My short and less-than-brilliant career as a cub reporter.
I don’t know about your job, but in the Public Service when your boss comes over and asks if you’d “like to do something interesting?”, if you take it to mean, “Something unexpected has come up and on such short notice we couldn’t find anyone else to do it and it’s a stretch to tie it to your job description, but here it is,” chances are that nine times out of ten, you’ll be right.
Well recently I got just such a request. For the record, I work as one point on a three-point triangle labelled 1. Media Relations; 2. Media Monitoring; 3. Media Analysis. I’m part of a small team who collectively make up the MA point (#3). On a recent day at work, the word came down from the folks on high (that’d be our Minister’s Office) that an Opposition news conference had been scheduled for Parliament Hill and someone finally noticed its title and decided that, whoops, it did indeed touch one of our Department’s many programs, and concluded it’d be a good idea for someone from the Department to attend and report back what was discussed.
No one who normally does that sort of thing was around, as it turned out, so somewhere down the line of desperation, my boss wound up in my cubicle asking me I wanted to be the one to fulfill the Minister’s Office request.
“No problemo,” I said. (Aloud, anyway. I’m sure my mind allowed other sentiments to rumble around momentarily like steel marbles in a pinball machine.)
So, arming me with a location, his cellphone number*, the title of the news conference, and a powerful local travel tool here in the National Capital Region called a taxi-chit book, my boss wished me well.
* This was after he had handed me his Blackberry in preparation for asking me to e-mail him the details the moment the news conference ended. “I’ve never used one,” I told him. “Oh… well maybe just take your cellphone then.” “I don’t have one,” I told him. He was beginning to look a little desperate. “Can’t I just call you from a payphone?” I asked. “Good idea – here’s my cellphone number.”
When I got into the cab, I looked at the office location – 130-S. I already knew that Parliament Hill addresses ending with the letter “W” refer to the West Block, so I confidently told the driver to take me to the South Block.
“There’s no such place,” he replied.
“Well,” I asked, “where are the ‘S’ offices?”
“That’s the Centre Block,” he said. “‘S’ is ‘Centre’”.
Of course, I thought, how could I have forgotten that little-known period of Canadian Parliamentary history – the Government of Canada’s Phonetic Literacy Initiative (PLI)? It had unfolded at precisely the same time as they were finishing the interior of the new Centre Block (after its destruction in the Great Fire of February 1916) and putting little brass office number signs on all its doors.
One of the shortest-lived literacy programs in Canada’s long history of educational initiatives, the PLI was abruptly ended scant weeks after its launch after an especially unfortunate incident involving 14 members of the Ottawa Women’s Christian Temperance Union who showed up at the Centre Block one afternoon in response to a Phonetic Literacy-written invitation and loudly announced that they were looking for their host, the then-Minister of War, A Luce Mandalay.
Today, just about the only remaining evidence that the PLI ever existed at all are the “S” number plates on the hundreds of Centre Block offices. But I digress.
Alright then, my good man, I directed the cab driver. Please take me to the Centre Block.
“I can’t,” he replied. “But I can take you to a place where you can get on a green shuttle.”
It’s those damned terrorists, again. There was a time, not so very long ago, when taxis and even private cars could drive right up to the front entrance of the Hill, the main door at the base of the Peace Tower. But no more. Now, you have to disembark – even from a taxi – at a stop in front of the West Block (the one on the left as you stand facing the Tower) where the green shuttle, in fact a cube van, passes by. Unless you have a cabinet-Minister-license-plated limousine, but they are as rare in Ottawa as red neckties these days.
En route we passed what was, in hindsight, an omen of the success I would achieve this day. At a different shuttle stop close to the Supreme Court building, my driver slowed down because there was a shuttle stopped there and he was going to let me board it right away. The uniformed RCMP officer standing at the stop clearly had a contrary opinion, however, because as my cab slowed down, the Mountie stepped forward and with great circular arm motions ordered my cabbie to keep right on moving.
Then I saw why. In front of the parked shuttle was a person lying on the road, covered in a bright purple blanket. He (or she, I couldn’t tell) was conscious, because there were several uniforms among the people clustered around, and it looked to me (at the quick glance I was able to cast as we passed) that an interview was underway with the casualty and a shuttle driver, a Hill security officer and at least one other Mountie.
By the time we got to the next shuttle stop, we were at the front door to the West Block and as the driver waited while I filled out a taxi chit, another shuttle drove by. (A taxi chit is a marvelous little piece of travel power for people who work in government. They’re contained in little booklets and treated for all intents and purposes as cash by the National Capital Region’s taxi companies. You fill out where you’re coming from and where you’re going, and when you get there you just circle an appropriate fare value from the list of $1 to $20 already printed on the chit, which also includes an “Other” choice.)
Now the West Block’s front door is a five minute walk – if you’re walking veeeeerrrrry slowly – from the Centre Block’s main entrance. I made a mental “To hell with the shuttle” decision and walked the couple hundred yards up the drive to the front door of the Centre Block in about two minutes.
To the front door of the Centre Block of Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
I hadn’t been here in a very long time and as I climbed the steps that lead up to the massive door, I realized that it still gave me a bit of a flutter to be at the gateway to the very seat of government in Canada, about to step into the building that is a gateway to the very heart of the people’s democracy.
I had taken exactly two steps into the building when a very large security guard held up an equally very large hand (Well no, that’s wrong isn’t it? That says his hand is the same size he was. To say a “proportionally” very large hand would be better.) Where was I? Oh yes, at the entrance to the “office” of my government. In effect, my space as a citizen of Canada.
“You can’t come in here,” he said in a very large voice.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“Oh, sorry,” he hesitated at my obvious shock at being barred from my House. “Have you got a badge?” I showed him my government employee identification. “That’s no good here.”
“Um, I have a notepad,” I said, hoping to reinforce the impression that I was here to attend a news conference. In fact, that’s what I told him.
His deferential manner had vanished. He pointed back out the door. “You want to go down the ramp under this entrance. Just tell them you’re here on Parliamentary business.”
Now this was more like it. Armed with the magic incantation, “I’m here on Parliamentary business,” I strode boldly in the door under the Peace Tower’s main entrance. And smack into another security guard.
Hah hah! I thought to myself. “I’m here on Parliamentary business,” I said. The large guard (“big and tall” must lead this job’s Statement of Qualifications) didn’t even hesitate. He pointed to one of those security arches that every air traveler in the world has to pass through these days. As I stepped through, I immediately triggered what sounded like four different bell tones.
“Are you wearing a watch?”, asked the guard on the other side. Back out the arch. This time, obviously and correctly sensing me to be a first timer, he rattled off a practiced series of “Are you wearing… Do you have…?”s that had me swiftly filling their little plastic box with watch, wallet, ballpoint pen, coil notebook. Once more through the gate and once more came the disharmonious jangle of the bells.
The guard looked at me. “I’m wearing a tensor bandage on my knee,” I offered, “and it has six metal clips holding it in place”. Now he passed a wand over my knee. Sure enough, it squealed. “Show me, please.” “Look”, I said, tugging the cuff of my corduroy pants, “there is no way I can pull this up over my knee.” “I’ll have to pat you down then,” he said, “Do you mind?”
