A joke, yes. We will laugh in the car.
Freshmilk and I have been enjoying the postings of Annexation on Epinions. I laughed heartily all morning long as a matter of fact at his tirades about ExLax, diarrhea, and the Epinions Idol segment. I too decided to create an Epinions name and post a story. Afterall, only about ten people read Lowbar and thousands read Epinions. So I wrote a review of a ski area I once used to work at and took the opportunity to slander my previous boss. I hit the submit button and... nothing. It didn't take. I tried again. Nothing. So I say screw you Epinions! I don't need your e-forum to e-anything. You e-got it?! So here's my spiel about Deer Valley. Try to act enthused.
When I was in my early twenties I was lured into a job at Deer Valley "bumping chairs". This is the hip, snow junkie
way of saying you're a chairlift operator. I would wake up in my home in downtown Salt Lake City at 5am and make
the hour long ride up to Deer Valley to make it to my $8 dollar-an-hour job. One day my car did a 360 on the highway
and almost got hit on either side by simultaneously passing semis (just like in the movie Planes, Trains and
Automobiles). Anyway, I was almost always late and a definate slacker. My boss was an Austrian, let's call him Hans.
He loved discipline and I think I became his defacto beeotch for he would seperate me from the rest of the chair
bumpers, put me on the back of his snowmobile and drive me to the other side of the mountain where he would yell
at me for about twenty minutes. I thought this was quite amusing. I couldn't understand him half of the time anyway
and I typically just ignored him.
Part of the job consisted of tidying up after a snowstorm. They would make us crawl up on the rigging of the chairlift
and tell us to sweep snow off of the turnstiles that sit fifteen feet off the ground. This is harrowing work. The
experienced chairlift operators would walk on top of the lift while us newbies would straddle the snow covered pipes
and be extremely careful lest we fall. A friend of mine did fall. She got a broken leg and couldn't work the rest of the
season.
Most of the time I would just sit at the top of the mountain in a hut with a space heater. This is the most boring place
in the world. There isn't anything to do but freeze and stare at the inexperienced skiers tumbling off the lift, so I
decided to read the newspaper, but I wasn't really reading it, I would glance down at a classified ad between chairs.
This is a no-no in chair lift operation. You are supposed to keep your eyes always on the lift. The danger is that the lift
could go into reverse and hundereds of people could be killed. This hasn't happened in 150 years but it's still the
danger. Most skiers don't know how bad this would be. If a lift goes in reverse, you're better off jumping. Anyway,
Hans happened to be skiing by at this moment and spotted my biblio-pecadillo. He entered the chair lift hut, fuming
mad, and ordered me to go home. It was the fair thing to do, his asking me to leave, I thought, and so I went home
without thinking twice about it. The next day he called me up and asked me to come back to work. I declined. Not
because I was mad because he ordered me out of the hut, I wasn't, lives were at stake, afterall. No, the reason I didn't
go back was he wouldn't let me ski under the lifts.
Deer Valley is a meticulously groomed resort. They take great pains to groom all the fun out of the place. If you like to
ski straight all day and not make a turns, this is the place for you. I however enjoyed skiing under the lift in freshly
laid powder. This was one of the greatest sensations I've had in my life but somehow it was a paradise lost, for no
sooner had I discovered the joy and rapture of being the first skier of the day to lay down tracks than I was taken
around the mountainside by Hans on the dreaded snowmobile of discipline and yelled at for not adhering to the rule
of only skiing on groomed areas (I must have been absent that day recovering from being straddled by semis).
Oh yeah, I once saw Pam Dauber there (from Mork and Mindy fame).
Like to ski straight and not turn? = perfect.
Like to read while hundreds perish at your uncaring hand? = not so good.
Like to dress up in Nazi regalia and terrorize slopes with your peoplessnowwagonnen? = Perfect!
