There has been a wave of discussion recently, both in and out of cyberspace, over the news that the mighty Google, search engine extraordinaire, has announced it will be making an IPO – Initial Public Offering – thus making it possible for an ordinary guy, presumably one with money to burn, to buy a little piece of the company via purchases of shares of its stock.

(Gee whillikers! I haven’t been this excited since I read long ago that pop sensation Madonna was going public with a line of clothing. Of course, at the time it was because I just loved the thought of having in my portfolio a share or two, complete with frameable stock certificates, of companies named “Boytoy” and “Slutco”. But I digress.)

Although Google as a force is still really in its nascent stages – the company only exploded onto the scene a mere five years ago – the sheer scope of its global impact today was driven home to me in a very recent exchange with one Jeff Miller, a man who maintains a website devoted to word oddities and trivia.

One of his sections is devoted to long words, and I noticed that he had included a classic. But I also noted he was missing a quirky related fact about it that long ago had struck me as an oddity of the genre. Here’s the brief message I sent him:

“You might consider adding, on your ‘Long words’ page under ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ entry, that ‘interdenominationalistically’ has precisely the same number of letters (28). In our family at least, they are both equally well-known.”

In very short order – less than a day in fact – I received this message in reply:

”This word is under consideration. However, a google search gives exactly 3 hits, all on pages discussing long words. This seems to suggest perhaps that the word is not well known outside of your family! Thanks for the tip. Jeff Miller”

I read that with a mixture of both disappointment and dismay. Disappointment because our little family oddity, which my daughter cites with delight on those occasions where wordplay is the subject of conversation, was essentially dismissed with a cyber-sniff, and dismay because it suggested to me that someone with so thorough a collection of word oddities should be so limited in his authority citation. A three-hit google reference was all he needed to conclude that the word is “not well-known outside of your family.”

Well of course it’s not! That’s (a) why it’s an oddity, and (b) why I thought you’d be interested in it.

How many hits, I wonder, would have been returned had he searched “name”, the bare-bones root word of “interdenominationalistically”? (I’ll save you the trouble – 279 million on 30 April 2004). Would 279 million returns justify a mention, Mr. Miller? (Probably not, because at that volume, it’s hardly an oddity, is it?)

But the simple fact is, it’s a word.

On its path to being, it begins in English with “name”, and even earlier among its stout Old English roots as “nama”, “nomen” in Latin and “onoma” in Greek. It travels structurally and historically through verbs forms like “nominate” and “denominate”, their nouns “nomination” and “denomination”, detouring as it goes along sidings where are parked trains of adjectives like “nominal” and “denominational” and their adverb tenders “nominally” and “denominationally”. A hike along a connecting “national” trail will lead you to a “nationalist” who might bore you to death he is so “nationalistic”.

And so on, and so on.

My point is that the word “interdenominationalistically” is crafted from legitimate rules of English grammar and spelling. Yet ersatz wordsmith Mr. Miller tells me it’s merely “under consideration” because it is not common – witness, he cites, the meagre Google return. But in the context of his site’s breathless pronouncement that Here There Be Word Oddities, I say, “so what?”

Mr. Miller’s reply disappoints me because he makes it appear that his research begins and ends with Google. In our house, we have literally dozens of paper dictionaries. The massive “Oxford Compact”, its type so tiny that it must be read with a magnifying glass, is still the most revered. But we also have dictionaries of Canadian English, American English, dictionaries of slang, dictionaries of the origins of English names, foreign language-to-English dictionaries and their reverses, crossword puzzle dictionaries, spelling dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, picture dictionaries that name the several distinct parts of a paper clip, even a Scrabble dictionary that doesn’t bother with time-wasting trivia like the meaning of a word; its purpose is simply to tell you the word exists and you can seize that triple-word score with your u-less “q”. In fact, I have a book about the writing of the Oxford dictionary (It has spawned a sequel. Movie rights are probably in the works) and another book about the passion some people have always had for building libraries – the book collections, not the buildings per se.

And “dictionaries” is correct. Because in our house no one dictionary ever completely answers our “What’s this mean?” requirement.

I am not condemning either Mr. Miller or the use of online resources. In fact, I often widen my dictionary prowling by using a superb online resource called the Librarians’ Index to the Internet (LII) that has whole subsets of dictionaries available to the computer user that would simply bankrupt a homeowner and collapse your bookshelf were you to set out to acquire paper versions of LII’s vast array of reference links.

But were I in Mr. Miller’s place, I would be delighted to discover such a minuscule Google return – here indeed is one more bit of evidence to confirm the word’s rareness.