I tried to imagine who would ever say no to that question from a security guard when it followed that explanation. After patting me down and satisfying himself that the swelling at the mid point of my leg between my thigh and my shin was indeed a fully wound tensor bandage, he motioned me one more time to the arch.
“Oh yes,” I remembered as the bells detonated for a third time, “I forgot that these shoes have steel caps in them.” And they did. (Don’t ask. I have exceptionally wide feet and sometimes what governs my choice of shoe is nothing more than, “Does it fit?” Little distractions like steel caps are secondary to finding a shoe that fits my “EEEEE”.) This time he just took his hand and banged lightly on the toes of my shoes. Then he ran the wand up and down me once more, for what he must have thought would be the last time, getting squeals from my toes, knee… and waist. He sighed. “Belt?”
“Yes,” I murmured, valiantly resisting the urge to snarkily explain its purpose vis-à-vis my pants. “Undo it,” he said. “Pardon?” I said back, thinking for one heartstopping moment he was going to ask me to drop my pants and give him visual confirmation of the tensor bandage.
“Please undo it and hold the buckle away from your waist.” When I did, he thrust the wand at my navel. Fortunately, I had consumed a low-iron breakfast that morning, which yielded no beep from my torso. So he concluded it had indeed been my buckle that set off the bells. Rather than persist with what was fast becoming a Laurel and Hardy routine for the new millennium, he finally waved me through, pointing to another desk. “Just go to the guard over there.”
My heart sank. Another guard? (This is why terrorists will never succeed in attacking our Parliament. We’ll just bureaucratize them right into the ground.)
At this desk, I was asked where I wished to go. Re-assuming what was left of my reporter’s confidence, I said, “I’m going to an NDP news conference in Room 130-S.” I gave him my name and showed him my employee i.d. to ensure he would have its correct spelling.
“You’re not on the list,” he said with a finality that made it clear there was no appeal. “It’s not a big room and there are only six people cleared. That’s why they’re recording it for broadcast.”
As I shuffled morosely away from Parliament Hill, I thought back to my days in the not-for-profit private sector working for an organization that, when we gave a news conference, would have been thrilled to have had a freelancer from the Friends of the Almonte Public Library’s Monthly Bulletin show up to cover it. Now you have to be on a list.
Muttering dark imprecations at Osama bloody bin Laden, I walked the 20 minutes back to my office to report my failure to Editor-in-Chief Perry White. Jimmy Olsen, I thought, would have gotten into that news conference. He would have stood behind a pillar and beamed a laser pointer at the guard, then walked right past him while he was feverishly rubbing away the large purple dots that had suddenly leapt to the fore in his field of vision.
I wonder if the Department issues laser pointers.
= = =
OCTranspo, where service is not just a word, it’s… Actually, then again, maybe it is just a word!
In the past couple weeks, downtown bus stops along OCTranspo’s east-west rush-hour routes have sprouted these four-foot high plywood tent signs that effectively warn commuters (paraphrasing): At each stop, our buses will stop once, and only once. When you see your bus come to a halt, go to where it is.
That seems perfectly logical for city bus stops that aren’t located on the rush hour lines. But for anyone who uses the damnable service downtown at a rush hour time of day, it’s an insult that says, “Our schedules are more important than our passengers.”
Because during a typical rush hour (in Public-Service-heavy Ottawa, that begins at about 3 pm), sometimes there is a solid train of buses that can literally stretch through the entire downtown core’s span of ten or twelve blocks, broken only by crossing intersections. What this means at an individual bus stop is that your bus will occasionally be brought to a halt several bus lengths away from the actual stop. It will then creep forward, one bus length at a time as a preceding bus moves along, until it actually reaches the stop point – a route sign sunk into the concrete sidewalk. At less busy times, drivers in fact are often quite rigid about first reaching this sign before they consider themselves to be “at the stop” to open their doors. Witness the fact that frequently, they will thunder past people waiting at any of several other elements of the bus stop – a shelter, another sign marked with route numbers, a long and wide concrete island where hopeful commuters stand – only to “stop” officially at the sign, often blowing past would-be passengers waving at them several yards back along the length of the bus stop, forcing them to run along the platform to get to the bus’s open door.
Well to me, what these idiotic signs are telling us is that OCTranspo is saying to its commuting passengers, “Now we’re going to play a little game. Guess which of my several start-and-stops was the official stop. Whoops! You guessed wrong because it was actually three bus lengths back at the beginning of the platform. Bye!” And if the driver has already made his or her “official” stop, well you can be waving a big red bedsheet and that bus won’t even slow down as it rolls past the sign, accelerating to traffic speed.
I have actually witnessed this policy in practice as drivers, having stopped once farther down the platform, will roll right past riders trying to flag them down at the actual stop point – the one marked by the route sign. In one extreme example, the bus on which I was riding one morning stopped to let a couple passengers out while still some 50 yards short of the sign. Then, the driver had the gall to swing out of line and pass four or five other buses moving towards the posted stop point. From my window vantage point, I saw several snarling platform standees who had been waiting for him watch in helpless rage as their bus roared past, separated from them by a lane occupied by the other buses that stayed in the morning rush-hour flow.
This new policy places the drivers’ schedule first and foremost. And OCTranspo wonders why more and more commuters are thumbing their noses at the giant red-and-white limos and opting instead for almost any other means of motoring to work. Their attitude reminds me of nothing quite so much as a sci-fi short story by Robert A Heinlein, whose title could, with complete accuracy, be changed to “OC Transpo Must Roll”. It’s an easy substitution to make in this brief review of the classic, “The Roads Must Roll”:
“’The Roads Must Roll’ gives you get a good sense of just why Heinlein came to dominate the science fiction field so rapidly, as the story rings with real world ambience, even though the envisioned technology is one case where Heinlein got it seriously wrong, seeing giant conveyor belts, or rolling roads, as replacing the car and railroads, thus leading to a strong dependence of the economy on them. Those who keep those roads rolling are in an obvious position of power and the story is all about one such case of the ‘little guy’ attempting to force things to go his way. The story is well told, the characters on both sides of this battle are quite believable, the social organization makes sense. Thematically, the story addresses the sense that many who work in essential industries have that THEY should be the ones who make all the decisions, who cannot see that our civilization is made of many specialties, all of whom are necessary to the continued functioning of the society as a whole. Within the confines of this story there is an encapsulation of many of the larger battles caused by this attitude, from the great owner/union fights of the early portion of twentieth century, to the more generalized battle between the ideas of socialism and capitalism.”
Or, in the case of my whine, to the more generalized battle of a belief by an entire region’s transit users that the service should be… well, a service, and the company’s contrary belief that it’s a bloody fine privilege so shut up, sit down (or, in many cases, stand up) and just let us get on with driving the damned buses our way, and on our schedule. Have a nice day.
= = =
And finally: Disincentive lead sentences (reader contributions welcome).
I’m sure these openings were all written with the writer’s breathless belief that its first few words would draw you into the story, hungry for the information contained in the sentences that followed.
But in my case, each one stopped me dead, hungry only for the little online “X” to close the site. Or maybe lunch. But most definitely not hungry for the urge to read any further.
The first two are that rarest of eye-glazing encounters, a twofer of lead sentences on the same subject:
1.
