Uncle Buck the Goose Wrangler.

Day 1,967, 00:16 • Published in Canada Canada • by The.Puppeteer

Summer is fast approaching for all of you secondary and post secondary students. This is a fun time in your life. Live it up. You will never have this kind of freedom again, I promise you that. I am at that creepy age in my life where I am finishing University and entering the real world, and seeing some of my friends already take the plunge into marriage. To that I say...

"Ain't nobody got time for that!"

As some of you know, I grew up in Niagara Falls. Why am I telling you this? Well, much like Erep, I had the pleasure of dealing with people from all different corners of the planet on a daily basis. This may sound like a fun place for a summer job, getting to meet different people from all walks of life. But you would be wrong. Very wrong.



First on the résumé was a restaurant at the brink of Niagara Falls. It was my first summer of High School, and this place employed half of the people that went to my school at the time, so I said why not. Quickly I realized how much working sucked and how I needed to avoid management at all costs. I began to spend multiple breaks in the large walk in freezer pretending to look for things. Eventually they caught on and would stop asking me to get things. But despite their best efforts, they could not keep me from slacking off.

They ended up removing me from the kitchen, and had me drive a golf cart to deliver food to the little stalls by the falls. Needless to say I was never on time, and usually pissed off more people than I can count driving through crowds, but it was all part of the job. They had the brilliant idea of giving me a radio to keep me in contact at all times, which I found out how to use against them. I found I could hear all of the messages between managers if I changed to channel 4.

Of course I didn't want to do much, so I found a few nice places to hide and just listen for my name. I quickly developed two new fun aspects of my job. The first was being the worst unofficial tour guide Niagara has ever seen. Informing people if they weren't back to the falls by a certain time of night, that they might be shut off. Also giving poor directions to any destination that I could not physically see. The amount of lost tourists that summer must have skyrocketed and looking back on it now, I wonder how many traffic jams I had caused.



The second, and personal favourite of mine was riding the Niagara Falls Shuttle *which was air conditioned* back and forth on the parkway and just claim I was on runs to the end of the earth. That, or I would blame the amount of foot traffic and that I could not get through in a timely fashion. The weird part about it was the driver never asked "Kid, do you ever actually go into to work?" in all the times I was on the shuttle. I just figured he would have done the same if he could have got away with it.

Needless to say they did not return my call for a job there the following summer.



The following summer I landed a job at a golf course that had just opened. This started off really well, and I was happy to be away from the chaos right down by the Falls. This all changed rather quickly once I found out how much geese hate human beings, and how much I hated wildlife in turn. I found myself in an unknown world next to trees and a lot of grass, and for someone with seasonal allergies this turned out to be my personal hell.

Daily I was called out to different parts of the course to deal with an irate goose that had made its way on to golf course. My way of dealing with these beasts was swinging a rake in their general direction and hissing back at them. This only worked when the wind was blowing the right way and they could not get a whiff of my fear. Other times there would be a Goose Vs Buck stare down for a few moments before it decided to charge at me. At this point I would run away and inform the golfers there was nothing any human could do, and to wait it out.



I didn't always live the of a goose wranglers life *insert joke here*. I believe my claim to fame was the invention of Golf-Cart Jousting, which led to one person being fired and one filing for workers compensation. Not bad considering the amount of times people fell off the golf carts. Not to mention the the amount of rakes we broke over the course of the year. After much experiment, I found that a golf club didn't give the necessary reach to properly throttle your opponent off the back of their cart.

**Whistle Blower Alert**

The real tip maker to this job was the closing shift when all the men needed somewhere to go before returning to their families. Nightly I was giving directions to some of Niagara's finest strip clubs. I found out "Honey, I am going for a few beers with the guys." really had a different meaning, and people paid handsomely for this information. So to the 3-5 women that play this game that have a husband, you're welcome. To the men, shame on you.



Sorry for the recent hiatus. Real life came and bit me in the ass the past few weeks. But I will always try to do quality over quantity.

TL😉R - If you were lost in Niagara between 2003 - 2007, sorry.

Cheers,

Buck.