Time Travel

The second stint of my Menasco experience began on the sixth of June, nineteen-ninety-four.

I will write about it at length as there are some fantastic memories of people that I must write down for my own enjoyment in future years, but my first comment about that particular chapter of my life is that I have never, and will never again I would imagine, experience time travel like I did during those four and a half years.

I was awake and on the road at five-twenty in the morning (I've just looked at the clock on the wall here and it is exactly that time) and my journey to Oakville from Oshawa would (in normal circumstances) take fifty minutes and I'd arrive at Menasco at around six o'clock.

I would then have a thirty minute or more sleep in the car, in a sleeping bag before heading into the plant when the canteen opened for the best coffee of my life and some breakfast.

I would leave work, usually, at six-thirty at night. The journey home would normally take an hour and I would phone Karen on my cell phone (it was huge) when I was close so that she could "get the tea on" and on Wednesdays we continued our mid week pub and NTN nights.

I worked Saturdays.

A normal working week at Menasco was almost always ten hour days, five hour Saturdays, fifty-five hours a week, plus travel time and that continued for two hundred and thirty weeks with a few vacations along the way. I have just calculated that a typical working week including travel was around eighty hours.

It was always busy, it was mostly fun, and my time there evaporated.

I will take the time to recall my favourite moments of those years, and try to fix those moments in some sort of timeline. At the moment though, in my mind, it feels too compressed, as though I was really only there for a happy year or so, but although I know that I loved the place I also have to acknowledge that at times I really loathed the place and my timeless reality.

Plenty of time to decompress those memories...