“Even before their experiment in perfecting
human genetics comes to fruition, Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie's unborn child is already
doing charity work just like mom and dad.”
(Rogers / yahoo.rogers.com
“In the Spotlight”, May 18)
2.
“LANGSTRAND, Namibia (Reuters) - Half of
Namibians voting in an informal radio survey
believe the day Angelina Jolie gives birth
should be declared a national holiday, an
honour usually reserved for kings, queens
and national heroes.” (Reuters online, May 23)
and
3.
“Less than 12 hours after Madonna crucified
herself on a mirrored cross, the Catholic League
expressed its discontent with the concert stunt.”
(Globe and Mail online, May 23)
Now I don’t blame the Globe for the ennui that last sentence induced. After all, Madonna’s attraction of anti-Catholic venom goes back to her writhing about an altar in the “Like a Prayer” video, animating a statue of a black Jesus in the process. (Lord knows it probably could have resurrected King Tut!) No, in this case it’s the fact that the world recently has been so inundated with coverage of official Catholic “discontent” with The Da Vinci Code, reading that there’s one more thing they’re upset about inspires a yawning, “So what else is new?” from me. (A Vatican call for a boycott of the film in Italy led to the biggest opening weekend in history for a movie in that country. And truth to tell, I suspect there are artists out there who would sell their St Christopher medals to get blacklisted by the Catholics.) But I did manage a hasty redirection to see whether there were any online images of the mirrored crucifixion. There aren’t, yet, but there is this consolation prize showing the woman’s almost uncanny Blossom Dearie way with a fine lyric:
http://thebosh.com/archives/upload/2006/04/Madonna-wants-to-turn.jpg
Until next time…
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Techie talkin’
Talkin’ techie talk…
For the whole damned post this time. Sorry, but treat this like a parable. And if I can save just one soul from being lured onto the rocks by the Siren call of a MicroSoft Help menu, then setting this tale to blog will be time well spent.
= = =
Four lessons I have learned over the past two weeks in the course of doing a computer upgrade as a Do-It-Yourself project (which in our house means rolling my eyes plaintively towards my much more systems-comfortable better half, and uttering that very antithesis-of-guy-dom word, “Help!”), rather than phoning Nerds-On-Site and simply dumpling the whole project into their lap:
1. MicroSoft Help isn’t. (If possible, render this one on paper and scotch tape it to the upper corner of your monitor screen where the MicroSoft “Help” question mark icon can usually be seen.)
2. My better half has more patience than the Mount Sinai Hospital.
2-a. I don’t.
3. Sometimes, it’s not the user’s fault.
4. And sometimes, it’s especially satisfying to think of “RAM” as an installation procedure.
Recently in our house Yours Truly benefited from a shared decision to bring my computer forward somewhat from the year in which it had been living (1998 - 2000 or thereabouts) and install a few new features / upgrades:
- Windows XP (to replace Windows 98);
- augmenting my RAM beyond the 128MB that it was. For most programs coming out now, 128MB-RAM, if it appears at all, is usually intended to cause much hilarity on the part of those who read that minuscule text on the box where it says, “Minimum System Requirements”, or is at best the absolute minimum requirement, and usually is followed immediately with a dire warning that you can expect hideously slow performance if that’s the best your computer memory has to offer;
- finally, the installation of what is, I confess, strictly a toy: a CD burner.
To its credit, Windows XP is a very user-friendly program to install so long as you select every last one of MicroSoft’s helpfully suggested defaults, and avoid any button with the word “Customize” in it like the plague if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.
After our first Windows XP installation run-through, my computer returned several signals that assured me that all of its new stuff, including the burner (about which more will be said a few words along) was sitting comfortably in my CPU and had all been “successfully installed”.
And that’s when the trouble began.
Again recalling my claim to “guy-dom” above, what I wanted to play with first, of course, was that miracle of modern technology and the bane of musicians’ unions everywhere, the CD burner. After first saving a few similarly-themed tunes to a memory-resident “library”, I hit the “Copy” option and was promptly informed by my computer, “Device Not Found”.
At this juncture, I should point out that one outcome of the world’s explosion in technology is that it takes almost no time at all for a self-perceived rational thinker to start arguing with a piece of machinery. “What do you mean, ‘Device Not Found?’”, I demanded of my monitor. I pointed at the just-filled slot in my CPU where the new CD unit was. “It’s right there.”
No, no, no, persisted my computer when I re-tried the “Copy” command: “Device Not Found”.
At this point, I ran a really nice little diagnostic program my better half found online. It takes about ten seconds to flash through your whole system and return a multi-page document you can print out that lists all your hardware, all your software, and even identifies where there might be problems. (In my case, for example, it also told me that there were about 65 MicroSoft security updates that I really should import if I didn’t want my computer to turn on me and start trying to convert me to Islam or Communism or some other belief that the US military industrial complex, their soon-to-be-newly-beefed-up brigade o’ border guards and probably the National Security Agency’s “What’s the problem with Baby Duck’s computer?” sub-routine would perceive as a threat. But I digress.)
On the diagnostic printout, there, clear as a bell, was the confirmation that the new piece of hardware was installed, and had been happily adopted by the network of cables, cards and chips already living inside my steel computer box.
It might be, by now, that you’ve already guessed where this is going. And if so, good for you because it never really occurred to me until some two days of really, really, REALLY aggravating troubleshooting had been consumed that I clicked to the fact that my computer had been patiently telling me all along that my correctly installed piece of new hardware was precisely what I had been sold -- a CD-ROM, not a CD-R. (That is a critical distinction. “ROM” means “Read-Only-Memory”; “R” means “Recordable”. “R” is a burner. “ROM” isn't.)
I had, in other words, been sold another CD player.
The folks at the computer store were highly amused when I told them this. I understood their thinking – it hadn’t been, after all, two days of _their_ troubleshooting time I had used up, but I didn’t entirely share their sense of amusement over their mistake. So, leaving them lying in pools of their own blood, I returned home with a new CD-R, my wallet lightened by the additional dollars it required to acquire the burner. (Had I been the business owner, I would have eaten the extra few shekels in exchange for my customer’s time and trouble over my mistake. But I’m not, so they didn’t.)
As a corollary to this process, I am now up to speed on the terms “Jumpering”, “Master” and “Slave” when applied to two like hardware devices installed in your computer. Oddly enough, it’s precisely the same thinking that gave us “Love” as the term to mean “Nothing” in tennis scoring. They’re simply terms used to designate two distinct pieces of hardware. To you, the end user, they mean you’ve got two very similar devices here, so you’re going to call one by one term and one by the other. Good lad. Off you go, then.
Whoever first determined the terms could just have easily have used “A” and “B”, or “1” and “2” but no, he or she must have been big-time into S&M because the terms that caught on were “Master” and “Slave”. (We’ll leave “jumpering” alone entirely.) So much so that the six-pin port at the back of each unit has “MAS” and “SLV” (or “SLA”) engraved into the steel above the respective two of the six pins that serve either function. Activating the correct connection requires the placement of a tiny rectangular pin-shielding piece of plastic that is quite literally about half the size of a typical fingernail clipping.
You think this story is over? Hah! Hah! I say again. This is MicroSoft we’re talking about here. Once you’re into MicroSoft software, it’s like trying to resign from the Mafia. You’re never done with them.
