Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Closure

I was speaking to someone today who told me "Nunavummiut always have the best reasons to be sent home from work." Which is true. I mean, yes, we have pedestrian reasons like a blizzard, but our blizzards are widely mocked as being wussy by other Nunavumiut (people in the Kivalliq are bizarrely proud of their five day blizzards) and are hardly worth closing over. However, there are other, slightly more weird ones you might not find down south. These are some of the reasons that Cathy and I have been sent home during our time up here:

1. A guy wandering around the post office with a rifle that shut down part of the city.
2. A dump fire that caused a toxic cloud of smoke around Iqaluit. Not entirely sure what good it did leaving one part of town to go home to the other part that still had smoke around it, but there you go.
3. Polar bear.
4. Computer failure.
5. Massive satellite failure which knocked out all telecommunications across Nunavut.
6. Frozen water pipes, knocking out water to the building.
7. Water main break, which caused massive flooding, which then promptly froze.
8. City-wide multi-day power failure.
9. Mold
10. Temperatures with wind chill below -50C (that one is Cathy's. The non-teacher adults still have to go to work).
11. Someone cracking open all the fire extinguishers and spraying them around the building.

There might be more, but I think that's a pretty good start. Can anyone else think of a reason why their office/business might have closed in recent years?

Last Five
All from "Pushin' Against a Stone" by Valerie June.

1 comment:

Lily said...

Our office has closed because the sewer tank was full/the water tank was empty and we didn't have running water.

Those are fun ones.