Direct Support Work

Hey everyone what's up?!

So you know how I've had to branch away from my field recently in favour of industrial work?

Well, when I contacted the coordinator who linked me with the two contracts that I would have to cancel, she responded with "What can I say to change your mind?"

I told her that there were lots of things she could say to change my mind. I said that I was refusing evening and weekend work so that I could maintain my original three contracts with the agency, and I said I wasn't accepting ongoing work because I had to slot away the "Train the Trainer" training in late February. I said that I would rather survive within my field than flourish outside of it, that my loyalty was 100% with the company, but that to continue working with them, I needed to survive, and that I wasn't surviving.

So they offered me an additional 20 hours and an increase in pay.

I didn't know I was valuable enough to play hard ball.

So I'm giving it another go as a full-time Direct Support Worker.

Court

So we got our gas heater working again. I got the gas heater guy to drop by again, and a nightmare scenario occurred. After several days of the gas heater not working, this guy stops by and we step into the living room. On entry, I just think "Whoo, this room is toasty".

The guy walks up to the heater and it is radiating heat for the first time since he left. He's like "It's working". I'm like "Seriously man, it was working after you fixed it, but the next morning it wasn't, and it hasn't until you just showed up just now". He takes me seriously and takes it apart. He says the controller is bad, which was a knob on the top of the heater. He installs a thermostat which shows the temperature of the heat omitted and has buttons to increase or decrease heat output. Much better than the knob that you would have to crank to change the heat to a mysterious universal temperature, which would turn off randomly.

So our main heat source is better than it ever was before. Gas heater guy also said he would propose changing the electric heaters to gas, since it's more cost efficient.

Unfortunately, a hand rail popped out of place recently and the lights in the kitchen stopped working and it's not the bulbs.

Guess where I was today? If you guessed "In court", congratulations!

My landlord invited me to court awhile back. He claimed I had some money due and I disagreed. Since then we came to an agreement and he said it would be a waste of both our our time and that he'd cancel the meeting, but I checked a few days ago and the hearing was active. I messaged him and he was like "Oops, see you on Thursday".

So I felt I had to show up to the hearing, even though I knew I was on the up-and-up, because if I didn't show, I was worried he could be like "Yo, this guy's a jerk" and get me kicked out because I wasn't around to give a sound counter-argument.

So he has a lawyer in in and represent for him. I've done a lot or preparation. I've got bank statements for the entire duration of my living in the unit with printout images of every paid rent cheque. I've got copies of confirmation of details on my gas and hydro ownership. I've got my notice of rent increase and everything to do with the trial.

I'm confident, but I choose to take free legal advice when they offer, and when they ask, I choose to take up their offer of having a mediator, doing things in front of a judge and crowd.

During the cool-off period, I approach the lawyer representing my landlord. He does some math and says I owe $81.

I'm like, "That's not much" and he's like "I know".

Who goes to court and tries to evict someone on $81?

So he reads me the details and I'm like "That's incorrect. I moved in two months after that and my rent was a different amount. It changed just last month".

So the charges against me went from $81, to $44, to $25, to nothing.

The lawyer is flipping. "F*** my life. He is trying to evict on pennies. I've got better things to do than charge on $50 F***ing dollars. I don't give a sh**, I really don't give a sh**"

So in the end I didn't owe anything. Sucks because I had a full work day I had to cancel, which would have earned more than $81, so it's like he prevented me from having that money regardless.

Heaters

So three of the six heaters in my unit aren't working. I mentioned in my previous post that the heater in my room wasn't working, but it turns out the heater in my roommates room isn't working, and the main heater in the living room is also not working. The currently operational heaters are the bathroom heater, the front hallway heater, and a secondary heater in the living room.

We had someone drop in, but when he saw my roommate's heater, he said it was electric, and he only does gas heaters. I showed him the main living room heater, which apparently is gas, and he went to work. He managed to make it start up, and after he left, I noticed that the switch on our control panel had one turned off. So I flipped the switch, and me and my roommates heaters started working again.