Next day, in my naivete, I asked the computer to open up a document in MS Word 2000. Up came the MSWord 2000 box that always comes up when I ask the computer to open up a document. And there it sat. And sat. And sat. And sat… (If you’ve seen “Casablanca”, you may recall the opening narration which describes seekers of Letters of Transit as travel hopefuls who come to Casablanca and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.) It’s in the spirit of that narrator’s same hopeless tone of voice that the MSWord 2000 welcome box opened up, and promptly locked up my entire computer.
I’ll skip the vast majority of the many details of the subsequent two days of work. Suffice to say that it was a fascinating, maddening, frustrating process that took me – again with my better half’s seemingly limitless reservoir of patience – burrowing down through so many layers of Windows XP that I had to look up to see Bill Gates’ ass.
But there, with the help of some very good point-by-point directions written by online troubleshooters who wrote things like, “If you are looking for ‘Thing-1’, you will need to do this because Windows XP has so many bugs you won’t find ‘Thing-1’ by following their instructions”, we finally managed to find and delete the offending roadblocking application, a little something perversely called “normal.dot”. (This also taught me that MicroSoft seems to share the same sense of humour as the people who work in my computer store because to get MSWord to operate normally, I had to delete a buggy little application called “normal.dot”.)
In the process, I vapourized about two years’ worth of stored e-mail that Windows XP happily expunged when it over-wrote my existing installation of MS Outlook, but strangely I have discovered that it seems I can get along with it. (So sorry, Betty Crocker BisQuick recipe people, but your “Recipe of the Week” messages now go into the ol’ panietta del garbagio.)
And last but not least, if you’re one of those who has been sold on the idea that you can buy software online, import it into your computer and have it work the moment it arrives, let me tell you this little story.
As if all the above accumulated frustrations weren’t enough, I also had my computer tell me – with impeccable timing – that my virus detection was no longer valid because, “Your licence has expired”. The licence expiration alone should not have been a major problem but, again with a snarly finger-point to Mr Gates, MS Word will not allow a new document to be opened until it automatically gives it a virus check. That would seem to make sense, right? Right.
It does indeed (make sense, that is), right up until your virus detection licence expires. Because now your computer has been dropped squarely into the logical conundrum of being told it needs to search for a virus detection program it is not eligible to use before it will release the document to you for writing, editing, printing, whatever.
So you guessed it – having just been released from its damned roadblocking “normal.dot” file, MS Word went right back into a whole new lock-up mode, this time tantalizingly presenting me with the unopened document window, while “Requesting virus scan…” sat forever in the lower left corner, like a waif in front of a candy store. “It’s all just on the other side of the glass – everything you want, BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!!! Nyahhhhh hahahahahaha!”
Now I know that I had purchased – relatively recently – an update to my virus detection program. What I didn’t know, and only found out after yet another wave of prowling around in the catacombs several “Windows” below my onscreen “desktop”, is that this particular virus detection program requires you to activate it.
In the same way as your new credit card, when it arrives, requires that you phone a 1-800 number to activate it before you will be authorized to make purchases with it, this virus detection program requires you to e-mail a specifically designated site in order for your new program to receive the remotely issued order to get the heck busy and start detecting viruses (viri?). The problem is that, having bought the program online and downloaded it the same way, I never came into possession of a helpful little piece of paper that would have said in plain English, “Before this program will begin detecting viruses, you need to activate it. You moron.”
But if you are reading this, please give me a virtual high-five. It means I managed successfully to activate my virus detection software, which in turn unlocked MS Word 2000 so as to allow me to prepare this input for tonight’s scintillating (*yawwwwwwwwn*) blog update.
And I suspect I owe my wife a second dinner to go with the one I already owe her for preparing my income tax return this year. But the Nerds-On-Site savings alone should more than cover both of those.
= = =
And finally, file this under “More esses, damn it... FAST!” Here is the opening sentence in an Ottawa Sun story the morning after the Ottawa Senators were blown out of this year’s hockey playoffs a whole round later than is customary – usually they get knocked out in the first round and this year they lasted all the way until the second, but I digress. There’s a special heaven for sportswriting aficionados. This lede is pure poetry:
“The Senators sat silently, slumped at their bench in a state of shock.”
So close. (Perfection would have been, “slumped in their seats”.)
So long. Farewell. A la prochaine.
Good bye until we meet again.
(And for victory in the bonus round, tell me who used to sign off each week by singing that couplet.)
Talkin’ techie talk…
For the whole damned post this time. Sorry, but treat this like a parable. And if I can save just one soul from being lured onto the rocks by the Siren call of a MicroSoft Help menu, then setting this tale to blog will be time well spent.
= = =
Four lessons I have learned over the past two weeks in the course of doing a computer upgrade as a Do-It-Yourself project (which in our house means rolling my eyes plaintively towards my much more systems-comfortable better half, and uttering that very antithesis-of-guy-dom word, “Help!”), rather than phoning Nerds-On-Site and simply dumpling the whole project into their lap:
1. MicroSoft Help isn’t. (If possible, render this one on paper and scotch tape it to the upper corner of your monitor screen where the MicroSoft “Help” question mark icon can usually be seen.)
2. My better half has more patience than the Mount Sinai Hospital.
2-a. I don’t.
3. Sometimes, it’s not the user’s fault.
4. And sometimes, it’s especially satisfying to think of “RAM” as an installation procedure.
Recently in our house Yours Truly benefited from a shared decision to bring my computer forward somewhat from the year in which it had been living (1998 - 2000 or thereabouts) and install a few new features / upgrades:
- Windows XP (to replace Windows 98);
- augmenting my RAM beyond the 128MB that it was. For most programs coming out now, 128MB-RAM, if it appears at all, is usually intended to cause much hilarity on the part of those who read that minuscule text on the box where it says, “Minimum System Requirements”, or is at best the absolute minimum requirement, and usually is followed immediately with a dire warning that you can expect hideously slow performance if that’s the best your computer memory has to offer;
- finally, the installation of what is, I confess, strictly a toy: a CD burner.
To its credit, Windows XP is a very user-friendly program to install so long as you select every last one of MicroSoft’s helpfully suggested defaults, and avoid any button with the word “Customize” in it like the plague if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.
After our first Windows XP installation run-through, my computer returned several signals that assured me that all of its new stuff, including the burner (about which more will be said a few words along) was sitting comfortably in my CPU and had all been “successfully installed”.
And that’s when the trouble began.
Again recalling my claim to “guy-dom” above, what I wanted to play with first, of course, was that miracle of modern technology and the bane of musicians’ unions everywhere, the CD burner. After first saving a few similarly-themed tunes to a memory-resident “library”, I hit the “Copy” option and was promptly informed by my computer, “Device Not Found”.
At this juncture, I should point out that one outcome of the world’s explosion in technology is that it takes almost no time at all for a self-perceived rational thinker to start arguing with a piece of machinery. “What do you mean, ‘Device Not Found?’”, I demanded of my monitor. I pointed at the just-filled slot in my CPU where the new CD unit was. “It’s right there.”
No, no, no, persisted my computer when I re-tried the “Copy” command: “Device Not Found”.