But I probably won’t be going to Mr. Miller’s place any more. He’s way too myopic for my purposes. I am a word miner, and I am often rewarded by the unearthing of a genuine “gee whiz” nugget that keeps me in love with the English language and its limitless configurations. For me, discovery and affirmation are often simultaneous – “I didn’t know that was a word!”

Mr. Miller, alas, is a data miner, a statistician. Despite his site’s name, his reply suggests he weights a word’s “oddity” not by its rarity, but rather by its googlability. (And if that’s not already a word, wait, because it will be.)

In a wordsmith, and as a wordsmith, I find that to be an oddity.

And now for something completely different:

The following is an extended free-form poem made up entirely and exclusively – including its title – of English-language advertising promotional text, miscellaneous operating instructions and “Engrish” that has been collected from various places around the Internet where foreign-language sources have taken it upon themselves, often working with no more than a desperately valiant intention and a cheap Thesaurus, to promote or to make their products and services understood by those who speak English. Sources are acknowledged at the end.

(And yes, he plagiarized, the first source is the one that motivated me to hunt down several other examples, so much of what follows is in the first source -- albeit in a wholly cold and non-poetic order. I claim credit only for this compilation.)

The punctuation here is exactly as captured. However, in casting the material in poetic form, I have occasionally merged two or more on a single line. Alternatively, some others may overflow to two or more lines. Therefore, I have used an asterisk (*) purely as a visual divider to separate one collected item from the next. Otherwise each item appears exactly as captured. Fill in your own pauses, your interrogatives, even your exclamations, as you immerse yourself in the ebb and flow.

A note to the spelling police: spelling errors are left as they were in the original items. They’re part of their charm.

--------------------------

Sky poem

This notebook is well bound with auto matic excellentic machine.
makes you demonstrate your youth and pride.
Get acquainted with it.
and you'll start a relationship that will last a lifetime. *

Under the blazing sun on the beach at sunset
its always you and the sound of waves
that quench my thirsty body.
tomorrow, I'll let myself flow beyond the waves
as the sea breeze blows. *

Beach boy muscat soda * Green Breeze Sound Sofa *
Outdoor Lifestyle *
Theme Zone * Audio Shot Bar *
Wild Idol Life *
Ultra Future Wave * High styling office *
From france * Power of suit *

Til the midnight * Happy box * Softly, tenderly. Gently.
Let your feelings boil up. Tension is important! Don't forget. *
Pure Sports Mind * Hard Goods *
Brains Organic Form *
Music Is career not hobby *

French. the first french man, not way of clotheing
orthodoxy style imagination gives is to play active *
My Beautiful * Colorful Rainy Days *
For Beautiful Human Life * Go wild *
Mood for the east *

Cute Swimmers * Dream of gold *
Exotic color * Exotic Print *
Imagination Studio *
Fashionable Picture Magazine * Man is the man *
Super young island * Heart on Fire *

For the men being * Super Brain Bank Media *
you can express your own personality to the full. *
warious function such as neat and tidy design
like a competent businessman *

voice recorder can provide you
the advanced business competitive power
besides refine senses, resulting in your successful business. *
Like Cat's Eye lighting up in darkness…
self-luminous function enables you
to meet astonishing color world under any situation
and side you are. *
suitable for those who are sensitive to trend,
since you can change its cover
according to their whole fashion and feeling. *

Make your personality more outstanding. *
Loads of fun, fun to you! * Neo paradigm, neo style. *
Beauty method for lady * Open lady *
British way of life * Feel the beat *

Your mobile style is satisfied with this one.
You’ll be able to make your wonderful life. *
The human furniture * French line *

Before passing gas I look behind me
but I don’t bother when I’m smoking. *
Lighting * All the hotel *
and camera on the backside fits those
who are seeking for their distinctive personality. *

Silky and natural *
While distinctive and somfortable design and
Multi-colored front cover make your personality,
more outstanding,
65000color and rich poly sound feast your eyes and ears. *

Imposition of night club. * It eats drinking alcohol.
There, it is infinite space. *
Declaration of latin chica boon * Non-stop golden dance hour. *
The breakfast becomes morning from 7 o’clock to 9 o’clock *

Ocean delight * This is convenience and a foppish flying pan. *
Don't touch cookies * Snack positively *
Crunky kids crunch chocolate *

Sparkling morning * A happy present from the earth *
Avoid by all means at sanded or lapidarian place
and busy a section of a highway coast,
for fear happen accident…
Warn: the manufacture not be propitious
to under 6 year of children and elder use *

A first favorite is the white flower pickled in the head.
Does everybody also want to become dear like me?
I am a joke baby pig. *