All six heaters were working. What a wonderful world.

But then I noticed that the control panel switch for me and my roommate's heaters switched off. Tried again and it did so again. The problem wasn't the heaters, it was the control switch. So I put a nail in the wall next to the control panel, and I wrapped a rubber band around it and the switch to force the switch in place (you may remember I used a similar technique to make my cell phone charge when it was having charge port troubles).

Unfortunately, even though the switch remained in place, the heaters would stop working after about fifteen minutes. To get them started again, you had to flip the switch off, then on again. Now obviously, it's pretty well impossible to do that when you're asleep.

Overnight, the gas heater stopped working again. So we were back to our original dilemma.

I decided to buy an electric heater for my room. I don't know anything about the heater scene, I see that prices range from about $30 to $100 and are indicated as to what size room they are most suited for. I got the $70 Mainstay Infrared Tower for medium-large rooms. Turned it on and it created this abysmal groaning sound. I can handle humming, buzzing, clicking, gurgling, and whirring, but this is a terrible grinding noise. So awful, I wonder which is worse, the cold or the noise. When applying for temp work, I was asked to indicate which environments were preferable compared to others. I answered that a cold environment was preferable to a noisy one.

I don't know if this is standard, but I know none of my other heaters groaned up this racket. So I get another one, same day. The Sunbeam 17 Inch Ceramic Tower. This baby purrs like a kitten, it has six settings instead of two, and it has an option to use a built-in thermometer to turn on and off to maintain your desired temperature. It's also more compact, and claims to be 10% more efficient with electricity usage than regular electric heaters. So if any of my readers are looking into getting a heater, Sunbeam smashes Mainstay in this respect.

Let me tell you about the work I've done over the past week.

I've acted as a warehouse worker, helping load stuff onto trucks because the warehouse we were in was going to be rented to someone else in a few days. After we got everything out of there, I was tasked by the same company to organize things and disassemble stuff so that they may be more easily transported out of a new warehouse, which now belonged to them but was full of the previous owners things.

I'm loving the Kitchener industrial scene so far. I think I already mentioned that my previous gig at the lubricant packaging factory was manned by like, two guys and went at an extremely relaxed pace. This gig was also two people, and we were only moving things when the truck appeared, and there was only one truck, so when he was delivering, we were left to our own devices.

I mean, this job has me lugging heavy objects on the regular, but realtalk, I would rather have a job that required me to be strong than required me to be fast.

Some of the guys from the warehouse I just unpacked were telling stories of what their work was like before relocating. They were talking about how they had no work, so they hooked up a TV, built a bed, and watched nine seasons of Supernatural over time.

They said they would send emails to their superiors saying "We're watching TV and taking naps" and the response was that they needed them to be available in case they needed something.

They are next to a high-end grocery and were talking about how they would go to their stirfry station every lunch. They pay very competitively. They pay me more than any other temp job has offered.

It sucks because this warehouse was in my neighbourhood. If I had stepped onto the scene a bit earlier, it could be me watching TV on my work bed, with my steel-toed shoes, eating stir-fry and making bank all the same.

Christmas Flood

So I managed to go home for Christmas. Since I work with individuals, it's not easy to take a vacation, as I have to cancel on seven people instead of one. However, all my Direct Support Contracts canceled on me, and the assignment from my temp agency started a week later, so I wound up with extra time.

I show up in Guelph Thursday evening. Wake up Friday morning, get up to go to the bathroom and step into standing water, which is covering the kitchen floor. It doesn't take long before me, my mother and brother are filling buckets of water and tossing them out. But the water is flowing in almost as fast as we're getting rid of it.

We contact our Landlord, and he calls a plumber and another guy. The three of them show up, there's a theory that it's a burst pipe because of all the freezing and thawing that's been happening due to fluctuating temperatures, but the plumber rules it out, as his evaluation concludes the plumbing in the house is fine.

