One of my first jobs in Canada was in an inbound call cen­ter. I was a bilin­gual agent, no doubt hired because I spoke flu­ent French.

The pay was low and I was work­ing from 9:00 am to 6:30 pm. On top of that, I reg­u­larly had to deal with cus­tomers call­ing from Quebec’s coun­try­side and we would have some vocab­u­lary and accent(s) issues. In a des­per­ate attempt to under­stand what they were say­ing I’d ask them to repeat while the cus­tomers invari­ably though I was Eng­lish and didn’t actu­ally speak French. “Put your man­ager on ze line, tabernac’, it iz unbe­liev­able I can’t get ser­vice in Français!”

Even my man­ager didn’t have the heart to explain I was cer­ti­fied 100% French.

But one thing helped to make it through the long days (that is, other than the pack of cig­a­rette I smoked and the cup of burn­ing hot cof­fee sit­ting by me on the table): when cus­tomers called, I had to ask them for their address. And I soon dis­cov­ered Cana­di­ans had some kind of humour when it came to nam­ing places.

I had heard funny places’ names before. France, for exam­ple, has a vil­lage named “Con­dom” where Eng­lish like to take pic­ture of the sign (and occa­sion­ally steal it). Took me three years of learn­ing Eng­lish to under­stand why. There’s also a small place named “Montcuq”— lit­er­ally, “my ass”.

Chi­nese have another kind of geo­graph­i­cal humour. For exam­ple, the city of Changchun (??). Changchun means “Eter­nal Spring”—only thing is, the city is located in Manchuria, China’s North­ern­most point, near the Russ­ian bor­der. And spring is all but eternal.

“Lhassa” the cap­i­tal of Tibet is another one. I’m sure Lhasa means some­thing beau­ti­ful in Tibetan, but in plain Man­darin is just trans­lates as “piss and shit”.

But Canada… let’s just put it this way: when a cus­tomer called me from Dildo, New­found­land, I was about to burst out laughing.

Indeed, Canada has some inter­est­ing places, most of them located in Newfoundland:

• Blow Me Down
• Come By Chance
• Jerry’s Nose, Luke’s arm & Robert’s arm (famous peo­ple around I guess… I’m glad they didn’t detail other part of their anatomy !)
• Mos­quito (the tourist board always find it hard to pro­mote the place…)
• Name­less Cove (run out of ideas?)
• Ha Ha Bay (what’s so funny?)
• Rooms (avail­able?)

In Nova Scotia:

• Ecum Secum (just say it aloud…)
• Egypt (wrong country)
• Lower Econ­omy
• Shag Har­bour (no com­ment… very famous among teenagers here, I guess)
• Yan­kee­town (hi south­ern neighbors !)

In Ontario:

• New Credit (Lower Economy’s sis­ter city?)
• Ochi­ichag­we­babigoin­ing (Ill link any­one who can pro­nounce that—being drunk doesn’t count)
• Snug Har­bour (Shag Har­bor, Snug Har­bor… what’s the deal with Cana­dian harbors??)
• Swastika (weird… I had to read this his­tory of the town to understand)
• Tiny (10,000 peo­ple, what do they com­plain about?!)

In Saskat­e­chewan:

• Adanac (Canada spelled backwards…)
• Car­rot River (do you smell like car­rots after you swim there?)
• Cli­max (far enough from Dildo)
• Drinkwa­ter (you mean carrot)
• Elbow (huh?)
• Eye­brow (HUH?)
• Ura­nium City (I’ve always wanted to go there just to send a “hi from Ura­nium city” post­card to my friend, a proud Green­peace member)

In Alberta :

• Car­rot Creek (Car­rot River’s sis­ter city?)
• Entrance (at least I won’t miss this one on the freeway)
• Milk River (CARROT we said, CARROT!)

Can other coun­tries beat that?!

Related arti­cles:

1. Foodie Review: Planet Cof­fee (Ottawa)
2. 5 Things My Mum Observed in Canada
3. Food In Numbers
4. Stuff Cana­di­ans Like (Part 1)
5. Pic­ture of the Week: Curi­ous Ant