The Ball Is Rolling

I don't have a job yet but I did spend 4 hours at Emploi Quebec the other day. Boy that's gotta be a tough job. I walk in and take a number, 16 they're serving 15, and as I wait I hear someone yelling in French. At first I ignore it thinking it was someone just saying something from across the room, like you have a nice day too, but in French so of course I didn't catch it. Then the source comes into view and it some guy storming towards the door. His body language tells me enough, he's hunched over a bit so that it looks like his head is creating all the forward momentum and dragging his body along for the ride. Then I hear another French word but this one I understand 'Tabernacle' (note the pronunciation of that word is different than it's spelling), then he says it a couple more times and slams his palms into the door forcing it wide open. I watch him storm across the street without looking for oncoming cars. Welcome to Emploi Quebec, the unemployment office for you anglos that live in Ontario.

So when it's my turn I tell the guy my story and he gives me a form to fill out to start my file but since they close for lunch from 12-1 and it's 11:45 I'll have to hand it back in at 1. That's fine for me I'm hungry and I know the area fairly well from playing softball in a park near the office.

Lunch goes well, I return to the office at 1:10 and there's a 15 person line up. Where the hell did all these people come from?

So I sit down to wait and surf the web on my phone, no service. How can I not have service? They must have built this building out of lead. So fine I sit and watch the people. Beside me is an older lady with three kids about her and a woman I suspect is the kids mother. The older woman, probably the mother of the mother, is in charge. She barks orders to the kids, who don't listen, while the actual mother of the kids sits and says nothing. One kid doesn't listen to her at all and he runs around playing with things. Finally the older woman grabs him and ties him into a kids stroller and he starts wailing. Great now I'm getting a headache. Finally after a couple more examples of bad parenting they get their stuff down and they leave.

Next to sit beside me is a giant fat man. He breathes noisily and mutters under his breathe. The person currently at the only open counter is taking a long time. I hear the fat man say things like "This is a joke", "Come on", What the F", and he's getting louder and louder I guess ramping up to a volume that the clerk can hear him and feel bad for him, or something. Finally it's the fat man's turn and he walks up to the counter throws a brown envelope at the clerk and immediately walks into the bathroom. Now that was unexpected. Eventually he exits the bathroom and walks out of the building. Not sure what happened there.

Emploi Quebec is not a fun place to hang out.

So when I finally get my turn I'm told that Service Canada still hasn't transferred my file to them but I can still discuss some of the services I can take advantage of. There's a starting a small business plan, there's full time French classes, and best of all they have a book with hundreds of production houses and post production houses. So I gather the information and I decide with my assigned agent that it is probably a good plan to work the summer and take the full time French in September. The main point being that there's more work in the summer. So yesterday I settled into calling current productions in pre-production and while I don't have a job yet I have a full understanding of the steps I need to take to get into the union and I have three sources of production contacts and I've applied to a number of summer productions. Hopefully within a few weeks I'll actually have a contract for a show. It turns out you can't really volunteer here, you can find jobs that don't pay you on Craig's list but if you want the set time required to get into the union you have to work. I'm fine with that, I'd rather work than volunteer.

Of course I still have the problem of not understanding French and it's going to annoy the hell out of any Key Grip that works primarily in French. There are going to be a million new words to learn, I had to learn them all in English a couple years back but I barely even remember them now.

Challenges await.

Oh yeah and I've got a new website. Little has been done on it to date but eventually I'll have some photographs up and further down the road I hope to have some videos. For now it's pretty basic but it's got a pretty catchy url.

www.joedeclara.com