Month: August 2023

In high school my best friend and I befriended a girl who had a mother from hell.

This woman constantly berated this girl for being a girl. Everything about being a girl was a travesty. She was lucky that her mother allowed her to use sanitary pads – only because she didn’t have time to wash rags. Forget tampons!

Imagine being a young woman, a teenager, and not allowed to try makeup, go to dances, participate in sports, and worst of all, not be allowed to shave your legs or armpits.

It was the hairy armpits and legs that caused her the most anguish. Mother told her that if she shaved it off the hair would grow back in like trees and be blacker than coal. Her hair already was thick like a forest and midnight black. It was not going to be worse.

She was so terrified of her mother that we could not persuade her to at least shave. She dared not wear shorts or a swimming suit and donned heavy nylons to cover up the lengthy black hair, practically dying in the summertime from heat stroke.

One day, this beautiful girl shaved her legs herself. We had nothing to do with it. We weren’t there when the deed was done, but we were proud of her!

Her mother screamed at us and banned us from ever seeing this girl again.

What is the matter with people? No, don’t answer that. I already know.

Okay this is the last of my scavenger day rants.

When I was working in retail in a mall, a photography shop there had a contest on to win a free photo portrait. There were no stipulations. I entered and I won.

Everything was great. They treated me like royalty and took a beautiful posed picture of me.

Things fell apart when I went to pick up my photo.

They tried to pressure me to buy multi-packages of my photo for over a hundred dollars, and were angry with me because I refused. I earned minimum wage at my job, a hundred bucks was at least two plus days of work. And what the heck use would I have for a thousand pictures of myself of various sizes?

They practically threw my photo at me and kicked me out of their store.

Naturally, I told people to not go there. They did a great job of my picture, I still have it, but they blew future sales.

Don’t have contests and giveaways and coupons and the like if you’re going to be a bitch about honouring them.

One more tale from my scavenger days.

The local pool hall offered an evening of pool for $20. My boyfriend and I, ever on the lookout for cheap entertainment went in.

Now neither one of us drinks, and even if we did, we could never afford it.

We stayed several hours and had a great time.

We went to the cash to pay and were informed it would be $52 because we did not order any food or drink.

Nowhere did it stipulate that we had to do that as my boyfriend pointed out to the owner. My heart was beating hard. We did not have $52 between us.

He yelled at us and said we should have the decency to buy food and drinks and not just play pool. That his business could not survive on people like us who bilked the system.

We paid the bill, just. I had maybe $2 left in my account afterwards.

Another place we never went back to. He went bankrupt a month later. Boo f’in hoo to him.

I do understand how business works, but false advertising is not the way to stay in business. You have to expect that you are going to attract people who have little to none disposable income and be upfront with them.

And poor people deserve to have some fun too. We were not taking advantage of you. You offered it and we came.

Oh here I go again! A rant about public transportation. It is such a vast subject, with so much to complain about, it is hard to pick just one area.

Today I rant about policing the pay.

First they decided to let seniors ride free on Wednesdays, which is a step in the right direction, but meaningless to us who take the bus every day and use a bus pass.

Now they decide to allow children 12 and under to ride free.

Just how the heck are you going to police that? It’s a bit easier with seniors, we pretty much all have grey hair and glasses. But how do you determine a twelve year old from a thirteen year old, perhaps even a fifteen year old?

And what is the point?

Transpo whines about low ridership. Well now there is an issue. Try providing a service where buses actually come when the schedule says for starters. Sometimes it takes me HOURS to travel a couple of kilometers, having to take two or more buses and do a lot of walking in between.

And how does providing free ridership increase your revenues?

DUH.

We have such a mess with our NO SHOW transpo, that I say; Just make the f’in thing free for everyone and get your revenue to pay your $100K a year salaries from somewhere else.

Be creative and provide a worthwhile service.