Catching no border * I feel coke *
Pocari sweat - ion supply drink *
This towel is full dreams I’ll take them up one by one
and bring all of them up carefully. *
Aquarius - for that whole body thirst situation *

This session, clothes of duplex are the stylish style
of old
it's an active, and it's functional very well,
and that's the losting a dandy heart always,
let us make a proposal on the significant, of the men
in the old cinema of monochrome.
Of liberty dupleix theme of '89 spring & summer
co-ordiantion, birth to creation, tradition
make a exactly form. Dupleix *

This hi motion model incorporates many moveable features
and realistic stuff *
The Fanky Tomato show *
Born to be chicken * Fuck Vegetables *
Bandai Brain Bank Media * Wild Mook *

The SGH-T500 was born into a jewel.
Studded with 32 cubic zirconium and silken finish
Your T500, like Jewelry, is beautiful.
Features Man made Jewelry
32 shining diamond-like cubic zirconium
symbolize an up-scale image and fast pace lifestyle.
Like glittering jewels, the T500 suggests
unlimited abundance and timeless beauty.
Like a bride’s wedding gift, theT500 excites women
and insures happiness, with its sleek, slim,
compact design,
and velvety finish.
The T500 is equally suited
for the opera house or an important party.

Music lagoon * Sound painting *
Urban contemporary wave from mandom *
Monday git you * I wish that I am be supporting play
for express to like you. *

Oh fair. Oh honey. My dear sweet fairy. Bring me a tiny peace.
It’s my pleasure to be knocked. *
Beautiful curve complements both the design, and the quality
of good feeling which you can get in holding the phone. *
Jive passion talk * Kissin' the movie *
Do you want to join in vehement athletics? *

-----------------------

Sources:
1. www.sgi.com/grafica/japan/
(“A Publication of Grafica Obscura: Collected Computer Graphics Hacks”)

2. www.livejournal.com/~inverseofverse/625.html

3. www.samsung.com

and, of course,

4. www.engrish.com

Bits ‘n’ Pieces

These probably are not even worth griping about, much less worth writing about griping about them, he gerunded, but they ticked me off so someone else is gonna hear about them, too.

Tim Horton Gripe 1: What possesses a managerial team to decide that sales and customer relations will soar in the Tim Horton donut shop chain if they require their front counter staff to ask everyone who orders just coffee, “Yes sir, and would like a donut or a muffin with your coffee today?”

(Let’s see… now there’s a concept that never occurred to me as I entered your fine establishment, its very air saturated with the aroma of thousands of microwave heated, sugar-glazed baked confections, and the trays behind the counter filled chock-a-block with cake donuts, yeast donuts, chocolate donuts, maple donuts, cream or jam stuffed donuts – or at least donuts stuffed with a barely recognizable chemical facsimile of flavoured cream or jam – and hey! I just thought of something else – a donut!)

“Actually no, little miss sunshine,” I thought but did not say. “I am roughly halfway through a six-hour road trip and I am in search of a steaming cardboard cup full of enough hot caffeine to see me through some more of this charmless drive along one the most boring roads in the entire province of Ontario – the Kingston to Prescott eastward run along Highway 401. I have decided that your coffee is probably up to the task of overcoming the numbing passage of a fresh mileage post every half kilometre…”

(I know – I’m mixing units of measure, but if you point to one of those signs and ask someone what it’s called, he’s going to say, “It’s a mileage post.” And if you ask him what the number on it means, he’s going to say, “That’s how many kilometres you’ve traveled from 401’s beginning.” But I digress.)

As I hear it, if a counter employee in a Tim Horton donut shop is asking me if I might want a donut with my barrel of coffee, he or she can only have assumed that I am too stupid to have realized that here on the front line of a donut shop they also sell… (get ready for it)… donuts! And here’s a memo to management: do you really want your customers going away with the feeling that they need to be reminded that you sell donuts in a donut shop?!

Why not ask me instead if I want a foot massage or a club soda enema, maybe, or a peek at the April Playmate of the Month? Think of some value-added option that might not, in fact, have occurred to me as I stand here in front of your face in your donut shop where the very shirt you wear runs the name “Tim Horton” across half your chest for all to read.

But please don’t ask me if I want a donut. In fact, I already have considered the possibility, and rejected it. I want precisely that for which I asked.

Tim Horton Gripe 2: One of the early signs of Spring in Canada is the annual nationwide launch of Tim Horton’s “Roll Up the Rim to Win!” contest, where every cardboard coffee cup in a medium, large or extra large size offers the chance to win something. The vast majority of prizes are minor addiction quenchers like coffee, donuts, cookies or muffins, but there are also some fairly major prizes like cash, bicycles, plasma TVs and even one of 30 huge GMC Canyon 4-wheel drive trucks that will enable the typical urban shopper to safely transport his double-double and cruller home while merrily pulverizing any squirrel dumb enough to try darting across the road in front of you.

