The other weekend, an old guy came into my work just before we closed. He walked up to the counter with $15 in his hands and said “Gimme your biggest burger.”

The biggest burger we have is a pound, so I was a little skeptical that this guy would be able to eat it, but he was entirely adamant about it. Everyone else was closing up, so I took his order, threw the burger on the grill, and dressed it for him. While I was dressing his burger, he started making small talk. It was a pretty normal conversation at first. He asked me about the restaurant, where I’m from, and so on. When I had answered all his questions, he told me “I like your history”. 

I kind of just looked at him awkwardly and thanked him. I turned around to continue cooking his burger and he muttered something while my back was turned. I turned around, smiled, and asked “I’m sorry? It’s very loud back here.”

“You know there’s time travel, eh?” he told me.

I looked at him quizzically, and saw my coworker giving him the same look out of the corner of my eye. I just laughed and said “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah there is.” He said, giving me an awkward smile back. “You believe in Jesus Christ?”

His question kind of took me off guard, and in an attempt to be polite I said “Oh, that’s a tough question.” He told me it was fine, I gave him his burger, and I turned around to go into the back room and tell the other people working with me what had just happened. While I was telling the story, a guy I work with who had been mopping the front came into the back and asked where the guy had went. “He was there a second ago while I was mopping, and there aren’t any footprints leading to the washroom …. Maybe he’s Jesus! He could walk on water!”

My coworker and I joked for a minute about the possibility of this old guy being Jesus, when he walked out from the direction of the bathroom and went back to his seat.

My friend said “Damn it, too bad he wasn’t Jesus.”

Only in Oshawa

I used to know a guy who lived in a sketchy apartment building on Simcoe street, and a few buddys and I used to go there to sesh pretty often.

One of my friends, Nick, told me about one time he went there without me. This sketchy guy that he knew showed up randomly one day, and they started talking. Now, when I say he was sketchy, I mean in and out of jail constantly for some pretty stupid reasons. While they were talking, the guy told Nick to come check something out in the bathroom. 

A few minutes later, a gunshot went off. The guy had pulled Nick aside to show him the gun he had in his waistband, and Nick (being the smart guy that he is) accidentally fired it. Nick and the guy dipped, leaving the guy who owned the place by himself until the cops showed up.

Only in Oshawa. 

I lived in Oshawa for a couple years when I went to Durham. I didn’t have a car at the time so I always took the bus and I always saw the same dude with bunny ears on walking down Simcoe Street North.

I lived in the apartment building at the intersection of Simcoe and Rossland. My apartment windows were ground level and it was summer when I first moved in so I had the windows open with just the screens on them. In the first week I had a sketchy fuckin dude bend over and look into my window and ask me if I had a cigarette he could bum off me.

Obviously I said no.

I saw him many many times after that and it just started to seem second nature and normal when I’d see him picking up cigarette butts in the parking lot and smoke them as I left for school. Fuck.

Pretty sure he’d wait til I fell asleep to come into my apartment and crawl in bed with me, but was the ultimate of creepers and would just be gone by the time I woke up.

Oshawa man. Oshawa.

-That’s nuts! I knew a guy who lived in an apartment on that corner, in the sketchy ass building right across from Northminster United. This actually reminded me of another story, I’ll have to post it soon

Last week, I started college. I was at school 12 hours a day until Friday, when I have one class that ends at 9:20 in the morning. I was excited to take the train home and be back in Oshawa, anticipating the time I would have to walk around downtown before I worked. I got off the bus right across from my work, went and talked to people, and nothing overly exciting happened. I left work to go get some other stuff done, and waited at a bus stop nearby.

Almost as if to welcome me back to Oshawa, a girl was standing at the bus stop, headphones in her ears, dancing and singing quite loudly to herself. The bus showed up, and it was packed. Every row of seats had at least one person in it, there was no choice but to sit next to some random, so I sat next to a guy while other people got on the bus. Another girl got onto the bus, wide-eyed, and whispered to herself “Oh, fuck me…”

I finished what I needed to get done and went home. On my way back to work, I sat at the back of the bus. A couple got on not too long after me, and the guy sat rather close. When he sat down, I noticed he had a tattoo on his neck of script that looked like a 12 year old had done it. It said “Hater Proof”. I laughed, and he looked at me as if he was about to rip my head off.

