December 16^{th, 2005}

So, tonight marks the end of my probationary period at my new job. I haven’t wanted to talk about it on the journal here, for fear that I would just be embarrassed if I wound up getting fired from it while still in the probationary month. As of today, though, I have some job security, so I figure I can talk about some of it (minus the stuff covered in my non-disclosure agreement!).

As anyone who’s been paying attention to the news at all recently knows, there’s a flying castle which is sort of parked a little ways off the coast of Vancouver, hovering a half a mile over the surface of the ocean. The guy who owns it is this Evil Wizard(tm) named Mordgrave. I capitalize this because, to be honest, I see it as mostly pretension on his part. I mean, yes, granted, he can be a dick, but that’s true of most bosses. He’s more of an aristocrat than anything else.

If there’s anything about him that I would actually call evil, it’s the fact that he keeps his fucking castle JUST over international waters, so he never has to deal with labour laws. I mean, the Walton family, who owns and operates Walmart, they’re a bunch of union busters extrordinaire, and if you’ve seen The High Cost of Low Prices, you know about the sort of bullshit they pull in order to keep people in line at work. Mordgrave, though, I sometimes wonder if his full name is Mordgrave Walton or something. He’s like them, but even worse.

Like, okay, take what happened at work last night. I’m working the graveyard shift in the dragon rookery at the base of the castle. Feeding and cleaning the dragons, mostly. It’s shitty work, but at least the pay is alright, and there’s minimal supervision. One of my co-workers is this guy named Asmir, and he’s a big fucking whiner. He’s always going on about the smell of the dragon farts. And yeah, I acknowledge that they stink, but that’s just part of the job, right? He’s been there longer than I have, though, and yet still he feels the need to make a huge stink about it every time one of the dragons farts. Like I need to have it pointed out to me, right? Like if he didn’t go on and on about it, I wouldn’t notice it, and I wouldn’t know that he feels the same fucking way about it as he felt about it the last hundred times it happened. Like I’ve got nothing better to be doing at work than listening to him complaining about dragon gas.

Now, we’ve got really specific instructions about what we’re supposed to feed these beasts. I don’t know who figures out what they need to eat each day, or how they figure out what precisely goes on the list (Asmir is convinced that the guy who does it puts things which give the dragons gas just to spite him, personally. Like the sun fucking revolves around him or something), but it’s really precise. Asmir, though, he figures he can sneak some kind of homeopathic shit into the feed that’s supposed to settle your stomach and cut your gas down. And, I shit you not, when I asked him what he thought would happen if he got caught, he just told me he would just tell the boss to go fuck himself, and seemed genuinely baffled when I suggested that this is likely a very bad idea. His lack of sense of the consequences of this sort of attitude just baffles me sometimes. He lives so far up his own ass that I really just don’t think he would recognize the light of the sun if he were ever to happen to see it.

So, he sneaks this shit into the dragons’ food, and feeds it to Bright Talon (which I will grant you probably IS the worst offender where gas is concerned). Sure enough, she ends up farting a lot less, but within a day, she gets the squirts something fierce. Not pretty. And guess who has to fucking clean it up? Yeah, that’s right : me. And Asmir thinks this is pretty fucking funny, the dick. So, our supervisor shows up for a routine check, and when she sees this shit, Asmir is all like "I don’t know. It just happened. Probably she just has a flu or something". The thing with Asmir is, not only does the fact that he lives so far up his own ass that he doesn’t understand the consequences of his own actions, he also doesn’t realize what a bad liar he is. Debbie (our supervisor), doesn’t buy this for a minute, and she tells him she’s putting him on report.

So, now Asmir’s getting all panicky, and trying to get me to lie in order to cover for him, and I’m like, "you made your bed, buddy. Why don’t you just tell Mordgrave to fuck himself"? And he’s all like "Oh, I’ve got a wife to support, oh I can’t die, oh, boo hoo". About a half an hour later, Asmir gets called up to the office, and he tries to put on a brave face, but I can tell he’s pretty freaked out, which I guess I can understand, but I still find it tough to sympathize with him, you know? He didn’t even offer to help me clean up the shit!

When he comes back out about a half an hour later, he’s got these fucking glowing chains all over him, and he’s all slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, and Debbie’s telling me that they’re, like, some kind of magic spell, and they’ll make him follow orders better, and he’ll have them on for the next couple of days, as a punishment.

Now, I know that this is supposed to be a punishment for him, but as far as I can tell, all it means is he’s some kind of meat robot as long as they’re on. I don’t even think he knows what’s going on; he’s just staring off into space and drooling while he works. Me, though, I have to put up with looking at him like this for the rest of the shift, and, as annoying as he can normally be, he’s way worse like this, because I can’t talk to him at all, and it’s like watching Terri fucking Schaivo walking around doing Asmir’s job. It feels like I’m the one being punished here, and I was the one telling him not to do it!

Now, I’m pretty sure that Chains of Unshakable Obedience are against the law in Canada, because of the labour laws here as pertain to cruel working conditions. But Mordgrave, he’s got to be able to do what Mordgrave wants, so he keeps his fucking castle just off international waters (I heard once that it’s actually like ten feet into international waters!), and just treats his workers however he wants. This is what I’m talking about with him being an Evil Wizard(tm) . It’s not the skeleton legions. It’s not the dragon army. I don’t even really care about the demonic pacts. Do what you want with your own soul, I say, and fuck the christians that are always calling that shit "sinful". I’m just saying he’s got no basic human respect for his employees.

I’m just glad I’m on my weekend now so I won’t have to be around for the next two days of Asmir’s drool-fest.