A Day in the Life of a Factory Employee

The alarm goes off at 5:30am. Too early, as if I were a farmer who needed to milk his cows. Yet I am not a farmer, I don't have the intrinsic pleasure of working for myself, I work for a large corperation, so I, like almost everyone in this city who has a job, works for someone else.

Bleary eyed, I walk out of my front door into a cold morning that wakes me up better than any coffee could ever do. I walk to a bus stop, sit there looking into idling cars waiting for the lights to change, and smoke a cigarette. The bus comes, the same time every day, and I get on, and see the same faces I see every day.

They converse about how this plant is shutting down and how that plant is close to it. They talk about a fellow who used to ride the bus, as I do, every day to work. His factory closed. He has lost his house. In Windsor, losing your house is a serious thing, a horrible disaster. In this economy when you get knocked down you rarely get up again. People look at buying a house in this city as a status symbol all in its own. As if it were a badge of gentrification, seperating you from all the "renters".

The bus nears my factory. Many of the faces have long since departed, and I am left, alone in my own world, looking at the purple morning sky stretch out before me.

Business is slow. We arent as busy as we once were. We have spurts of activity, but these are mere punctuations in a timeline filled mostly with repetition. Boredom eases into the first break where I have exactly 15 minutes. In these 15 minutes, I sit down, have a cigarette and I think.

People who work in factories think all day long. Ian Curtis, the founder of the band Joy Division said "I loved working in a factory, I could daydream all day." This is the absolute truth. I meditate on all subjects, big and small, ornate and disgusting. I've systematically planned out how I could spend 20,000,000 dollars without spending more than 100,000 on a single thing. I invented a new political system. I've urban planned downtown Windsor to include a light rail system, and an arena that incorperated a canal system into it's design.

Picture an arena downtown with a marina and canal systems surrounding it like a moat, and stretching into the neighbourhood beyond. Adjacent to the arena would be the light rail terminal/underground mall and you could access the arena underground through the terminal across the street, or over one of the many bridges that surround the arena. I see covered bridges and lovely stone bridges arching above the canals, with cool sports bars and pro shops lining an area right next to the venue. I see artsy cafes and artist's studios and indie bookstores lining ouellette, with only a few tourist trap bars, not 50, more like 10 large places, all on the same block. That way the police could watch over the area and the residents wouldn't have to listen to bassy hip hop at 2am because no one would live in this district. It would be built away from downtown, in its own little district near the bridge perhaps.

The light rail system would stretch to it's former borders and beyond, all the way to the big box wasteland of Walker rd and Division. There would be paths exclusively for bicycles and pedestrians stretching all over the city.

But alas, none of these things will ever happen. The arena is finished and sits next to a huge closed auto parts factory on the east end of town, far from the downtown core and the Spitfires' real fanbase. The canal will probably never happen, due to the mind numbing number of hurdles it has to face. The focus groups, the feasibility studies, it could be dragged on forever. If it does finally get built it will either be marketed to seniors and be small and boring, as I have predicted before, or will be used as the site of a massive housing project, replacing the existing projects at Glengarry.

You see, the Glengarry Projects are right next to the Casino, our Taj Mahal of tourism. All the tourists dont want to see a Canadian ghetto, so why not tear the whole lot down and move them all downriver a bit to that old plot of land that was supposed to be a lot of cool things? That way we could build the new steel and glass piece of shit city hall where the ghetto once stood and make the American tourists, who we will do ANYTHING for, feel more comfortable as they exploit our city like a low rent hooker.

I usually end my day at work with a head full of thoughts like the afforementioned. Going home I wait at Devonshire Mall, seeing miles and miles of gas guzzlers ahead of me. Where did we all go wrong? When I see a parking lot, at a mall of all things, filled with suvs of all things, in the most economically depressed city in Canada of all places it makes me wonder why all of those people havent downsized months ago.

I then answer my own question. In times of strife and disarray we cling to what is familiar and real to us. In Windsor, suvs, malls and parking lots are familiar to us. What does this say about the majority of people in this city.

They cant even cut off their hummer to spite their focus.