At this point, I ran a really nice little diagnostic program my better half found online. It takes about ten seconds to flash through your whole system and return a multi-page document you can print out that lists all your hardware, all your software, and even identifies where there might be problems. (In my case, for example, it also told me that there were about 65 MicroSoft security updates that I really should import if I didn’t want my computer to turn on me and start trying to convert me to Islam or Communism or some other belief that the US military industrial complex, their soon-to-be-newly-beefed-up brigade o’ border guards and probably the National Security Agency’s “What’s the problem with Baby Duck’s computer?” sub-routine would perceive as a threat. But I digress.)
On the diagnostic printout, there, clear as a bell, was the confirmation that the new piece of hardware was installed, and had been happily adopted by the network of cables, cards and chips already living inside my steel computer box.
It might be, by now, that you’ve already guessed where this is going. And if so, good for you because it never really occurred to me until some two days of really, really, REALLY aggravating troubleshooting had been consumed that I clicked to the fact that my computer had been patiently telling me all along that my correctly installed piece of new hardware was precisely what I had been sold -- a CD-ROM, not a CD-R. (That is a critical distinction. “ROM” means “Read-Only-Memory”; “R” means “Recordable”. “R” is a burner. “ROM” isn't.)
I had, in other words, been sold another CD player.
The folks at the computer store were highly amused when I told them this. I understood their thinking – it hadn’t been, after all, two days of _their_ troubleshooting time I had used up, but I didn’t entirely share their sense of amusement over their mistake. So, leaving them lying in pools of their own blood, I returned home with a new CD-R, my wallet lightened by the additional dollars it required to acquire the burner. (Had I been the business owner, I would have eaten the extra few shekels in exchange for my customer’s time and trouble over my mistake. But I’m not, so they didn’t.)
As a corollary to this process, I am now up to speed on the terms “Jumpering”, “Master” and “Slave” when applied to two like hardware devices installed in your computer. Oddly enough, it’s precisely the same thinking that gave us “Love” as the term to mean “Nothing” in tennis scoring. They’re simply terms used to designate two distinct pieces of hardware. To you, the end user, they mean you’ve got two very similar devices here, so you’re going to call one by one term and one by the other. Good lad. Off you go, then.
Whoever first determined the terms could just have easily have used “A” and “B”, or “1” and “2” but no, he or she must have been big-time into S&M because the terms that caught on were “Master” and “Slave”. (We’ll leave “jumpering” alone entirely.) So much so that the six-pin port at the back of each unit has “MAS” and “SLV” (or “SLA”) engraved into the steel above the respective two of the six pins that serve either function. Activating the correct connection requires the placement of a tiny rectangular pin-shielding piece of plastic that is quite literally about half the size of a typical fingernail clipping.
You think this story is over? Hah! Hah! I say again. This is MicroSoft we’re talking about here. Once you’re into MicroSoft software, it’s like trying to resign from the Mafia. You’re never done with them.
Next day, in my naivete, I asked the computer to open up a document in MS Word 2000. Up came the MSWord 2000 box that always comes up when I ask the computer to open up a document. And there it sat. And sat. And sat. And sat… (If you’ve seen “Casablanca”, you may recall the opening narration which describes seekers of Letters of Transit as travel hopefuls who come to Casablanca and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.) It’s in the spirit of that narrator’s same hopeless tone of voice that the MSWord 2000 welcome box opened up, and promptly locked up my entire computer.
I’ll skip the vast majority of the many details of the subsequent two days of work. Suffice to say that it was a fascinating, maddening, frustrating process that took me – again with my better half’s seemingly limitless reservoir of patience – burrowing down through so many layers of Windows XP that I had to look up to see Bill Gates’ ass.
But there, with the help of some very good point-by-point directions written by online troubleshooters who wrote things like, “If you are looking for ‘Thing-1’, you will need to do this because Windows XP has so many bugs you won’t find ‘Thing-1’ by following their instructions”, we finally managed to find and delete the offending roadblocking application, a little something perversely called “normal.dot”. (This also taught me that MicroSoft seems to share the same sense of humour as the people who work in my computer store because to get MSWord to operate normally, I had to delete a buggy little application called “normal.dot”.)
In the process, I vapourized about two years’ worth of stored e-mail that Windows XP happily expunged when it over-wrote my existing installation of MS Outlook, but strangely I have discovered that it seems I can get along with it. (So sorry, Betty Crocker BisQuick recipe people, but your “Recipe of the Week” messages now go into the ol’ panietta del garbagio.)
And last but not least, if you’re one of those who has been sold on the idea that you can buy software online, import it into your computer and have it work the moment it arrives, let me tell you this little story.
As if all the above accumulated frustrations weren’t enough, I also had my computer tell me – with impeccable timing – that my virus detection was no longer valid because, “Your licence has expired”. The licence expiration alone should not have been a major problem but, again with a snarly finger-point to Mr Gates, MS Word will not allow a new document to be opened until it automatically gives it a virus check. That would seem to make sense, right? Right.
It does indeed (make sense, that is), right up until your virus detection licence expires. Because now your computer has been dropped squarely into the logical conundrum of being told it needs to search for a virus detection program it is not eligible to use before it will release the document to you for writing, editing, printing, whatever.
So you guessed it – having just been released from its damned roadblocking “normal.dot” file, MS Word went right back into a whole new lock-up mode, this time tantalizingly presenting me with the unopened document window, while “Requesting virus scan…” sat forever in the lower left corner, like a waif in front of a candy store. “It’s all just on the other side of the glass – everything you want, BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!!! Nyahhhhh hahahahahaha!”
Now I know that I had purchased – relatively recently – an update to my virus detection program. What I didn’t know, and only found out after yet another wave of prowling around in the catacombs several “Windows” below my onscreen “desktop”, is that this particular virus detection program requires you to activate it.
In the same way as your new credit card, when it arrives, requires that you phone a 1-800 number to activate it before you will be authorized to make purchases with it, this virus detection program requires you to e-mail a specifically designated site in order for your new program to receive the remotely issued order to get the heck busy and start detecting viruses (viri?). The problem is that, having bought the program online and downloaded it the same way, I never came into possession of a helpful little piece of paper that would have said in plain English, “Before this program will begin detecting viruses, you need to activate it. You moron.”
But if you are reading this, please give me a virtual high-five. It means I managed successfully to activate my virus detection software, which in turn unlocked MS Word 2000 so as to allow me to prepare this input for tonight’s scintillating (*yawwwwwwwwn*) blog update.
And I suspect I owe my wife a second dinner to go with the one I already owe her for preparing my income tax return this year. But the Nerds-On-Site savings alone should more than cover both of those.
= = =
And finally, file this under “More esses, damn it... FAST!” Here is the opening sentence in an Ottawa Sun story the morning after the Ottawa Senators were blown out of this year’s hockey playoffs a whole round later than is customary – usually they get knocked out in the first round and this year they lasted all the way until the second, but I digress. There’s a special heaven for sportswriting aficionados. This lede is pure poetry:
“The Senators sat silently, slumped at their bench in a state of shock.”
So close. (Perfection would have been, “slumped in their seats”.)
So long. Farewell. A la prochaine.
Good bye until we meet again.
(And for victory in the bonus round, tell me who used to sign off each week by singing that couplet.)