So last night at my neighbourhood drive-by, I ordered a medium and two larges, but my order was packaged in “rim roll-up” cups only in the medium size. So I asked if the contest was over. No, I was told, it goes into May, “but we only have the contest cups while the supply lasts.” Fine, I replied, so can I have a second medium cup wrapped around the outside of each of the large ones? You guessed it – no I cannot. But she was profusely apologetic. Now oddly enough, they’ll happily do the reverse. If I had wanted a hand-saving second cup around the outside of my roll-up medium-sized one, they would quite cheerfully have wrapped a non-contest one around it.

Here’s a key difference between a Canadian and an American. I think that, were I an American drive-by coffee purchaser at this point, I would have slid the two large ones back across the counter and asked for the full order in medium cups, instead of large. Plus I probably would have wounded the drive-up window clerk with a round from a .22cal pistol that I would be carrying in my glove compartment. (I’m stereotyping unfairly here, and I apologize. Some of my best friends are Americans. I actually like a lot of Americans. Just not the ones who happen to be running the country at the moment. But for the record, I especially like Americans who have guns and who can shoot me dead in the name of world peace.)

But I’m Canadian, so I just muttered, “It’s not your fault,” and returned home with a mere one contest cup.

However, I did grumble about it all the way home.

Gripe 3: In Chapters Indigo, our biggest megalopolistic book shop chain here in Ottawa, I am asked two questions every single damned time – almost without fail – that I am standing, book(s) in hand, in front of the cashier: “1. Did you find everything you were looking for?” And 2. “Did anyone on our staff offer to help you today?”

In reply to question #1, I can’t tell you how many times I have been tempted to revert to Tim Horton mode and reply, “Why yes. And I am astonished, truly astonished! For while I know that this item in my hand is a remarkably eclectic and highly unlikely discovery to have unearthed here in your gigantic bookstore, it turns out to have been precisely the very thing I was looking for – a book in a bookstore.” But I suspect that both the sarcasm and the humour would be wasted.

And secondly, in fairness to the rather broad definition of “honking big bookstore” in Canada, given that Chapters / Indigo is now also selling an array of non-book crap ranging from playing cards and Godiva chocolates to DVDs / CDs, scented candles, jewelry and bathroom towels, I suppose it’s not unreasonable to complain to the counter person in what is first and foremost a bookstore that my search for a box of inch-and-a-half long #8 Robertson screws sadly had been fruitless.

No less reasonable than it is to be asked the question, that is.

I find question #2 vaguely unsettling. The Canadian in me hates the thought of getting someone in trouble but I’ve often wondered what the response would be if I cried, “No!” and launched into a tirade about the shoddy service that had left me aimlessly wandering the aisles of books in search of a particular title. (I would also have to admit to being completely unable to cope with the ever more specific sea of signs directing me to ever more narrowly defined locations in the store, beginning with, for example, “Non Fiction” (on the wall), then “Military History” (above the shelf) through “World War II” (on the shelf), then “Alphabetically by Author” (also on the shelf), and so on.

Would, I wonder, a “No” reply from me trigger an emergency staff meeting in which the issue is raised of the colossal failure of an entire evening duty roster to detach just one person to ask if I might have been helped in my browsing, perhaps to end with the sacking of the unfortunate soul tasked with wearing the “Supervisor” badge that fateful evening? Would, perhaps, a random selection of staffers – say every fifth one of all those working that evening – be stripped to the waist, strapped to a hatch cover and flogged with a cat ‘o’ nine tails – or worse – as a bitter lesson to all the others not to allow such a calamitous lapse to occur in future?

I have toyed with offering a brusque and dismissive response like, “I did spot one of your stripe-shirted cockroaches coming towards me out of the corner of my eye, and told her to go to hell before she could even open her mouth.” But there my Canadianality kicks in again and, instead, I opt for avoiding even a hint of problem by answering, “Yes.”

It’s amazing the sense of relief it always seems to trigger on the face of the cashier.

When the “Spring forward” clock-change weekend ends with your clock radio snapping to life on Monday morning and the intrusively chipper announcer telling you that the temperature is, with the windchill, running at about minus 28 degrees, you begin to give a serious new emphasis to the whole concept of Work / Life balance. Specifically, the “balance” that says roll right back under your duvet and stay at home because it’s so cold that after two steps outdoors you’re going to have experienced “shrinkage” so drastic that your stomach will be pressured into feeling full until you’ve thawed out again. It’s April, fergawds sake! Minus 28?!!!