Next theory is that it's a crack in the foundation of the house, and the water coming in is melt, although this would require a pretty large and pretty recent crack. They shovel away all the snow and ice from around the house and put up the metal plates against the roof to funnel away falling water. Doesn't slow the river any.

We find where the water's getting in. It's coming in through a wall on one side of the kitchen. It looks like the interior of the house is sweating. The landlord leaves his wet vac for us and his push broom and says he'll be back the next day. Gotta give him credit, the next day is Christmas Eve.

Since there is a drain in the laundry room, so long as the water was kept somewhat shallow, we were able to use the broom to sweep water into the drain as it pooled into the centre of the kitchen. We put up wads of towel to stop it from being swept into my brother's room during this process. Regardless, water is beginning to seep through the foundation inside both my mother and my brother's rooms. The only fully dry room is the living room.

Landlord gives us a $100 prepaid Visa and an Italian Christmas cake. He's really apologetic and I get why, but he's hustling and nobody gets what's happening so I really can't cast blame.

We cut the water in the house and nothing happens. We get a representative of the city to cut off the city water and that also doesn't help.

So me, my mother, and my brother exchanged stations, making sure the river was manned consistently, bailing water out of the apartment for a solid five days.

Know what it was? There's an abandoned house next door and uphill from us. A pipe burst, no one was there to report it, and before anyone thought to check, it was waist-high in water. Water from that house flowed underground and seeped into our apartment. Explains how our plumbing and foundation were unchanged, and why cutting the water in our house didn't work.

So we finally get that under control. Day that I'm about to return to Kitchener, I get a call from my roommate. He's says "Our unit is flooded."

I don't think my good luck charm is working.

So I get back, and yeah, flowing water, and standing water about as bad as the Guelph situation. It doesn't persist as long, though. It's coming from beneath the sink, so I turn the knob beneath the sink and that cuts the water. Our landlord gets a plumber night-of, he does some work and all is good. But it is the story of how I came from one flood to another, and how I was up until 3 AM the night I got back, vacuuming up water and mopping when I had work the following morning.

Before this Christmas, I'd never used a wet vac. Now I feel like an old hand at it.

Just had New Years. This isn't just the beginning of a new year for me, it's also my first year anniversary living in this unit. I remember last New Year, me and my roommates didn't realize that our heat was working (It was, we just didn't turn it on) so we spent a night without heat. This year, I found out the heater in my room is broken. So I guess like, not having heat in the New Year is like a tradition now.

Last year's New Year Resolutions were to get my G2, progress my romantic life in some way, and to find full-time employment in my field. I didn't get my G2. I did some Driver's Training, but I did half of the sessions on one end of the Summer Program, then found I had no time during the summer because I had two jobs and was working seven days a week, and then I did the other half of the sessions on the other side of Summer Program, which was mostly refresher. Wound up not touching some stuff and didn't wind up taking the test.

Closest I came to progressing my romantic life, I landed a date but she wound up standing me up. Wouldn't respond to any of my messages after that.

And as for employment, I had a few good job leads but nothing came of them. I managed to grow my Direct Support Contracts from three to seven, but ultimately found I couldn't survive on Direct Support alone and went back to being a factory temp, eliminating all my new contracts except the three I started with.

I did score that Safe Management Instructor gig, which I'll be training for late February. Unfortunately, I can't take on ongoing industrial contracts until I finish this training.

So 2016 was a big ol' washup and I'm restating my resolutions this year.

Today I was supposed to have a week-long assignment starting 7 AM, but when I showed up, they were like "The guy you're supposed to report to isn't here until 7:30, please wait in the lunchroom" So I waited until 7:30 and they were like "He won't be here until 8:00, please wait in the lunchroom." At 8:00 the guy I reported to showed up, and he was like "Turns out the guys in the warehouse you were supposed to be in are on vacation, please come back tomorrow".

Bah.