Another Job?

March 26th (Thursday)

Last night the sky clouded over and the rain began early in the morning.  It rained pretty steady for the whole day, and we headed to work to finish up our project.  

During the morning the Shearwater barge arrived, and when we saw people’s trucks with food boxes arrive at the under-cover area outside our work, I headed out to help.  

The weighing and sorting of everything took quite a bit longer than normal because people were working to maintain a “social distance”.  This made it impossible to help each other, and therefore everything took more time.  The boxes were also much less organized than usual with multiple boxes containing two people’s groceries, which were unlabeled.  We then had to consult our receipts and sort out the items.  We assume that this was due to the high volume of online orders that Save On Foods was receiving.  Their staff must be completely swamped.  

I was quite surprised by how much food we actually did receive.  It seemed as though they either had items in stock or they were able to make adequate substitutions for most items.  The things that we did not get were meat, eggs, and flour, but we did receive almost all of the vegetables that we had ordered, and also peanut butter and mayonnaise, so that was nice.  Hopefully we will be able to get some flour from the Bella Coola store because we are almost out.  

After getting all of our food home, I headed back to work to help Jason.  He was pretty much done all of the last little jobs, and we worked at moving furniture back into the apartment.  We also sorted through all of our work supplies and put everything away. 

While at work, Ken, not the wharfinger Ken, but the other one, stopped by to see us.  He is the manager of the fish-fry farm here in Ocean Falls.  Their tanks are on land, and they raise fish from fry until they are able to go into salt water, then they get shipped to the ocean tanks on the coast.  We had talked with him in the past about the possibility of working for him if we were to decide to stay in Ocean Falls this year, and he had discussed the idea with his boss.  

They have decided that what would be best would be if they could completely isolate the crew shifts. There are already two employees who work at the farm who live in Martin Valley, and so it would be ideal if we worked with these two people, and his crew that comes in from outside worked together. There would be disinfection between each shift change, and so transfer risk of the coronavirus would be minimalized. They are also changing their shifts from 8 days on - 6 days off, to 14 days on - 14 days off, and he was wondering if we would want to work with his two resident employees. We found out all of the details from him, and then said that we would talk it over. 

Now it is up to us to decide if we want to make a commitment to being here for a little while longer. We have some flexibility, as he said that any time that we give him would be helpful, so we are thinking to say yes to two, two-week shifts.  Opening the door to working at this place may also be beneficial to us in the future, and it is always good to help out, but we are still hesitant to making this commitment.  We have until tomorrow to decide.