The Book of Sifty

Lost socks 7:22AM

At the ski resort in Colorado people lost things all the time..
working on the lift people would always turn up with things they'd found on
the field.

People would hand in all sorts of crap. It always amazed me what people lost
on the mountain. I mean it was like below freezing most of the time.
Actually a lot below, a lot of the time. So why the hell people would take
off their ski boots is beyond me. Let alone then lose one of their socks in
the snow..

Official policy was anything that looked like it was worth something it was
to be taken down to the base and turned into lost property at the end of the
day. Anything else was to be collected in the lift shack and handed into the
lost property people once a week. Generally this meant it collected in a box
in the lift shack until Jerry turned up and told one of us to take it down.

Jerry was this retired schoolteacher that was on our lift crew. She was
pretty cool if you didn't mind being treated like a grade school kid some
times. If, when she occasionally asked you to do something you did it, and
you listened to the way she thought you should do something you'd done a
million times before, she was quite classic to work with. And she had quite
a hot daughter too...

Anyway she'd always rag on us for pissing behind the lift shack, or not
sweeping the snow off the chairs properly in the morning. Or letting the
lost property pile up in the shack. So more often than not this involved me
carrying a bag of mismatched ski gloves and ugly sunglasses down at the end
of the day and giving them to the lost property people. Whom I'm sure put
them straight in the bin. But it kept Jerry happy.

If there was something you liked the look of in the lost property you turned
in you could put your name next to it and claim it after 21 days, if it
owner didn't come looking for it. So I managed to score a watch, a hat, and
a pair of walkie talkies. These were a common as thing for people to lose,
but good fun. Everybody has them in the states, they cost like $40, and
people use them to keep track of their kids, friends, and just generally
over organise things. Like a typical inane conversation went something like
this..

'Hank to Bobby Jr. Where are you?'

'Hank?'


'Bobby, we're on the lift. Where are you?'


'On the lift too, we're on the Eskimo lift on chair number 73'


'Oh.. so are we, ..hang on.. yeah we're on chair 74.. '


'You mean in the chair behind us..'

Halfway organised 7:26AM

If you are halfway organised and keep track of each other they are really
only something you should need for emergency situations, or serious
disorganisation. Still they are really super useful when you're driving
around in a strange town with a couple of car loads of people trying to find
a party and need some inter-car communication..
(cell phones didn't get very
reliable coverage - and they were so expensive very few people had them)

Anyway one day somebody turned in a disposable camera, a crappy $10 one. It
had about 19 photos left. This was the middle of college spring break and we
were flat out with people who couldn't ski and couldn't get onto a lift
flailing around all over the place. So we hung this camera off the side of
the lift controls, where people can see it as they get on the lift, and got
back to work.

Of course during a quite bit later in the day we took a couple of photos of
each other. Since it would be pretty classic if these people got back their
photos after their holiday with a couple of random shots of some lift
operators in there.

But the camera hung around the lift for weeks.
Eventually I looked at it one day and it had no photos left. Screw. Can't
really give it back now.. its like 90% lift ops and besides they never came
looking for it. So I dismantled the camera and kept the film, it hung around
the apartment till we left and I put it in my bag. Back in London I was
filling a box of shit to post back to NZ. I tossed the film in there.

Finally yesterday the box shows up in NZ. I'd totally forgotten about this
film. But there it was. So I took it in to get developed today. Well there
are about five random holiday photos of some people. Some photos of two
girls flailing about in the snow, and about 20 photos of various members of
the lift department!

Theres my work mate Adam and myself. There is Logan who only worked for
about 2 weeks before getting fired. There some classic self-portraits of the
various mechanics who'd would turn up at the lift before us in the morning,
and some really odd arty shots of the microwave in the lift shack.