Monday 3 December 2012

So you want to move to Fort Mcmurray?

well if you’re reading this, ill make an ass of my self by "assuming" you want to or are undecided about moving all the way out to the rich city of Fort Mcmurray, located in Northern Alberta, Canada. Thank fuck you decided to read this because i am going to give you the down low, the accurate information and details of this place everyone talks of, the place with tons of work, a huge rate of pay and, most of the time, "Easy money", as some would say.
But listen up the town itself is a retched pit of despair, sorrow and overall bad vibes. Remember this is a place where people flock from all over the globe to make it rich by any means necessary. Every type of person wants money and things and lots of em, and this attracts the worst kinds of human scum. Criminals, refugees, illegal immigrants anyone you can imagine are here in this place.
Fort Mcmurray is a melting pot of culture and race, unlike anywhere else. In the span of a 5 minute drive or walk down the main street of downtown fort mcmurray you will encounter every type of skin colour and every type of culture on this planet and most people are overall doing well financially. This is what makes it such a different city then most places because here everyone is on the same plain, everyone has the chance to make it rich.
But back to the city itself, walking down the street in daylight is no issue at all depending where you walk but most likely the worse you will encounter is a crack head or 2 and maybe the odd homeless couple banging in the grass, drunk as fuck. these people for the most part wont hurt or attack you but just overall dealing with them is frustrating especially when you go to take your bottles back to the depot you might as well just give em to the bums to avoid the madness that will occur. Most parts of the upper fort mcmurray area out of town do not have much or any of these fuckers running around so that is your best bet for finding a place,
Stay out of downtown, for living anyways, the apartments are overrun with loads of people, mostly taxi drivers from Africa and Pakistan. and not to be racist or anything but these people load into the rooms 5-6 sometimes 7 living inside 2 bedroom apartments, hollering and dancing to the we hours of the night, bongo's and all destroying the place and everything around it stinking it up with weird smells of fuck knows what kind of food. I’m not saying there all like that but from what i encountered from my 3 years living up there this is my experience.
other then dealing with where your going to live you have to deal with the excessive traffic day in day out sometimes taking 1 to 2 hours to move a few hundred feet, you have to understand this is a town built for probably at the most around 20000 people and here jam packed into this town they have over 50000 i would say.
And every single person has a vehicle either there own or a company vehicle supplied by there company so most people have more then 1 car, and every morning on your way down Highway 63 towards the Death Plants (oil refineries) . there is literally a thousand cars of traffic trying to get through 2 sets of lights, (this is prior to the overpasses that are being built). 2 whole communities of thousands head down the hill towards the lights[.] Another few thousand head in from town and another thousand from the other direction of town, everyone heading to the same 2 lane road to get to 1 of the probably 20 different refineries about an hour‘s drive North of town.
Most people take the Bus to work that is supplied by every oil site, and this is no funner. Most times you[‘re] waking up at around 4am to get ready and then to catch your bus at 5-5:30 to arrive at most sites for 7am, the start of most shifts. Braving the mighty -40 degree weather at 4-5 in the morning is hell it cripples every cell in your body. You cringe up, every muscle contracting, your body haunched up then you set foot on your porch and hear the horrid 'Creak" of the wood just splitting, crunching , knowing in your mind nothing is made to be in these temperatures, definitely not humans, and you set forth down the street and wait and wait for the big ol’ Diversified bus to come rumbling down the road.
but sometimes they don't show up at all an 3 hours of standing on the side of the road isn't good for you at all, so your strut back home and lay in bed sick all day, losing out on hundreds of dollars because your bus broke down or the driver ran it off the road. to take the chance to drive into work is most times the plan but really in the end if your bus cant make it to get you, most likely the roads are rotten ice filled skating rinks anyways, not worth the chance of death down the retched highway 63 (death highway, hell’s road)
Alright then after all that bullshit of transporting to work however you get there or whenever, you unload from the bus and then join the rest of the herd of sheep and scurry one by one through the swipe gates where you take your key card thing and run it through the system and most times you will also get randomly checked by some dumb undereducated person most times that can barely speak English.
after being violated you then head into your lunch trailer and get yourself prepared for the day, by consuming heavy amount of coffee and most times a joint or 2 followed by a stretching session and then a little work, safety talk. Then you start your day of driving around doing nothing or being told by your foreman to hide for the day or make whatever work your doing last as long as humanly possible, "Dog fucking" most people call it, when your stand around all day doing nothing or pretending to do something which was the most likely case.
