Says Canada, “Hey, did you feel the earthquake we had last week? It rattled my windows and made one of the paintings on my wall slightly crooked. They say it was a 5.0 on the Richter scale. It was really scary.”

Replies Haiti, “Fuck you.”

More annoying than the excited buzz about the earthquake a few of us in our sparsely populated country actually felt, was the fact that my phone line went dead for half an hour afterwards. When it came back, there was static on the line that got worse and worse until, nearly a full week later, I had to call up Bell and speak to a very nice computer who dispatched a technician to come and fix it. And by fix it, I mean replace everything, because the earthquake had rattled some shoddy workmanship loose, drawing attention to the fact that the whole thing was held together with tissue and spit.

And speaking of shoddy workmanship, it left me kind of surprised there was no actual measurable damage to Montreal’s mafia-built infrastructure. Usually it needs little to no encouragement to fall down, particularly when people are standing under it. Looking at it funny, or sneezing within ten city blocks of it usually suffices. I guess it goes to show that, as seismic events go, this one was a bit of a non-starter. The technician who fixed my phone line didn’t even know we’d had an earthquake the week before, and looked vaguely confused when asked if he’d done any other earthquake-related repairs lately.

While Montrealers went about their post-earthquake business in that je-ne-give-a-shit-pas sort of way, either failing to notice the shaking at all, or assuming it was the people in the next apartment over having vigorous French-Canadian sex, Toronto, true to form, panicked. Entire office buildings were evacuated just in case there was any real danger of someone spilling their coffee. This is the same city that calls the military when it snows. Snows in Canada. Really. Not a joke. The entire rest of the country still points and laughs about that one. Oh Toronto, you know we only tease you because we all hate you so very very much…

Anyway, yeah. Earthquake. No big deal. Phone line fixed. No charge because it was all outside stuff. But if you tried to call with a big job offer last week and all you heard was static, do call back soon. Eyestrain Productions wasn’t disinterested, merely broken.