To commemorate the two year anniversary until the start of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, work decided to open the mountain non-stop for the weekend. Thats 9am Saturday until 10pm Sunday. And guess who pulled the graveyard shift during this momentous occasion? That's right, me. How did it go? Let's just say it was a surreal experience.
At first I thought: "Piece of cake! Who the hell goes snowboarding or skiiing at three in the morning? This will be an easy chunk of overtime." To be honest, I wasn't overly busy, but man I was was wrong about how popular this venture would be.
The mountain was covered with stoned, drunken snowboarders staggering through the mist. They were falling over in front of my snowmobile, I swear I almost cut off someones head with the thing. Myself and a few workmates were taking refuge in the Peak Office, the building was shrouded in fog and we could see figures moving around outside, toying with us, not getting close enough for us to make out what they were. I was starting to get the feeling that I was in some sort of zombie survival movie.
There were two species of zombie on the hill that night. The retarded, meandering zombies like you see in your more classic zombie movie such as Night Of The Living Dead (these were the stoners). Then there was the jumpy, aggressive, venom spitting zombies from more contemporary zombie flicks like 28 Days Later (these were the drunks).
There had been some trouble with the drunk zombies, most of whom had been infected prior to coming up the mountain on the tram (they had their zombie juice confiscated at the base). So Mel had a few run-ins with this sort, luckily she didn't get infected herself. This species were also giving the lift operators a hard time, for some reason they thought they could infect the lifties by throwing snowballs at them. Haven't these zombies seen any zombie movies? They have to bite people to infect them!
I mostly had to deal with the stoned zombies, most of which were infected once on the mountain. Our boss ordered some pizzas from the kitchen, you know, to say thanks to the staff for working this shitty shift. I was sent to pick them up from the kitchen, I had noticed that the foyer was totally packed with people lining up for food (stoned zombies get hungry at 3am). On the way out of the kitchen, carrying the pizzas, I thought I was going to die. I must have had two hundred teenagers with the munchies staring at me, mouth agape, drooling.
You could tell that their zombie brains were struggling..."He has pizza, I want pizza, me just take pizza!" I felt like I was holding a big, juicy brain. I was lucky that these were the slow moving zombies, their heads were turning, following the pizzas as they moved, but their bodies were too slow to react. I got the hell out as quickly as possible, threw the pizzas into the snowcat and floored it.
The rest of the night didn't go too badly, a few zombies broke out of quarantine so I had to go and round them up, but that was about it. The staff started to get a bit of cabin fever/sleep deprivation as sunrise approached. But unlike all zombie movies, everybody made it out alive.
