Killing Time

I haven't talked too much about work but there are a couple of things that I'd like to mention.  My biggest complaint with my job thus far is the actual building I work in.  It is old, small, dingy and falling apart.  This building has been around so long and has seen so many companies come and go that literally every person I've spoken to says that they worked in the building in one of the last 5 decades. Some more than once with a different company. The air conditioning doesn't work very well and in general it's kind of a depressing environment.  My biggest complaint, by far, has been the toilets.  They are dark, dirty and they smell.  To top it off they have a trough for a urinal.  In October we are moving to a new building (thank Spaghetti Monster!).  In the meantime, the building management has decided to do a few little upgrades to the place.  The most important is the toilets.  They are doing the toilet renovations one floor at a time and my floor just happened to be first.  It has been a vast improvement. Unfortunately, the rest of the building is still awful. How awful?  Well, this weekend they are working on removing the asbestos from the basement.  Asbestos.  I can't wait until October but until then I'll kill the time as best as I can.
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Both Nadia and I have noticed that there is an unspoken, undercurrent of violence in Perth.  The local papers are filled with stories of assault and violence every day.  We thought that perhaps the violence was being overblown by the local media.  So, I decided to look into it a little more.  Because different countries classify 'assault' in different ways I decided to look at a statistic a little more black and white: homicide.

In 2010 the homicide rates for the following cities was:

City              Population          Homicides
Calgary        1.1 million              15                   
Perth            1.7 million              56                    
Vancouver   2.3 million              43

The numbers demonstrate that Perth has a much higher homicide rate than Calgary.  Understandable since it is a larger population in a more compressed area.  However, Perth's homicide rate is even higher than Vancouver which has a larger population and population density.

The violent undercurrent, it appears, is not just our imagination. We haven't had any issues but we can almost feel it in the air.