While I was walking towards work, I passed an older guy. He had to have been in his mid-forties, if not fifty. He was wearing a light blue shirt that looked as though it was see-through, his entire gnarly gut in full view. I say it looked see-through, but he could have just been excessively sweaty. 

I worked for 4 hours, rather uneventfully, and left to catch the bus. Around Simcoe and Athol, I passed a homeless man. If you’ve been around downtown a lot, you should know who I’m talking about when I say it was the lumberjack looking one. I’ve seen him around all the time, and he generally seems like a nice enough guy. As I walked by though, he screamed “FUCKHEADS!” and started punching the air.

To top it off, on the bus ride home a girl went to get off of the bus. She stood at the back door, no more than 2 feet in front of me, and as the bus stopped she tripped. I’m assuming she stubbed her toe or something, but she bent over and shut her eyes, opening her mouth wide as if she was about to scream. When the back door opened, she looked at me then ran off the bus.

It felt good to be home.

Only in Oshawa

I went to EB Games in the Oshawa Centre the other day, and while I was standing in line a kid came in with his grandparents. When they came in, his grandpa said “Don’t you want to keep your money till we go on holiday? Gambling?” He stood at the counter awkwardly for a minute until the girl working there asked him what he was looking for. He said Skyrim, and the girl told him she had one copy left for xbox and one copy left for PS3. When he told his grandmother she had to buy it for him she asked why. He told her it was rated M, and she immediately started telling the kid he couldn’t get it because his mom would not approve. The kid started raising his voice, saying “It’s not sexual content! I have lots of M rated games, but she won’t let me play games with sexual content!”

Eventually, he convinced his grandparents to buy it for him and I left the store. When I got home, I looked at the back of my copy of Skyrim. It has sexual themes. His mom was probably not amused.

Only in Oshawa

I went to the movies with a buddy of mine, and he started telling me about a party he had gone to recently.

He mentioned that he was talking to a guy who sells pot, and the guy told him about how some kid bought a gram completely with change.

To prove it, the guy pulled out a single, long roll of nickels, quarters, dimes and pennies. My buddy told me it looked like a mentos pack filled with change.

Only in Oshawa

Yesterday, I was sitting in the park with my girlfriend. There were several seagulls flying around, being noisy and sketchy. Three of them landed near a table close to us where two people were sitting. The seagulls all started cawing, sticking their heads out and walking side by side. My girlfriend was telling me how that can’t be normal, when the guy sitting at the table next to the seagulls pointed his finger at them and screamed “DIE!”

We broke out into laughter, and the seagulls flew away.

Only in Oshawa

On my way home from work last night, I stopped at a convenient store next to my bus stop to grab something to drink. Once I got up to the cash, I started to debate whether or not I wanted candy. Two elderly women came into the store, so I moved to the side to let them pay first.

The first woman was using a walker, and had a huge scowl on her face. She grabbed a diet coke, a chocolate bar, and a tub of cotton candy. When she got up to the counter, the cashier looked at her and said “How’s it going jockey?!”

The woman gave the cashier a look like she was about to leap over the counter at him. She gave the cashier $10 and waited for her change. Before he gave it to her, the cashier calmly asked if she wanted any lottery tickets. I would assume he asked her that because she usually does by lottery tickets, but the woman glared at him and said “I don’t want any tickets, that’s my change now give it to me or I’ll call the police!”

The cashier laughed and pretended to put the change into his pocket, telling the woman to call the police. The woman started screaming “GIVE ME MY CHANGE RIGHT NOW GOD DAMNIT!”, so the cashier gave her the change and she hobbled out of the store.

Now, normally I wouldn’t laugh at anything like this, but the old woman got what was coming to her. She came off like a grouchy, miserable woman. I was standing to the side, laughing with a friend of mine who had come into the store in the middle of the situation, and the woman stopped at the door, turned to my friend (who is a bit of a sketchy character, but a nice guy nonetheless) and said “Don’t you try and steal my change or I’ll call the police.”

Only in Oshawa.