Between quitting my day job in December, the horrible weather and the cold I had for over two weeks, I’m getting pretty close to freaking the hell out because I’ve been stuck in my apartment for so long. I practically didn’t leave at all while I had my cold, so my last few trips out of the house have been relatively interesting.
Yesterday I went to a focus group put on by a marketing company for Blockbuster Video. I don’t know how they found me, I just got a phone call asking if I wanted to participate – spend an hour and a half talking about Blockbuster Video and get paid $75. Heck yeah! It was all the way up at Yonge and Eglinton, so I spent quite a while on the TTC, which never fails to provide for bizarre situations and random observations.
The first thing I noticed happened pretty soon after living my place on the Dundas streetcar. While we were stopped at Ossington I looked out my window briefly and saw an old man sitting on the sidewalk begging for spare change. This man is always at that corner, sitting in the same spot and seemingly oblivious to the people who walk past him. This time however, it was cold and raining and the man looked very upset. He kept rocking back and forth and shifting his hands from underneath his legs and onto the sidewalk, then back while muttering something repeatedly. He had a pretty angry and uncomfortable look on his face, and for a minute I thought he was looking directly at me. I couldn’t help feeling like he was angry at me, and I was deeply affected by the sight.
Seeing that man reminded me of an “experiment” that I did about 3 years ago with my friend Thomas. I think it was near the end of January and we decided that we were going to attempt to spend 48 hours on the streets of Toronto. We wanted to get a taste of what a homeless person might feel on a daily basis. This idea might seem a bit controversial, but we both understood that our fabricated experience would pale in comparison to the real thing – the fact that we could turn around and go home at any point would unavoidably taint our perceptions. We ended up lasting about 9 hours, much of which we spent seeking shelter from the wind, first by finding places where we could huddle under our useless blankets and eventually inside a Tim Horton’s. Coincidentally, the one and only homeless person that we saw that night had also chosen this Tim Horton’s as his refuge. I was comforted by the thought (hope?) that many of the homeless must have found some sort of shelter for the night. Even though our attempt was short-lived and slightly pathetic, I now feel a deeper sense of sympathy for people out on the street, and I find myself donating more of my time (and sometimes money) in an effort to help them.
All of those thoughts went through my head before the light turned green and the streetcar moved on.
I switched to the subway at Dundas station and rode it north all the way to Eglinton. It was still raining when I started walking to the office building where the focus group was being held. After a couple of minutes of walking I realized that I must’ve horribly miscalculated the distance between the station and my destination. I thought about taking the bus but I had lost my transfer and didn’t have any more change on me for bus fare. So I just kept walking. When I finally reached the place there was a guy who looked like Gord Downie smoking at the entrance and a sign on the door that told me to enter code 0310 on the keypad to get buzzed into the building. I poked at the keypad with no effect, I couldn’t figure out how to use the thing. Assuming he worked in the building, I asked Gord if he knew how to work this stupid buzzer and the two of us stood in front of it scratching our heads for a few minutes before I went out on a limb and just opened the door and realized that it had been unlocked the entire time. Go figure.
The next 20 minutes or so were incredibly awkward. I was in a tiny, drab waiting room, I had a nametag on, there were motivational posters on the walls (the real ones, not the ones with lines like: “Planning – much work needs to be done before we can announce our total failure to make any progress”), snacks on the table and 5 complete strangers sitting there with me, including Gord, who by this time must have thought I was a total idiot. Nobody talked or made much eye contact, but some people ate cheap sandwiches or pastries from the platter on the coffee table. There was something creepy about the environment, like someone had tried to make it more inviting but had accidentally done the complete opposite.
They started our “discussion” about 15 minutes late. We sat in a big meeting room, complete with two-way mirror, video camera and microphones. The topic of discussion was this idea that Blockbuster was floating, a new price plan which I thought was total bullshit. I won’t get into the boring details but I seemed to be the only person who was against it, everyone else was kissing some major Blockbuster ass. It was pretty lame in general but I had a relatively good time trashing the idea on my own.
After 90 minutes we got up and left, stopping at the reception desk to pick up a small envelope containing $75 in cash. I grabbed a sandwich on my way out. It was slightly soggy.
I need to get out more.
