Week 17: You're Fired

As I feared, like many of my co-workers, I got laid off from my summer job at McDonald's. There simply weren't enough customers coming in in an area that was designed for the car, when very little oil was available. In addition, we had to raise the prices of the food to pay for the costs of transportation, and we had occasional shortages. The unemployment rate in Kingston, Canada has skyrocketed; Statistics Canada figures for this month place the unemployment rate at 27%, and it's bound to get higher. So far, there haven't been any layoffs in the public sector here, but if tax revenue stops coming in then those will be inevitable too. At least I was one of the lucky ones - I managed to make over $3000 this summer. Inflation has been so high, though, that $3000 is worth about $2000 in last year's dollars. It's almost the end of the summer, and I'll be going back to Toronto for school next week anyways.

Gas prices dropped slightly to $1.97 a litre, but there are still shortages of gasoline everywhere. Owners of diesel cars are slightly luckier - they only have to pay $1.78 a litre, and shortages of diesel are less common, due to the massive reduction in trucking resulting from the poor economy.
Bicycles are still everywhere, there are few cars on the road, and the buses are still packed - it will be worse when the Queen's University students come for the fall. Kingston Transit has started to run school buses on its regular bus routes, a move which promises to greatly increase capacity, but so far, it does not have enough drivers.

People's leisure activities have changed - the movie theatres, stores and restaurants are empty, and many of them have closed. There's still TV, if you want to watch news of the oil crisis south of the border (it's much worse there), and the video rental store is still open (and still quite popular). It is nice out, and a lot of people are doing things outdoors - everything from walking and biking to sailing, swimming, rowing, canoeing, and flying kites. The parks are full of people playing basketball, volleyball, baseball and many other sports - none of which require a drop of oil. However, the skating rinks and indoor pools have closed as an "energy conservation measure". The market downtown is busy, as it is the cheapest place to buy food - locally produced food is much cheaper than food shipped from thousands of kilometers away, which no one is buying anymore.

I'll be going back to school next week. I suspect that things will be much worse in Toronto, but I'll see.

Note: This is a World Without Oil post. All events referenced herein are fictional.