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Peculiar road habits…
We spent several hours of this year’s Easter weekend on the road between Ottawa and Hamilton. Along the way I repeated what has become, since Lord knows when, a personal tradition. At Oshawa, there’s a brief stretch of the 401 where the highway takes a dip and passes beneath three street bridges in very close proximity to one another. And travelling at a breath or two over 120 km/h, you can pass under all three bridges in a grand total of eight seconds flat. Exactly. Since time immemorial (or more accurately, since 120 km/h became pretty well the standard velocity for travelling the 401), I have started a count of “one thousand… two thousand… three thousand…” either out loud or to myself and always manage to hit the hard “d” at the end of “eight thousand” at the precise moment the far side of bridge three rips past my sightline above the windshield. Passing the “eight second bridges” has been, without fail, a part of every drive to and from Ottawa for as long as I can remember. (Or at least as long as I have been driving the 401 @ 120km/h.)
Many, many years ago, when my Dad piloted the family car as we drove from Perth to visit my aunt and uncle and their family in Belleville, we would always stop at Actinolite. It’s a tiny town which still stands at the intersection of Highways 7 and 37, the latter being the road south through Tweed to Belleville. But for several years, roadside at Actinolite, there stood a cage, elevated on a concrete platform, in which resided a black bear with an insatiable love of Coca Cola. The cage had been erected beside a restaurant and, to make things easier for people who just wanted to stop and greet the bear, the owners had placed a vending machine that dispensed glass bottles of Coke. It was a never-ending break-up-the-drive delight for me and my brother to have Dad spring for a bottle, then allow each of us to take a turn tilting it bottom-up through the massive steel bars on the cage while the bear would gulp it down.
From today’s perspective as an adult, I realize now it was a pretty wretched life for such a wonderful animal. The cage was not huge and if it provided any shelter at all for the bear, it was in a minimal structure about the size of a large doghouse tucked into one corner. And given the number of bottles of Coke he must have had poured into him on a typical weekend of meeting the travelling public, I also suspect his dentition would eventually have left him unable to manage anything chewier than porridge. But we were kids, he was a big shambling black bear, and he loved the Coke that we passed him through the bars of his cage. I don’t think we ever made the Perth to Belleville run without stopping for a “Coke-bear break” at Actinolite for as long as that bear resided there.
- 0 -
Recently, I was out with a small group of good friends at what we try to arrange monthly as a “Boys’ Night Out” (BNO). One conversation opener was the news that, the previous day, the Ontario Provincial Police had pulled over and checked 25 randomly selected cars with toddler restraint seats for the way in which the seats had been installed. No fewer than 24 had the seats installed incorrectly.
The BNO gang started reminiscing about our own experiences installing these things and, without exception, we agreed that each and every one of us had probably installed the seats officially wrong. But in all cases, our thus-restrained children were nonetheless fully restrained within the seats and their harnesses. In my case, I recall our seat-backed anchor strap was not bolted down to a fixed point mounted by means of a hole drilled into my car (which is how the instructions tell you to do it) – it was secured by the nylon-webbed strap’s being wound around the rear headrest post and tied with a knot that would have tested even Lord Robert Stephenson Smythe Baden-Powell of Gilwell.
That led us to start musing along the lines of, “Just how on earth did we ever manage to get to where we are today?” when we all grew up without the countless government regulations and Canadian Standards Association guidelines governing everything from the allowable gap between bars in our cribs to the sugar content line at which nutritious fruit “juice” becomes the toxic, life-threatening fruit “drink”.
I found a similar line of thought in an online discussion about the complexity of some US Congressional regulations:
“Considering we were a nation for nearly 200 years before Congress started protecting us against ‘unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths,’ a natural question is how we managed to survive and grow from a population of 4 million to the 280 million of us today. According to my e-mail's author, if we listen to Washington, those of us still around who were children during the '40s, '50s and '60s probably should be dead. Nonetheless, there are 58 million of us born in 1945 or earlier who are still kicking. Our parents allowed us to sleep in cribs beautified with lead-based paint. They drove us around in cars that had neither seatbelts nor airbags. They permitted us to ride our bicycles without helmets, just as adults rode motorcycles without helmets. And, horror of horrors, there were no childproof medicine bottles that, by the way, are sometimes so difficult to open that some people summon their children to open them.”
One of our BNO guys actually recalled falling out of the family car one day when Dad took a corner just a little too sharply. (Boys being boys, whatever the age, the rest of concluded, “Well that certainly explains a lot!”)
Where am I going with this particular bit of rambling, you wonder? Right here:
At my father-in-law’s home in the law-abidingly-named “Ancaster Police Village”, they have recently instituted a new classification of garbage pick-up that is chock-a-block with rules and regulations: the Green Cart. And I foresee it will soon be nothing but trouble.
Recently, every residence in the community received a great big plastic green garbage bin on wheels. It stands about four feet tall, and comes equipped with a swing-open lid. On arrival, a smaller, in-house version was tucked into the bigger one like a baby in a womb, along with an accompanying book of instructions. The offspring was for use, I assume, on the kitchen counter where such waste typically is generated.
Oh, what means: “such waste”, you ask? Happy to oblige. (By now you’re starting to see how this blog comes into being. I talk to all my imaginary friends and they ask me questions, which I answer here. Some days, my room here at the special hospital is so full of imaginary visitors that it’s all I can do to get the friendly staff to give me enough crackers to at least be able to offer everyone something to eat. But I digress again. My imaginary friend Conrad is telling me to get back to the story.)
Anyway, from the Green Cart’s very own website, here’s the complete list of what is supposed to go into it:
“Food Waste: Baked goods; Bone; Bread; Butter and margarine; Cake; Candy; Cereal; Cheese; Coffee filters and grounds; Cookies; Corn cobs and husks; Dairy products; Eggs and eggshells; Fish and fish parts; Flour; Fruit; Grains; Gravy and sauces; Grease / lard / fat; Herbs and spices; Jams and jellies; Mayonnaise; Meat and meat products; Nuts and nut shells; Oatmeal; Pasta; Peanut butter; Pizza; Popcorn; Pumpkins; Rice; Salads; Shellfish; Sugar; Syrup; Tea bags; Vegetables; Watermelon; Yogurt.
Paper products: Paper bags; Facial tissues; Freezer paper; Greasy pizza boxes; Microwave popcorn bags; Paper napkins / plates / cups; Paper towels; Waxed Paper.
Other Items: Dryer lint; Feathers; Hair; Houseplants; Leaf and yard waste; Nail clippings; Pet Hair; Popsicle sticks; Sawdust (in paper bags); Toothpicks; Wood ashes (cold – in paper bags); Wood chips.
Remember, absolutely no plastics in the Green Cart!”
Now there are still parts of Ancaster where they post yellow diamond-shaped signs advising you to keep an eye out for deer crossing the road. (And I have a trio of amazing memories connected with that: 1. a Christmas Eve walk where, at one point, we were strolling up a gently sloping street. As we neared the crest, we were suddenly confronted by the silhouettes of some eight to ten deer as they silently crossed the street a scant ten to 15 yards ahead; 2. the morning several years ago when we all woke up to find that a doe had decided to take her ease and lie down smack in my in-laws’ large backyard. She stayed long enough to allow us to take a few photos and admire her. Then she gently rose and ambled off somewhere else; and 3. another day when two rambunctious fawns, who looked large enough to probably be called teenagers, but still were possessed of their young coat dappling, were rambling around inside the yard along its tree line. With them, we played a gentle game of almost-tag. Get close, watch them bounce away among the trees, watch us as we got close again, bounce off again… several times until they decided it was time to move along to an adjacent yard to continue their explorations.)