But sadly, feeling healthy and at best no worse than wretchedly resentful of the morning cold blast was not going to sit well with my boss as an excuse for staying home, so into the teeth of the northern gale I went. I’ve noted previously that my home to work commute includes a half hour of walking. I might not have mentioned that almost all of this is in a northerly direction. When the windchill hits minus 28 in early April, you can darned well better believe that the wind is going to be howling down from the north!

(It had snowed pretty well almost all day Sunday, after raining almost all day Saturday. So being the kind devoted husband that I am, I thought I’d tuck the car into the garage to that it would be snow-free when my wife went to use it to go to work on Monday morning. Funny thing about a day of snow and plummeting temperatures that follows a day of rainfall – every hole and water channel on your car freezes solid. This includes the opening into which you insert your key to open the door, and it includes the rubber seals around the doors which thoughtfully steer the water around the doors onto the ground. I know, rubber seals don’t “thoughtfully” do anything, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Genuine People Personalities notwithstanding.)

After several minutes of a fruitless struggle with the driver’s door – the day’s worst snow and wind had been directly almost without let-up at the driver’s side of the car – I finally got the passenger door to open up. That required a few more gymnastics as I clambered over the stick shift and finally settled into the driver’s seat, from which I successfully managed to peer through the peephole sized viewing port I had chiseled out of the ice and snow on the windshield. Inching forward until I bumped my sawhorse – my “far enough” indicator – I left the wheels to thaw and I went back in, in search of a large cat for each foot.

It is early April. The first official day of spring was more than two weeks ago.

I am griping about the weather. I AM CANADIAN!!!!

Have a nice day... somewhere warm.

DeLonghi and the short of it
PART III: If you’ve never in your life laid sod, how can you be expected to know the green side goes up?

Dear DeLonghi,

“Where to begin?

My wife and I combine a total of four university degrees. Plus both our jobs frequently involve taking great care not only to understand the written word, but also to write messages whose text leaves no room for any meaning other than the ones we intend. That sounds overly heavy. I don’t mean we’re writing directions for disarming a ticking nuclear warhead. But we both have to communicate with clarity.

That’s why it is so disappointing to discover, after the fact, that even half an effort by the DeLonghi folks to make themselves understood would have made all the difference in the world between our happily enjoying a new product, and my boxing it up in disgust and returning it…”

First of all (for those who have been following the sad tale of me and a DeLonghi since Part I), I am now all but sure that the machine worked fine, after all. I’ll never know with complete certainty, but I’m “Ivory Soap” certain.

Here’s what I think is the key point of departure from what we did, versus what DeLonghi obviously intended. (There are other issues, but this is the big one.)

We were using an espresso coffee “pod”, a pre-packaged little pillow of coffee about the size of a flattened marshmallow, which had been designed to eliminate the need for a post-brew clean-up.

The instruction said to “place the pod in the filter”. That seems simple enough. But the instructions, you see, also come with an illustrated list of the machine’s parts. And the part labelled “pod filter” was a shallow steel insert that fits into the main filter – the big piece with the traditional espresso machine handle on it. So we placed the pod in the insert, placed the two atop the main filter, and locked it into place. That yielded the sprayed water I described in Part I.

But what has been nagging at me from the start is how this could happen, given (a) that the water spout seemed to be unobstructed; and (b) it was a DeLonghi, after all.

So on a whim, I set out to see if anyone else had run into a bad experience with a DeLonghi. No they haven’t. No one. Not one. Anywhere. In fact, when I Googled “DeLonghi disasters”, the only hits I found were in sentences like, “The DeLonghi is a beautiful machine that eliminates any chance of the espresso disasters you get with other brands.”

And then I found this instruction in a review of the DeLonghi on one website: “When using pods, place one pod into the single cup strainer (forget about using the pod strainer) and place the automatic coffee press on top. This is the secret for great crema. Make sure that the machine has been turned on for about 30 minutes and disregard the red pilot light, which will come on much sooner. The machine needs at least 30 minutes of warm up time in order to produce real hot espresso with lots of crema."

And there’s the difference. This guy, almost in passing, says forget about the “pod filter / strainer” and place the “coffee press” on top of the pod.

“On top of” the pod.

“On top of”

(*DING!*)

We had placed the pod on top of the filter – because that’s precisely what the instruction said to do – and that plainly mashed the pod so snugly against the spout, the water was left with no alternative but to exit the machine anywhere it could.

After the fact, it’s amazing to me how the glow of the awareness lightbulb is almost blinding in its “Of course!” intensity. And I suspect anyone with any espresso maker experience, especially with coffee pods, is thinking after reading this, “Why you idiot”.

