First off:

Smells Like Yukon and Wicker Hog Media do not endorse arson in any way, shape or form, even if it’s the kind of arson that any reasonable person might consider a public service of the highest order—for example, the gleeful torching of Great Big Sea’s tour bus. If you’re now wondering “What’s with the quasi-legal disclaimer?”, you obviously haven’t listened to the audio outtakes posted over there on the right side of your monitor.

As it turns out, Segment 06 “The Office Sweet” was a gold mine for outtakes, thanks in large part to the loose lips of Thane Phillips.

“I thought of a whole bunch of other stuff I could have said,” Thane reported to Mark about a week after the segment first aired.

We think you’ll agree that he’s done more than enough already.

“The Office Sweet,” like many Smells Like Yukon segments, was a last-minute substitution. Originally, we’d planned to do a story that would examine—celebrate?—the great long-standing Yukon tradition of the bush party. With the 2007 high school grad season approaching, the timing was certainly right for this kind of story. What super-cool dude in his mid-thirties wouldn’t die for a chance to get down and dirty at the Hen, Stag or After Grad in one of the Greater Whitehorse Area’s finest gravel pits? Sadly, the production schedule couldn’t seem to accommodate the story. Or maybe we hadn’t found the right angle yet. (We’ll figure the hook out eventually, so stay tuned for a possible bush party story in the future.)

Recollections of how the idea for “The Office Sweet” came about and superseded the previously-scheduled programming are a little hazy, but it must have been percolating in Mark’s mind when he paid a visit to Jesse’s office one sunny day in late March or early April. After seeing the impressive view from Jesse’s corner office in the Elijah Smith Building, Mark pitched the idea for a story about trying to find the Whitehorse office with the best view and location. Part of the idea’s appeal was its simplicity: no high concept here. It was just a straightforward multi-stop odyssey in the vein of the “Shop Coffee” quest that inspired the Smells Like Yukon series in the first place. A return our roots.

While Mark plugged away on the script for “Harder than Hell,” Jesse began to flesh out some notes for “The Office Sweet.” In all likelihood, the effort to come up with a working title for the piece provided the inspiration to pay small tribute to the BBC TV series The Office and the movie Office Space, of which both Mark and Jesse are big fans. The tribute eventually took the form of our inclusion of a clip from the pathetic Milton Waddams character from Office Space; he’s the one whose desk ends up in the company’s dingy basement. Fans of The Office—and you’d have to be a pretty serious fan—would have twigged to our use of the Muppets’ “Mahna Mahna" song in the piece. The series’ protagonist/antagonist David Brent makes several references to the Muppets throughout the series, and season two actually begins with Brent and several of his beleaguered staff members humming this song, which is officially credited to Mahna Mahna & the Two Snowths.

By mid-April, we’d narrowed our potential candidates for “Best Office in Whitehorse” down to a short-list of three: Yukon Energy on Robert Service Way; Physio Plus at the Canada Games Centre; and, Health and Social Services on the fourth floor of the downtown’s Financial Plaza Building. Our other strong candidates had been the control tower at Whitehorse International Airport (or, alternatively, the airport manager’s office), and the corner office overlooking the Yukon River in the YTG main admin building. But we figured our three choices offered the perfect variety in terms of location, as well as representing the main sectors of Yukon’s economy: private business, government, and non-profit organizations. We also had to consider the fact that physiotherapist Thane Phillips—never one to shy away from a spotlight, microphone or a naked wipe-out on his mountain bike in front of 100 people—had already informed his employers that we’d be paying a visit to his workplace for the story. We couldn’t bear to disappoint him….

With one location nailed down, a simple division of labour soon secured our access to the other two. Mark called Janet Patterson at Yukon Energy, who quickly got control centre operator Steve Blysak’s agreement to open his working environment to us. It’s unclear whether Janet, a former CBC Yukon on-air host, thought much of our mission, but she was certainly a firm believer that the Yukon Energy office would be a tough one to beat in terms of our criteria. Meanwhile, Jesse had to go through proper channels to get clearance for our visit to the Health & Social Services office—but he works in government, so it was a good job for him.

On Friday, April 20, Jesse booked the afternoon off his real job and we set off to visit our three finalists. The weather certainly cooperated. It was so sunny and warm, we couldn’t resist the temptation to make a pit-stop at the Liquor Store for a couple of cases of Chilkoot Lager. But don’t jump to the conclusion that we drink on the job—the beer was for after.

At two o’clock, we pulled up, clean and sober, to the Yukon Energy Building down by the Yukon River. Janet met us at the door and handed us off to Steve in the Control Room. As expected, the view of Whitehorse Rapids dam and the Yukon River downstream, including the Millennium Trail and Rotary Bridge, was pretty cool. Steve was a good interviewee and, judging by his willingness to interrupt the process to attend to various alarms and flashing lights on his seven-screen console, he was an even better control centre operator. Sure, the interview took us a little longer than we expected—but at least the town didn’t end up underwater and without electricity. It wasn’t until we’d left the building that we realized we forgot to take pictures of the view from Steve’s office. However, Mark did take one short video of Steve describing how the control room had been temporarily located in the bathroom of a trailer following a fire. This video was so horribly underexposed that it may warrant inclusion in Smell-O-Vision’s woefully thin catalogue at some future date.

After a trip up the hill to visit Thane at Physio Plus—where we got more sound than we could possibly use in a six-minute piece, hence the outtakes—we were on our way to Health & Social Services. A communication breakdown meant we weren’t 100% sure they’d be expecting us, but when we stepped off the elevator onto the fourth floor, Pat Duncan soon appeared and rounded up colleague Pam Buckway. After confirming that we hadn’t inadvertently crashed an afternoon bridge club for retired Yukon politicians of the Liberal persuasion, we got down to business in a conference room. No strangers to the interview process, both Pat and Pam were very polished interview subjects. Pat even did her best to spin our radio piece into a PSA for Yukon’s insured health services, so we had to nip that in the bud—or maybe it was in the editing! Pam, for her part, kindly offered to switch roles with Mark when he confessed that his interview technique puts him roughly in the same league as that Saturday Night Live character Chris Farley used to do….

By 4:30 p.m., our little tour was all wrapped up. Even though the piece was really about the journey, not the destination, we knew we’d still have to go through the exercise of picking a “winner.” By that point, we agreed that the Health & Social Services office, for a variety of reasons, was our first choice. Any thoughts about reviewing the clips that evening were quickly pushed aside by Mark’s fast-acting freezer, which had taken delivery of the beer that had spent the afternoon riding around in Jesse’s car. In fact, work on the story came to a total standstill for the next week, at which point the first and second drafts of the script were completed in short order before Mark hopped on a plane to Vancouver. Jesse polished the script and completed the editing over the next day or two, while Mark discovered what a pain in the ass it is to update a website when his computer’s Dreamweaver software is 2,000 kilometers away….

And to conclude:

Smells Like Yukon and Wicker Hog Media do not endorse flattening trees in greenbelts any more than they endorse arson. Unless, of course, the trees are being flattened to make way for a new mountain bike trail.

Thanks for everything, Thane.

(Posted May 2, 2007)