You first start by filling out a safety card which takes anywhere from 10 minutes to and hour when it should probably be finished in 2 minutes, after that you[‘re] heading to get a permit for where you are working and this usually take anywhere from 20 minutes to and hour as well. You may not experience this in every trade but i myself have been a scaffolder, and electrician and have dealt with this on in everyday basis, and watched most other trades do the same.
[Stay] out of the way so that the big shots that look after the workers for the refinery don't see you sitting around wasting there money, but everyone does it and everyone knows about it. The more skilled of a trade you have it seems the less actual work you have to do. I dont know how many thousands of dollars i made just by sleeping or hiding away inside a pipe rack, and being told to do so by my foreman/supervisor.
If this kind of work is for you then Labourer is the job you want at either spark or fire watch you basically get paid 30 plus in hour to watch a welder's sparks, so they don't catch fire or start a catastrophe. which basically involves sitting on a bucket or some other homemade chair device, most times in a warm heated shelter, sometimes not with a meter in your hand and a radio, simple.
So ya other then spending your days raking in cash by not really doing a whole lot you finish the day off, get back on your bus and head home, which sometimes in the winter when roads are bad might take anywhere from 2 to 10 hours for which you don't get paid and this by far the part i hated the most, especially after a day where i actually worked and was exhausted.
and these buses without the long drives are most times retched horrible transports of people talking as your trying to sleep stinking up the bus with farts, the shaking and moving of parts of the bus as you hit every bump and i mean every one because there is a lot being the road is built over a swampy muskeg,
no sir this is not fun, the moment you fall asleep it becomes OK but when you sleep in and pass your bus stop that's never a good time.
So ya back in town you made it, finally time to go out to the Casino riddled with lowlifes and scums everywhere gambling away there week, or months pay in a matter of hours greeted by terrible crack heads and prostitutes as you enter the door. This shows you the type of people you got to deal with in this town, and if that not your scene you could head to the NV night club, or cowboys it used to be called when i lived there[.] [It’s] a dance club for the horrible men and women of this town, a place where Juiced up roid mongers go to pick fights and test there special tai chi MMA skills, a place where the dirtiest filthiest of whores come to gold dig and hunt down there pray for that night or a place where people try to go have a good time but never end up having it,
yes this place i hated the most it was the pinnacle of rotten, foul human conditions, and behaviours, a place where everything wrong with the new generation, comes to light, in this dark stinky bunker. and if this doesn't seem like fun to you there is always the small pubs where i cannot say anything bad about most because for the most part they are alright other then filled with ol cougars and older crowds most the time, making it hard to pick up chicks your own age but overall a good place to eat and watch a game,play pool, let loose after a long day of work.
the only good memories i have are of pubs, not to say i will every go back to [any] of them because i hope to never be anywhere near Fort mcmurray every again for my own reasons. The Rent is crazy high and no where near worth for the places you live the yards of most houses aren't even big enough to mow, usually the houses there are within 3-5 feet of another house which leaves no privacy ..My advice to anyone out there dont live in town just go there make money and leave, like they say "take My money and run" and that is your best plan, because living there will get you no where further in life then anywhere else in the world.
After you pile up stock amounts of possessions and houses and cars after awhile your working just to pay debt.. Get in Get out Take the money from that horrible town an use it to boost the economies of other cities. fuck Fort Mac it has gone to the dogs, there is no hope for this province, lets sell it to the Asians, and give the money to the rest of canada,
the end of part 1.