2. Saturday mornings with Kimmie

My first week at the UBC AC I was told that on Saturday morning someone named Kim would show me the ropes with backwashing the filter tank, and I thought to myself, oh, I hope she's nice. Later that day I was introduced to this big tall hairy manly dude named Kim, and a beautiful friendship was born. In the early days I treaded carefully around the fact that he had a girly name, but that was short lived. Now he's Kimmie or Kimberley or Kimberley Anne (his middle name is Andrew) all the time.

One can't really describe Kimmie so much as experience him, so I'm not going to try that hard here - those who have met him will know what I'm talking about. Kimmie is the person with whom I've laughed the hardest and possibly had the most fun with in my entire life. He's a marvelously complex human being - tall and rugged and manly, yet collects african violets (I think he's got a bit of a problem actually). I took him to the african violet show at Van Dusen Gardens one year, and I'm not sure the blue rinse crowd knew what to make of him. He doesn't really drink, yet when he does he makes sure it's Jagermeister. He loves Star Trek, and any and all musicals. He's hands down the funniest person I've ever met, yet can also be the most serious. He's got one of the biggest hearts of anyone I've ever met. And he can clap the loudest. He for sure holds a permanent spot on my list of top 10 favourite human beings of all time.

So Kimmie and I worked the Saturday morning early maintenance shift together for about five years. When it looked like he was going to lose the shift due to seniority reasons, I changed the criteria for working that shift (makes much more sense, but I did have alterior motives) so that he'd be sure to secure the shift for the duration of his tenure at the UBC AC. We had fun. We made dirty nasty pool maintenance work a hoot. And we hold the record for the fastest backwash ever, at just 20 minutes and change (this job normally takes two people close to an hour).

Many of my other favourite UBC AC memories feature Kimmie, so he'll show up again, but he for sure deserves to be in a category of his own. Yay Kimmie!!!