Wednesday, April 11, 2012

No clean clothes, no chance

WelHappy Dixonl... I've been out of clean clothes for about a week now. Last time did it at the laundromat, I spent work$30. And my laundromat is cheap.

So this morning, I have to put on 100% dirty, stinking moldy clothes.

I'm also gonna be totally starving in like an hour or something. And then I have a full work day, for which I may never get paid.

So! I can go to the Caribbean catholic church, spend two hours and get a ton of food, or I could go to the meeting place and st Felix and get my laundry done and a breakfast, and then I'd have to grab lunch and dinner somewhere... right at crunch time at work... so, not an easy decision. And not a great way to start a work day.

I wish there were more laundry services. CONC makes you schedule your laundry use. Hey, that'd work well if I weren't mentally ill!

Sketch Studios used to have laundry, but the one of the machines broke and that was the end of that.

Oh yeah. Thanks, by the way, for the shitty, hungry Easter. Thanks for making it so you can't call #311/#211 from a pay phone anymore. Quarter or no quarter. Nice. No point in making those particular numbers payphone accessible, on no.

Oh yeah and to all the meal program co-ordinators who would never use a mailing list to inform people of holiday stuff, and make sure not to include a list of Easter meals next to the sign they put up: please believe me when I say, you can't provide free internet to your visitors and claim that we don't use the internet to stay in touch. And you can't claim that a mailing list is difficult to set up. Just have a sign-up sheet somewhere, or have a sign with a link to your website and a sign-up thing on there. It is so easy, and I'll keep volunteering to do it 'till someone has the common sense to say "ok, you know what, let's try this." We love you, staff and volunteers. You can do this. You stubborn, obstinate, presumptuous hosers.

So, of course I should have known I'd have to deal with that, and solve the problem, and do the research, or just not use these services unless it's going to be really frequent so I notice their signs or get told by their greeting people... they make someone put up signs but they won't send out emails.

And to all the folks who put together services as window dressing, not to be used but just to exist to be pointed at like "see all the stuff we're doing?":  someday  that gravy train of endless exploitation is going to get derailed by one of us, the poor, and some of you are gonna be crushed under the wreck.

And to all the folks who avoid getting into politics, avoid getting into government, avoid getting into public service, because you think politics is dirty and bad, because you think government is shitty work, because you think public service is deadsville: Go into that governance course you were gonna give up for a business degree. Pursue your dream of becoming a lawyer, even though you know every time you say what you do, eyes are gonna roll, you're gonna have to deal with lawyer jokes all your life, etc. Follow your dreams. It's politicians who were warned, vast numbers of Canadians would starve because of their decisions. They got their spots because all the people who'd do good job are avoiding the career. For real, check out some of the municipal and ward debates. Not many of the candidates can string together a coherent sentence unscripted. There's just no interest. The mayoral race is full of people who remind me of the crowd at the soup kitchens. Some of them are actually from the soup kitchens!

Anyone considering being a personal support worker though? Just get out now. Go travel or something. PSU work  will flatten you. It's another excuse to pay you to help them compensate for how light their benefits packages. So you can earn a hundred bucks by figuring out how to hook up your client with twenty bucks worth of transit tokens or some shit.

Just some hungry easter thoughts.



3 comments:

  1. Question: does St Felix offer laundry felicities and are there any shelters that offer up detergent and showers (for men, there seems to be quite a few but for women)? Or if you're homeless, are you basically screwed in that area?

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  2. Sorry to take so long to respond to this... St. Felix doesn't do laundry but the Meeting Place, Evangel Hall and CONC all do. Um... they offer laundry, at least. And showers, I think. The St. Stephen's Community House on Augusta just south of College also offers both. All of those places are ultra stressful to use, so just make a pact with yourself: if it gets too weird or too crazy, give up and get out and try the next one.

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  3. Hopefully that info is accurate, please throw up another comment if it's not. EHM might be men only. Not sure.

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