The Chantastic Blog

Since it’s a long weekend and I don’t have class on Monday, I had a very late dinner. After doing some dishes and watching a repeat of a very under-rated TV show, I needed to throw out the garbage around midnight. The garbage chute wasn’t working in the refuse room, and as I fiddled with the chute buttons, I kept hearing murmuring coming from one of my neighbour’s room. Apparently, the walls are pretty thick between apartments so you can’t hear anything when you’re in the apartment, but the door…is just a door, which means you can hear pretty well from the hallway. When I came out of the refuse room, I figured out what those murmurs were.

My neighbours were having sex. Loud, loud sex.

There are a lot of crazy people in Toronto, especially downtown. I’ll try to document my run-ins with them here, and I’ve even created a subsection just for them in the categories to the right (that’s how many there are!).

Yesterday, I went to a Shopper’s Drug Mart to mail something. There was an old lady ahead of me who had apparently been there a long time already, and from what I overheard of the conversation she had with the girl behind the counter, she was looking to mail a Sears catalog, and wanted to buy insurance. Because she needed assurance that the catalog would not get lost in the mail since it was such an important document. Seriously.

After she was done, the girl behind the counter literally hid in the back of the store and peered through the small hole in the door leading to the back area until she saw that I was looking for someone to help me. She then came out, looked around, and said, “Did you hear that lady? She was crazy!”

I said, “Yeah, something about Sears catalog and buying insurance? That was kind of weird.”

The girl then whispers to me, “I think she’s still here” in the same voice that the kid from The Sixth Sense whispered, “I see dead people.”

The prof for my Finance pre-MBA course seemed like a funny guy the first few days. Then at the beginning of one of our last classes, he starts off by saying, “I just wanted to clarify something. Students have been coming up to me after class and calling me ‘Doctor’, ‘Professor’, and someone even called me ‘Sir’ today. No no, I don’t like those names. I actually prefer ‘Your highness’.”

You might be wondering what I’m sleeping on since my mattress hasn’t arrived yet. Well, I have a bed, just no mattress. So when I go to bed, the order is this:
Bed wooden board, blanket, comforter, Chan.

What does it feel like?

It feels like I’m sleeping on a frickin’ wooden board.

Because it’s me and nothing can go smoothly, I have yet to receive my mattress despite me buying it over a week and a half ago. The reason? Apparently there’s a strike going on somewhere, according to my mom, who talked to the store where I bought my mattress.
I hadn’t talked to the guy from the store directly since I paid for the mattress 10 days ago, so the guy I bought the mattress from gave me a call the other night. He apologized for the delay, explained that there was a strike at a Simmons factory in Wisconsin, said my mattress might be on a shipment arriving on Thursday and would keep me up-to-date, and gave me his phone number.
He then phoned back about 30 seconds later to…apologize for the delay, explain that there was a strike at a Simmons factory in Wisconsin, and let me know my mattress might be on a shipment arriving on Thursday and would keep me up-to-date.
It was like we never had the first conversation on the phone. I was completely dumbfounded. During the second call, I actually started to doubt whether the first phone call actually happened since he was saying the exact same thing. The only reason I know that he actually phoned twice to tell me the same thing was that after the second call, I saw the mattress store’s phone number that I written down after the first call.

I still have absolutely no clue why he phoned twice.

During a break in my 3 hour pre-MBA Intermediate Excel class, I went to fill up my water bottle at the fountain just outside the washroom. As I filled it up, the water pressure at the fountain decreased everytime I heard a flush from the washroom nearby.
Now, I realize that I’m not exactly drinking reverse-diffusion mineral water, but would it have killed the designer of the building to have two water source pipes to give the illusion that they weren’t serving toilet water at the water fountain?

As part of the pre-MBA program, there are a series of tutorials, workshops, and events that everyone can sign up for to get to know other students and prepare for class. One of those events was the Toronto/Boston baseball game on Saturday, which I attended. Now, having written both my undergraduate and graduate theses on baseball, it’s safe to say that I know more about baseball than the average fan (or in this case, the average MBA student).
While we were at the game, some of the North American students were explaining the basic rules of baseball to the international students. That’s fine, no harm in that. However, when a couple of those same North American students started making grandiose statements like they were some kind of baseball expert, well, that’s when my ears began to bleed.
“The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are the two best teams in baseball.” Really? Are you sure about that? Because the standings say that they’re not even the two best teams in their division. Just because your team is well known doesn’t make them the best. It’s like saying Paris Hilton is one of the best actresses in Hollywood because she’s so well known.
Somehow, I didn’t give in to my desire to correct them. I’ve got to deal with at least some of these people for the next 20 months, and the last thing I need is to get a reputation as “that guy”.