Readers write

Regular blog reader Asher writes: "Can you do a post about the different types of lifties (i.e. the local pot smokers, Aussies who make the most of their accents, South Americans etc.)".

Thanks for writing in, Asher. It turns out that this is an unusually interesting question here in Rossland, because the standard stereotypes don't really apply. Red Mountain is unique among the skifields of British Columbia in that the entire workforce is still unionised. Everyone who works here is governed by a collective agreement between the hill and the United Steelworkers of America, who might do a fine job of representing steelworkers, but actually blow chunks as far as being a union for a ski hill is concerned.

All of my housemates are ski instructors, and recent upheavals in the ski school universe have meant that I, as the only member of the household to speak English as a first language, have actually read the collective agreement for the hill. Basically, in enshrines the right of management to do whatever they want to their employees, provides a few guarantees to employees that strike a careful balance between being pretty unhelpful to staff and making the ski hill costly and infuriating for management to run, and ensures that the union has its finger firmly embedded in the Red Mountain pie.

Anyway, the central concept that is enshrined in this pretty hopeless document is the idea of seniority. The ski hill is obliged to provide job security, promotion opportunities, shifts and pay increases based on how many hours each staff member has worked at the hill in previous seasons. Those seasons have to be consecutive - if you leave town for a winter or get a job poking racoons in the eye or something you drop to the bottom of the seniority ladder and have to work your way back up.

This system has some unusual results on the makeup of the workforce. There are a bunch of locals who have been working as lifties for years, and the hours they have built up over those years make them high on the seniority list. That means they get guaranteed job offers each season, lots of shifts, and the highest level of the laughable pay scales that people get for crappy jobs out here. Consequently, a surprising number of the lifties here are old guys who have lived in Rossland and swung chairs since the dawn of time. The vast bulk of the remaining lift hosts are young local lads and lasses who have either grown up in Rossland or moved here a few years ago. They work as lifties each season and in the summers they hibernate in cocoons woven from their own facial hair. As a lifty, you are strongly encouraged to snowboard. I don't think skiing is explicitly banned, but it would certainly be frowned upon by the senior staff.

Of course, most of these local lifties do smoke pot, but that hardly makes them "local pot smokers" as set out in the categories Asher suggests. Saying "local pot smokers" implies that the locals who smoke pot end up as lifties. In Rossland, the locals who smoke pot are pretty much all of the locals, so it's not really an informative category to use when describing people from here.

To my knowledge, there are two Aussies working here as lifties - one of them has been here for so long that his accent has eroded to some kind of unwanted international linguistic bastard-child, and the other has already used his accent to maximum effect.

I haven't met any South Americans anywhere in Rossland. The closest thing we have is Quebexicans. I would say that they're like a French analogy of regular Mexicans, but there are some people in Rossland who actually read this blog now, and I don't want to be beaten up, so I won't say that at all.

The system of seniority does have some practical applications in town aside from simply making it more difficult to run a successful skifield. I am currently campaigning for a system of seniority to apply to the single men of Rossland, as a way of dealing with the oversupply of single men with respect to single women in town. Under my proposal, men would be ranked according to how long they had been in Rossland and single . Spending more than a few days out of town in an area with lots of single women would reset your "lonesomeness timer", so to speak. Single women in Rossland would then be obliged to introduce themselves to the single men in town in order of seniority. If Ms. Single didn't find Mr. Single #1 to her liking, she would proceed to Mr. Single #2 and so on until the stock of single men was exhausted. This fair and equitable system would assist the lonely hearts in town and possibly also breach a number of Canadian laws and social conventions.