But never having made espresso with a machine, both my wife and I were acutely conscious of the need to avoid any misdirection of pressurized steam. We’ve both seen filmed examples of the risks associated with jets of uncontrolled steam. So we read and re-read the directions, very carefully, and got the same defective result twice in a row.

All of the machine’s parts (and there are a lot!) are very nicely labelled in the book of instructions. But here’s what’s missing: a simple black and white illustration showing each part visually “stacked” in its proper order to show precisely where the main filter goes, the “pod” goes, and the “pod filter” goes, when brewing with either coffee grounds or a pod.

Because yes it is possible to screw it up. In fact, it is inevitable when the instructions fail to emphasize the distinction between the “main filter” and the “pod filter” when they say, “place the pod in the filter”.

So alas. It’s too late anyway. We’ve obviously found a system that makes excellent espresso and cappuccino at a fraction of the cost. As a gadget-loving guy, of course, I’m a little ticked. But as a cappuccino-loving guy, I’ll get over it. (And there’s something vaguely therapeutic about being able to rid oneself of the day’s tensions by pounding hot milk into a froth.)

My “defective” machine is probably already being combed over by DeLonghi’s crack team of fastidious consumer relations scientists who, even now, are embarking on trial number 87 only to find out that the machine successfully spits out yet another perfect cup of espresso. “But it’s impossible!” they are muttering (except in Italian). “It was returned as defective, and the customer is always right, right?”

Well, not always. The machine was probably working just fine. My whoops.

But its directions, obviously, are a mess.

PS… Answer your damned e-mail next time!

DeLonghi and the short of it
PART II – Foaming at the mouth

The DeLonghi was still an unhappy memory when my wife came home and told me she’d been telling her boss about our experience and he had asked why we didn’t just get a milk frother and a cheap little espresso maker?

It took the dust only moments to settle as I sped back to my online connection to search out information about milk frothers. In short order, I discovered some wonderful machines that, sure enough, did nothing but froth milk. They ranged from little battery-operated swizzle sticks to things that looked a lot like our briefly owned DeLonghi, but without all the bothersome coffee-making bits that had led to water being sprayed across our kitchen counter. I immediately resolved to limit my spending to a mid-range machine that fired superheated steam into a cup of milk and thus produced the froth required for our cappuccino.

But my online ordering experience had also left me bitter about that whole process and I also decided to start with local businesses. If possible, I would get something that, if it did turn out to be defective, could be returned to its point of sale, instead of to someone for whom an online product was akin to a mad-cow laced lump of ground round.

There is, in Ottawa and not too far from where we live, a wonderful culinary supplies store that carries everything from thousand dollar chafing dishes that keep banquet food for up to 100 people nicely warmed, to 49 cent decorative clips that you mount on the edge of your pasta saucepot to hold the stirring spoon, thus preventing the HIDEOUS RED PASTA SAUCE SPOT OF DOOM!!! from ever darkening the white top of your stove.

And there was a whole shelf they might just as well have labelled “Espressos R Us”, because on it was everything one could imagine associated with making the stuff, including milk frothers.

I began reading the instructions for some of the really elaborate scale-model jet engine ones that would froth milk faster than you could say “second degree burns”. As I was reading, my wife pointed to a box with a picture on it of what looked, to me, like a small glass coffee pot. On closer inspection, I discovered it had a lid into which a plunger, fitted with a really fine mesh screen, had been inserted. The instructions, to which I gave a dismissive few seconds of my attention, were ridiculously simple: pour milk into container to “milk fill line”; heat milk in microwave to desired temperature; place lid over container; manually work plunger up and down to produce perfectly frothed milk every time.

“But it doesn’t plug in,” I pointed out, “so how can it be a frothing machine?” (I was conveniently forgetting my long-ago high school physics classes in which I had been taught that a simple inclined plane, or a lever and fulcrum, is all the “mechanics” needed for something to be called a “machine”.)

I was rewarded with a look that suggested I should consider reading the instructions again. (At least I’m pretty sure that’s the correct translation of the look.) Coincidentally, this device was sitting on the shelf right next to one of those little gleaming metal four-part stovetop espresso makers (1. bottom part / 2. metal filter basket / 3. top part / 4. lid). The accompanying price stickers revealed that the two devices combined would total less than 20% of the on-sale DeLonghi, and working together they seemed to hold the promise of delivering the same product.

The guy devil in me leapt to my shoulder and whispered, “Who are they kidding? It’s not an expensive appliance. How can you even approach getting a good cup of cappuccino from such a stupidly simple pair of devices? Go for the blaster!”

