TORONTO – The largest economic power in the nation came to a grinding halt this morning as Eddie, the streetcar operator, struggled to properly move the Dundas streetcar tracks using his large wooden stick.
“Oh man, I’m going to be late for my job managing global investments for the Canadian mining industry” said passenger Dylan Mallory as Eddie paused the streetcar, collected the big stick from beside the door, and went outside to manually move the streetcar tracks.
“I used to be a lot faster but I’ve been doing this so long I developed sciatica in my back.,” said Eddie as he jammed away at the tracks with Ol’ Hickory – his nickname for his favourite stick. “Are you sure you guys wanna talk about this right now?”
Traffic in both directions came to a screeching halt as Eddie worked on switching the tracks for several minutes before ambling back to the streetcar and carefully putting Ol’ Hickory back in its place.
“I have a conference call with London in 5 minutes!” screamed Walter Albright from the driver seat of his Mercedes as he watched Eddie check his mirrors.
Others did not mind the delay as much.
“It’s cute that, even in the 21st Century, Toronto is sticking to its quaint, small-town ways,” said Linda Hearst, visiting from New York.
Studies estimate that Toronto, the largest city in Canada and 3rd largest economic centre in North America, loses approximately 3,000 working hours a year to ‘stick time.’ The financial cost of this is reportedly well over $10,000,000.00.
However that number pales in comparison to the annual cost of cleaning up garbage spilled by the raccoons the city can’t keep out of our garbages.