In other words, there are still parts of Ancaster that are not that far removed from being more rural than urban. In recent years, it’s undergone an enormous residential build-up, but deer are still occasionally spotted, and raccoons abound. So take a look at that above list of Green Cart disposables again, especially the first paragraph, and take a minute to put yourself in the mindset of a raccoon.
Does the word, “buffet” (or whatever loose combination of sounds a raccoon might make to convey that thought) come to mind? Cause it should. Good heavens, the program even asks you to provide the napkins with which they can clean their little furry faces after chowing down on the contents of your Green Cart!
Its lid is no deterrent at all. It doesn’t, for example, lock but it is hinged and just swings over the cart’s large square opening to sit atop it. However, the Green Cart service website does have this helpful advice:
“The best places to store your cart ‘are in your garage or shed, or outside away from decks, stairs, walls or railings so that animals do not have any leverage to help them get in. Using a bungee cord tied over the lid (from the lips on each side of the cart) or a heavy object (brick or large rock) on the top of your green cart will also help.’”
All of which sounds wonderfully sensible and practical and maybe even workable, but at this point in the Green Cart planning meeting, the environmentalists must have gotten up en masse and gone to the bathroom, because a complete and utter fool appears to have hijacked the planning process: “Remember, bungee cords or any objects on top of your green cart MUST be removed before collection.”
Raccoons are not stupid creatures, as anyone will attest who has ever grappled with them in your attic or even among your garbage in what you thought were raccoon-proof containers. And if there’s a relatively simple way, or even a complicated way, to crack The Da-Liddy Code, you can pretty well count on a raccoon’s being able to figure it out.
But the Ancaster program actually requires that you unlock your lid, peel away the shock cords, or even lift the heavy brick off, before the poor but obviously powerfully unionized garbage collectors have to confront the apparently insurmountable inconvenience of doing it themselves. How many people, I wonder, will find themselves in the position of removing their lid fasteners early in the morning en route to work – hours, in some cases, before the garbage pick-up takes place on their street? (This brings us back to why the Green Cart says “buffet” in the mind of a raccoon.)
Plus when you factor in that this thing – the container – stand some four feet tall and measures about 16 – 20 inches on a side, wheels or no wheels it’s going to be a pain to hose out every week after the fastidious tuxedo-clad white-gloved garbage collectors have passed through the neighbourhood, deigning to allow your refuse to be added to the contents of their truck.
So not only don’t I think this program is going to work, I think it’s going to be a toss-up as to what complaint first makes it into the “Council Highlights” column of the community newspaper: the stench of a growing number of less-than-well-cleaned Green Carts on a hot August afternoon, or a blisteringly irate resident who one too many times had to clean up “buffet” debris that was raccoon-strewn along the street for fully half the length of his property’s frontage.
= = = = = = = =
Regular readers will recall that, occasionally, bits of official work-related messages will turn up here, along with an accompanying observation from me that reflects my (a) confusion; (b) frustration; or sometimes, (c) complete and utter befuddlement (a.k.a. “WHAT the hell were they thinking?!”)
This one is a category (a). I’m confused. Recently I received this in my e-mailbox at work:
“Invitation to the first Interdepartmental Visible Minorities Symposium
You are cordially invited to the first Interdepartmental Visibly Minorities Symposium, on Wednesday, May 3rd, starting at 8:00 a.m. at the Cadieux Auditorium, Lester B. Pearson Building, 125 Sussex Drive. The symposium is hosted by the Visible Minorities Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the National Council of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service of Canada.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves in our country’s ethnic diversity. Diversity makes us stronger as a country. As members of the public service, we constantly strive for employment equity in the workplace. In accordance with this, the themes of the symposium will be Employment Equity and Diversity and the Public Service Modernization Act.
The symposium is open to all employees in the public service who agree to maintain a scent-free environment throughout the day.
For more information, or to confirm your attendance, please contact (a non-Anglo-Saxon name).”
No, it’s not the unintentionally hilarious typo “visibly minorities” in line 1. (“You’re not just a minority; you’re visibly a minority!”)
It’s not even the theme of the memo. Visible minorities, employment equity and diversity all touch on laudable goals in the public service. In fact, to my mind, the Day of Jubilation will come when someone uses a term like that in conversation and people tilt their heads in a sort of puzzlement because they work in places where people routinely are employed for reasons of their relevant education, experience and ability to do the work, not because they’re a “visible minority” or because the department has actually had to be ordered to observe “employment equity” and “diversity” in its hiring criteria. Because when you hire based on experience and ability, you’re going to get equity and diversity by default. But I digress.
No, what puzzled me most about that invitation is this line: “open to all employees in the public service who agree to maintain a scent-free environment throughout the day”.
Can anyone tell me why I am apparently being asked to be an advocate of a “scent-free [workplace] environment” before I’ll be accepted at a visible minorities symposium?
And can anyone tell me how this invitation is NOT saying either, “Hey: visible minorities: you smell” or “Hey, everybody else BUT visible minorities: you smell!”? (Because one or the other of you has to toe the olfactory line before we’ll even let you in the door.)
= = = = = = = = = =
For the record, another of my imaginary friends recently asked me to add a comment about where I stand on the great flag debate. It’s like this: I really, really, REALLY resent the fact that the people we elect, and the wailing members of the fifth estate, have decided to use the return to Canada of four caskets containing the bodies of Canadian soldiers recently killed in Afghanistan as the hook upon which to hang their political commentaries. Scoring points by burying the tragedy and its accompanying solemnity under a torrent of sleazy histrionics has, if such were possible, even further eroded my respect for those who would claim the right to lead us.
That’s probably not what you wanted to know but, in the words of Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that”.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, recall that in my Grenada ramblings I referred to the street etiquette represented by the incessant use of the car horn. I offer by way of contrast the following:
On a recent walk portion of my daily commute, I was waiting at a busy intersection’s island delta for a break in the traffic. This particular intersection has no pedestrian crossings. Traversing it is supposed to be accomplished by means of a nearby tunnel. The problem is that you have to walk some distance out of your way to get to the tunnel entrance. Then, once out on the other side, you either have to travel even farther out of your way to come back to the sidewalk you left to get to the tunnel in the first place, or you have to hike up a steep, grass-covered slope to get back up onto the sidewalk. (I am sure that hill, in fact, was erected solely for the entertainment value it undoubtedly provides a cluster of hidden city workers who on wet days pass their coffee breaks watching people trying unsuccessfully not to slip and slide all the way back down its slick grass slope.)
The net outcome is that a great many people simply avoid the tunnel and cross on the surface, keeping a careful eye on the array of motor and pedal-powered vehicles being directed by a battery of timed traffic lights either to go straight, or to take one of several possible turns through the intersection.