The guy angel in me leapt to my shoulder and steered my eyes’ angle of view to where it included my wife’s face.

Five minutes later, we left the store with a cheap (as in inexpensive) manual milk frother and an even cheaper (as in even less expensive) stovetop espresso-making pot.

Later that same day, we tried out our new system. I followed the instructions for the milk frother and the first couple of plunges sprayed hot milk all over the counter, giving me that sinking feeling of déjà vu. But on closer inspection, I discovered the pot lid’s designers had cleverly thought to add a baffle that blocked the pot’s pouring spout while the plunger was being used. I just hadn’t cleverly rotated the lid to where the cleverly added baffle blocked the spout. That problem was swiftly corrected with a quarter turn of the lid, and I hadn’t even had to look for “sprayed milk” in the troubleshooting section of the three-short-paragraph set of instructions! Good thing, as it turned out, because the frother’s designers, after concluding that three short paragraphs of directions covered everything you likely need to know about making milk hot and beating the heck out of it, had apparently decided that a troubleshooting section was unnecessary. (Problem: milk spills on counter; Solution: hold milk pitcher’s spout directly over container when pouring milk into it.)

Meanwhile, the stovetop espresso pot had percolated a perfect two-cup portion of espresso in about three minutes flat. As it happened, the monster cappuccino cups my wife had bought on sale were best suited to a two-cup serving. As we drizzled the froth onto the coffee, and dusted it with a little cinnamon, we both said, “_Looks_ good.”

It tasted… fabulous!

In fact the result, achieved using nearly forgotten mediaeval microwave and electric stove technology, systems known only to the secretive idol-worshippers among long lost ancient societies, called by their storytellers “Mom’s bridge club” and the like, was… well, as good as anything we’d ever been served after many an outstanding dinner in Ottawa’s Little Italy.

I was astonished. Flabbergasted, even. The distant Italian roots on my family’s tree were no doubt quivering in dismay. And I won’t go into the details about the level of profound embarrassment to which my guy genes had fallen. But at the risk of letting down the species, I’m now forced to concede that many multiples of ten-dollar bills are definitely not required to provide the means of producing great cappuccino on one’s own kitchen countertop. (I mean, of course, in a _mug_ on one’s own kitchen countertop, just in case anyone was confused into thinking that my previously described experiences of spraying copious amounts of water and milk on the counter’s surface was actually part of my preferred method of making coffee.)

Which left only the nagging mystery of what had gone wrong to cause a top of the line name like DeLonghi to deliver a defective machine to me.

END OF PART II
COMING SOON – PART III: If you’ve never in your life laid sod, how can you be expected to know the green side goes up?

Machines: they’re a guy thing.
(or: DeLonghi and the short of it)

Give yourself some time; it’s a long story.

PART I

A recent jarring experience with a piece of domestic hardware has severely shaken my “guy” credentials.

Not so very long ago, my wife ran into a bargain on large, heavy, colourful cappuccino cups, and bought four of them. That evening, we agreed that maybe it would be a wonderful idea to buy a cappuccino maker so that we could use our new cups for their intended purpose, supplementing their assigned employment as space fillers on our already-crowded kitchen cup shelf.

I immediately launched a wide internet search for consumer information about cappuccino / espresso makers and, as luck would have it, found a happy convergence of an elite brand of these machines – DeLonghi – with a still-active price-reduced sale period and the capability of ordering same through hbc.com, the “dot-com” division of the Hudson Bay Company. With the cost reduced by some 25% off its rather lavish regular price, it was too good an offer to decline.

Two weeks later, I received an e-mail message telling me it had arrived at my nearest Hudson Bay store’s receiving department. I quickly picked it up, brought it home, and established it in an honoured and active position on our kitchen counter – right beside the toaster. It was a gleaming silver device with a half dozen ominous attachments and a steam nozzle that reminded me vaguely of the downward thrusting exhaust of the Harrier “jump jet”, an aircraft whose jet blast is so powerful, it can take off and land vertically, like a helicopter, so long as its thruster nozzles are pointed down – just like the milk frother nozzle on our new cappuccino machine.

I began like any guy – looking vaguely at the little symbols covering the face of the machine to see if I could work it without actually reading the instructions. As nearly as I could deduce from the rather ambiguous imagery, I was supposed to operate it by taking a coffee mug into the shower. Unlikely. So I decided that perhaps reading the instructions was required.

This product’s manufacturer is an Italian company, and in very short order I discovered why there are whole websites devoted to the hilarity of operating instructions and public notices translated somewhat crudely into English from their original language, whatever that might have been.

