E-cybopooch is part of the family now, and he deserves your e-respect!

In a sweeping coup of procrastination, I rearranged my nerdy D&D and Spaceship Zero miniatures last night. I even cleaned up a bit. Yes, it came to that.

So I had to get up before 2pm today to go downtown to the Vancouver Police Department. For this Mentor volunteering I’m doing, they require a criminal record check. I took the bus to the heart of the delightful East End. When I got on I put in two loonies and the box told me I owed another dollar. The bus driver said “I saw both of them” and so he overrid the box. Then he announced to the entire busload of passengers that the ticket machine was acting up, so the next time it happened he was going to say “stupid machine!” and he asked the entire bus to repeat “stupid machine!” after him. So at the next stop an old lady got on and the box did it’s thing again. The bus driver said quietly to the old lady “yeah, it’s broken – watch this: Stupid machine!” and the entire bus yelled out “Stupid machine!” That was fun.

Then on the bus ride back I was the first one on the bus when it was at the beginning of it’s journey (the #50) and the bus driver asked me if I had seen the front page of the paper – the headlines were “Who is stealing transit fare?” or some such. Then we had a little discussion about how they decided not to instal proper turnstyles on the skytrain stations as it was too expensive, but in the long run it will save them money. And he read out a bunch of boring statistics, quoting from the newspaper, about which stops had the most people without proof of fare payment on them. Even if those stats are true – they are meaningless.

Anyway – the criminal record check went swimmingly and I wager that I’ll be mentoring by Friday. I’m putting the Toren back in Mentoren.