I took a job

A few years ago, I had been laid off from a fairly low-stress, cushy job. More even than money, I needed to get another job so I could stay in Canada (at that point I hadn't yet officially immigrated as a permanent resident). So after a couple of months of unemployment, I took a job in an awful suburb north of Montreal. The commute was brutal. I didn't have a car, so I took the metro to the end of the line, then took a bus for a long time. It took an hour and a half each way. The office was in a short, square office building. In front of it there was a highway. On the other side of the highway was a shopping mall. Behind the mall was another highway. To the left of the office: a road with more offices. To the right: A bus terminal. My desk was in a crowded, windowless room.

It was the end of winter. Elsewhere this would be spring. Not in an awful suburb north of Montreal.

I made friends with a co-worker who had also just started there. He was from eastern Europe. We had the same middle name. Sometimes at lunch or breaks, he and I would go outside, just to get out of the office. We'd walk around the parking lot, making laps around the building. He'd smoke. Pretty soon, we were deep into April, and we'd go outside for our walks with high expectations. But we were always disappointed. It just never stopped snowing or sleeting and it was always windy and cold. (Of course it was windy, it was an industrial wasteland, no trees to get in the way of wind.) But we were desperate for escape from dark office drudgery. We started making bigger laps. We walked to the far ends of the parking lot. And then one day, we just decided to start walking down one of the highways, until we found something. I mean, we didn't say, "Let's walk until we find something", but that's what was in our minds. And so we took a long walk and eventually we came to a break in the buildings and roads. It was a little patch of land that had been cleared. They were going to build something there. The ground was all muddy and there was a hole filled with muddy water. But there was some vegetation growing around the muddy pit! It was great. We stopped there and talked about why they would dig such a hole.

Then we went back to work and had to stay late because we had taken such a long walk at lunch.
Eventually that company moved its office to downtown Montreal and I liked the job much better. They laid me off in the fall.