phone number, which I was.

Not bothering to call back is understandable when I've been calling people to harass them about a job they don't have or don't want to give me, but it's completely baffling when you're calling people to say "You know that thing you want to get rid of for money? I'd like to give you money for it."

So, in a desperate attempt to prove that I am in fact a real person and not just some kind of philosphically problematic figment of my own imagination, I decided to buy a car. Buying a car would not only force other people to acknowledge my existence, it would also allow me to travel in the rain (since hitching in the rain is pretty unreliable), and move all my crap around (I've previously stashed a bunch of ski gear in Revelstoke, since hitching with skis is frowned upon). In the spirit of my last post, I should also admit that buying a car would allow me to leave Revelstoke, because it looked like it would never stop raining, and that it would (depending on the car) make me feel like a big man.

At first, the buying a car project went well. Stephanie, the owner of the crazy old house where I was housesitting/helping out knew someone who was selling a car etc. etc. It turned out they were selling a cheap van which was easily impractical enough to make me feel like a big man, and although the body of the vehicle was pretty rough it seemed to run OK. So, a positive start. Then I tried finding winter tyres (over here people switch to different tyres to drive on the snow and ice). There were a cheap set on the online classifieds, but of course the seller didn't return any calls. In the end I bought a set from a mechanic, and the whole process (from calling the first tyre guy to actually driving away with the van) took FOUR DAYS. It took Jesus less time to rise from the dead, and he didn't have one of those pneumatic tyre wrenches.

This van was significantly cheaper than any other car I've bought. Perhaps one good reason for that is that when you drive the car up a steep hill (like the one that gets you to the town of Rossland) white smoke or steam pours out of the bonnet. So, instead of using my awesome van to get to job interviews, it's at a mechanic's getting inspected. However, since buying the van I've dramatically improved my hit rate on phone calls - I'm two from two! If this thing never runs again and just serves as some kind of talisman to prove that I'm not the only sentient being left in the world with a telephone, it will be money well spent.