Now admittedly the DeLonghi’s instructions weren’t so much translated badly, as just plain inadequately (much more on this in Part III), especially when it came to “Troubleshooting”. It was a very brief section that, it seemed to me, recognized only one “problem”: “machine will not work”, for which it offered one of two solutions: “plug it in -- correctly this time” or “re-read the directions, you clot”. But what I really wanted, after the same result happened following two carefully followed sets of start-up procedures, was one that said, “Machine sprays hot water from every possible orifice on its plastic and steel body except the water delivery spout, soaking your counter and flowing freely onto your floor”.

After the second such result, I actually inverted my DeLonghi (no, that’s neither as painful nor as gymnastic as it might at first sound). I discovered in the process that an empty water reservoir in no way means that all the water has drained from the machine. I was seeking a closer look at the water delivery spout and was rewarded with a clear view once the machine stood upside down on my counter. The spout looked like a large slot-head screw with a hole in the middle. The hole was completely unobstructed, so I took it to mean the fault lay elsewhere.

Given the absence of any further troubleshooting choices – the two failed start-up cycles having exhausted the only two “try again” options provided – I hunted down the DeLonghi (Canada) website and wrote an e-mail message outlining the steps I had followed, and asked for their guidance. Ten days later, I still had received no reply so, sadly, I boxed up my elite DeLonghi cappuccino / espresso machine and took it back to the Hudson Bay Company store where I had picked it up.

When I arrived at the counter, I noticed the wall behind the staff / customer interaction space proudly proclaimed “hbc services” and swiftly concluded I had come to the right place. So I explained that I wanted to replace a defective machine and asked, “Could you good people help me out, given that you are self-promoting as ‘hbc services?’”

Well, as it turns out the mere presence of a sign advertising “services” should not automatically be taken to indicate that you can actually expect to receive any at this location. Nope. Don’t believe it. Despite sharing first names, it seems “hbc.com” is most emphatically not related to “hbc services”, or at least certainly not in the minds of the people who work there. Here’s how it was explained to me: “Oh you got that that from the dot-com” (in the same tone as, “Oh you got that from the dyspeptic leper on the corner”). “We can’t replace it here. You need to go home and re-order it online.”

“No problem,” said I, “and I trust that even though the ‘on sale for 25% off’ date has passed by, you will honour the sales price at which I ordered it?” “Oh no,” they said (“they” because I was dealing with two salespeople throughout this process, a young one who was clearly learning the ropes, and an older one who obviously still harboured a deep suspicion of the addition of ‘dot-com’ to the list of customer purchasing options), “the sale has expired.”

“And we’re not the dot-com”, the older one added helpfully.

“But the ‘hbc’ in ‘hbc-dot-com’ does stand for Hudson Bay Company and this is a Hudson Bay Company store, right?” I pressed. “Yes it is. But the dot-com is something completely separate. We can only receive the things people order, but we’re not the dot-com.”

I looked longingly at the huge display of DeLonghi espresso / cappuccino makers they had placed in the Small Appliances section, cruelly in plain view of customers who came to the “hbc services” counter, and realized I wasn’t going to be taking any replacement DeLonghi home this evening.

“OK, so I’ll re-order it. Since I’m still in the 30-day return-a-defective-product period, it’ll be replaced at the price I paid for it, right?” “Irrelevant,” replied the salespersons. “You’ll get it at whatever price it’s listed now on the dot-com. However,” they added cheerfully, “we can accept the return here of the defective product, so long as it’s within the 30-day period.”

“After receiving it, right?” I said, rather obviously and unnecessarily conversational. “No, after ordering,” they replied.

I was stunned. “Wait a minute,” I bleated. “Do you mean to tell me that if this thing took five weeks to arrive, I would already be beyond the 30-day return period on the day it got here at the store?” “That’s right,” they said.

At this point, I was seriously wondering how much wasted money someone had spent to mount the nicely scripted letters that made up the word “services” on the wall behind the counter, but I concluded that neither of these two was responsible for the idiotic Hudson Bay policies vis-à-vis the ancillary and plainly unwanted “dot-com” division. If I wanted to whine to anyone, it would have to be someone farther up the ladder.

“Fine, please just take the defective unit back… but can you at least process the credit to my charge card or do I have to do that myself after you confirm that you have the returned product?”

Astonishingly (in light of the complete absence of “service” from “hbc services” so far), they said they’d be happy to do so. After another few minutes of paperwork requiring no fewer than four repetitions of my signature, I headed home, morosely lacking a DeLonghi, possessed only of a rubber-stamped piece of paper confirming they had taken return delivery of a defective one.

END OF PART I
COMING SOON – PART II: Foaming at the mouth