I was late for work one night, and my boss was busy chewing me out, telling me what an idiot I was, along with a whole bunch of etceteras that I was doing my best to tune out.

The Boss likes to go on the occasional rant, and it's often best to just stare off into the distance and imagine you're anywhere else while he finishes yelling at you. I know what you're saying, that you wouldn't take it if it were you and you'd rather quit, but there's another reality to consider. When you find a job where the owner doesn't give a fuck what you do as long as you're not fucking up the business or stealing from him, the freedom it grants to just fuck off for eight hours while getting paid comes with a price. The price was that the boss got to yell at me when I fucked up. I figured that if I couldn't deal with my own fucking attitude when I had fucked up, and couldn't recognize that I deserved the beatdown that I had just paid for, then there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

The thing is, I was late was because sunset had been severely fucking with me. I had known the change in seasons was coming, but I hadn't realized just how bad it was going to be.

See, this is another thing that everybody fails to mention, that where you live in the world determines how many hours of daylight you have. I live in Toronto, and from the Fall to early Spring, it's an excellent place to be a vampire. With the sun going down around 5 PM and the nights getting longer as winter progressed, you really can't beat it. But that doesn't last forever and after Christmas, the days start to get longer and longer. By April, the sun is going down around 7 PM, and then right in the middle of summer, it's going down around 10 PM for some of the shortest nights in the history of ever.

Guess which dumbass had to go and get turned into a vampire around the end of March. The fact that it coincided with Easter wasn't lost on me, with the whole rising from the dead thing, but that wasn't my primary concern at the time. It was getting harder and harder to make it to work on time even with Sammy covering for me. Beatrice had given me a basic rundown on "day-tripping, " but I had mostly tuned out when I was supposed to be paying attention. Dumb, I know, but you know me. In any case, it was still incredibly hard to leave the house with the sun still up in the sky like it had any business being there. Most days I'd have to exit the house looking like a burn victim, all covered head to toe and trying desperately not to make eye contact with anyone.

When Claude got fed up and just paid a mechanic to fix the engine and the transmission in my piece of shit Honda, it made travelling to work a little easier, but people still stared at me. At least in the car, it was a lot easier to just turn up the music and tune out anyone staring at me and pretend desperately that I didn't really give a fuck.

So I was getting to work later and later, and even Sammy was giving me strange looks like she suspected something was wrong with me. Didn't help that I had to rush to the store while keeping to the shadows, so I didn't get an accidental burn.

All of this was going through my mind while the Boss yelled at me and I just tuned him out, knowing I was going to keep on being late and all the yelling in the world wasn't going to change that. It was either pretend to be a burn victim or actually be a burn victim.

Goddamn sun.

It was while the boss was yelling at me that I noticed the sign on the board behind his head.

SPACE FOR RENT, it said. INQUIRE INSIDE FOR DETAILS.

"Is that for real?" I asked him, and he gave me a look that told me all I needed to know about my available bargaining power.

"Why you asking?"

"A friend of mine is looking for a place to rent is all."

"You're a bad fucking liar."

"I know. How much you want for it?"

I was screwed before I opened my mouth, so the next five minutes of negotiation was me putting up a token fight and then dropping my pants and taking it up the ass. Figuratively speaking of course. But I got the room, and that was all that mattered.

It was all mine.

It was a dinky little room with barely enough space for the ten foldout chairs that I put there. Toronto has this thing with trash that they'd adopted from New York City, where people would put pieces of furniture they had no more use for out on the curb or beside the trash, instead of actually in the trash. It was with the understanding that someone else might find some further use out of it and it had even inspired some people with trucks to make early Tuesday morning raids to get the best pickings. You could find old computers, old television sets and old chairs out there if you were lucky and knew where to look. One time I had come across an old Mac Pro tower just sitting on the side of the driveway of some house in a nice neighbourhood, and another time there had been a nice set of expensive studio monitors that were worth at least $600. So that's where I'd gotten all of my chairs, various street corners, and back alleyways giving up their goodies. They were all mismatched and in different stages of disrepair, but they didn't smell too bad, and you could at least sit on them.

I even made a sign:

FRIENDS OF VLAD MEETING

CALL 555-449-5478 for more info

Or email [email protected]

I was proud of the wording for my little ad. I had worked on it all night at the shop, writing and rewriting until it said everything I needed to say or at least thought I needed it to say. The random customers at the store didn't bother me; they shopped, paid for their stuff and left. It was the perfect symbiotic relationship where we had some hidden agreement to ignore each other until we actually needed each other. As far as I was concerned, as long as they weren't trying to cop a feel, blowing each other in the viewing booths or exposing themselves to anybody else in the shop, then they didn't exist. And yes, those are real examples of things that have happened.

What can I say? Midnight shift has its own brand of freakiness.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE
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