On this morning, I had already decided that the oncoming tide of cars would require a few seconds’ waiting, so I had turned my head to look elsewhere when I heard a “beep beep”. Now at that intersection, sympathetic motorists will frequently slow down to allow waiting pedestrians to cross. In my case, having turned my head, I heard the horn and concluded that one such sympathetic motorist was saying, “Go ahead, my friend”.
But as I started across and looked up to give my benefactor a wave, I noticed that, in fact, he was just completing the process of giving an adjacent driver the finger – the culmination, I assume, of some exchange that had begun long before both arrived at my intersection. The “beep beep” was to get that driver’s attention. For my part, instead of seeing a driver waiting patiently with a smile and a wave while I crossed in front of him, I was suddenly confronted with a swiftly accelerating grille, to which was attached a car of no small size, coming right at me as the driver was leaning out the window, looking backwards, giving his parting gesture a grand flourish.
I’m not sure he ever did see me. But he might have caught a glimpse of the brief cloud of dust I raised as I suddenly charged through what was left to cross of the intersection. He might even have caught a bit of the four-letter stream of expletives I loudly directed his way as he blew past. But even if he had, I doubt very much he gave a damn.
The moral of the story is obvious. There are two parts to the information conveyed by a car horn – what you hear and what you see. Never, never assume anything about either until the actual evidence of both has been fully assimilated.
We spent several hours of this year’s Easter weekend on the road between Ottawa and Hamilton. Along the way I repeated what has become, since Lord knows when, a personal tradition. At Oshawa, there’s a brief stretch of the 401 where the highway takes a dip and passes beneath three street bridges in very close proximity to one another. And travelling at a breath or two over 120 km/h, you can pass under all three bridges in a grand total of eight seconds flat. Exactly. Since time immemorial (or more accurately, since 120 km/h became pretty well the standard velocity for travelling the 401), I have started a count of “one thousand… two thousand… three thousand…” either out loud or to myself and always manage to hit the hard “d” at the end of “eight thousand” at the precise moment the far side of bridge three rips past my sightline above the windshield. Passing the “eight second bridges” has been, without fail, a part of every drive to and from Ottawa for as long as I can remember. (Or at least as long as I have been driving the 401 @ 120km/h.)
Many, many years ago, when my Dad piloted the family car as we drove from Perth to visit my aunt and uncle and their family in Belleville, we would always stop at Actinolite. It’s a tiny town which still stands at the intersection of Highways 7 and 37, the latter being the road south through Tweed to Belleville. But for several years, roadside at Actinolite, there stood a cage, elevated on a concrete platform, in which resided a black bear with an insatiable love of Coca Cola. The cage had been erected beside a restaurant and, to make things easier for people who just wanted to stop and greet the bear, the owners had placed a vending machine that dispensed glass bottles of Coke. It was a never-ending break-up-the-drive delight for me and my brother to have Dad spring for a bottle, then allow each of us to take a turn tilting it bottom-up through the massive steel bars on the cage while the bear would gulp it down.
From today’s perspective as an adult, I realize now it was a pretty wretched life for such a wonderful animal. The cage was not huge and if it provided any shelter at all for the bear, it was in a minimal structure about the size of a large doghouse tucked into one corner. And given the number of bottles of Coke he must have had poured into him on a typical weekend of meeting the travelling public, I also suspect his dentition would eventually have left him unable to manage anything chewier than porridge. But we were kids, he was a big shambling black bear, and he loved the Coke that we passed him through the bars of his cage. I don’t think we ever made the Perth to Belleville run without stopping for a “Coke-bear break” at Actinolite for as long as that bear resided there.
- 0 -
Recently, I was out with a small group of good friends at what we try to arrange monthly as a “Boys’ Night Out” (BNO). One conversation opener was the news that, the previous day, the Ontario Provincial Police had pulled over and checked 25 randomly selected cars with toddler restraint seats for the way in which the seats had been installed. No fewer than 24 had the seats installed incorrectly.
The BNO gang started reminiscing about our own experiences installing these things and, without exception, we agreed that each and every one of us had probably installed the seats officially wrong. But in all cases, our thus-restrained children were nonetheless fully restrained within the seats and their harnesses. In my case, I recall our seat-backed anchor strap was not bolted down to a fixed point mounted by means of a hole drilled into my car (which is how the instructions tell you to do it) – it was secured by the nylon-webbed strap’s being wound around the rear headrest post and tied with a knot that would have tested even Lord Robert Stephenson Smythe Baden-Powell of Gilwell.
That led us to start musing along the lines of, “Just how on earth did we ever manage to get to where we are today?” when we all grew up without the countless government regulations and Canadian Standards Association guidelines governing everything from the allowable gap between bars in our cribs to the sugar content line at which nutritious fruit “juice” becomes the toxic, life-threatening fruit “drink”.
I found a similar line of thought in an online discussion about the complexity of some US Congressional regulations:
“Considering we were a nation for nearly 200 years before Congress started protecting us against ‘unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths,’ a natural question is how we managed to survive and grow from a population of 4 million to the 280 million of us today. According to my e-mail's author, if we listen to Washington, those of us still around who were children during the '40s, '50s and '60s probably should be dead. Nonetheless, there are 58 million of us born in 1945 or earlier who are still kicking. Our parents allowed us to sleep in cribs beautified with lead-based paint. They drove us around in cars that had neither seatbelts nor airbags. They permitted us to ride our bicycles without helmets, just as adults rode motorcycles without helmets. And, horror of horrors, there were no childproof medicine bottles that, by the way, are sometimes so difficult to open that some people summon their children to open them.”
One of our BNO guys actually recalled falling out of the family car one day when Dad took a corner just a little too sharply. (Boys being boys, whatever the age, the rest of concluded, “Well that certainly explains a lot!”)
Where am I going with this particular bit of rambling, you wonder? Right here:
At my father-in-law’s home in the law-abidingly-named “Ancaster Police Village”, they have recently instituted a new classification of garbage pick-up that is chock-a-block with rules and regulations: the Green Cart. And I foresee it will soon be nothing but trouble.
Recently, every residence in the community received a great big plastic green garbage bin on wheels. It stands about four feet tall, and comes equipped with a swing-open lid. On arrival, a smaller, in-house version was tucked into the bigger one like a baby in a womb, along with an accompanying book of instructions. The offspring was for use, I assume, on the kitchen counter where such waste typically is generated.
Oh, what means: “such waste”, you ask? Happy to oblige. (By now you’re starting to see how this blog comes into being. I talk to all my imaginary friends and they ask me questions, which I answer here. Some days, my room here at the special hospital is so full of imaginary visitors that it’s all I can do to get the friendly staff to give me enough crackers to at least be able to offer everyone something to eat. But I digress again. My imaginary friend Conrad is telling me to get back to the story.)
Anyway, from the Green Cart’s very own website, here’s the complete list of what is supposed to go into it:
“Food Waste: Baked goods; Bone; Bread; Butter and margarine; Cake; Candy; Cereal; Cheese; Coffee filters and grounds; Cookies; Corn cobs and husks; Dairy products; Eggs and eggshells; Fish and fish parts; Flour; Fruit; Grains; Gravy and sauces; Grease / lard / fat; Herbs and spices; Jams and jellies; Mayonnaise; Meat and meat products; Nuts and nut shells; Oatmeal; Pasta; Peanut butter; Pizza; Popcorn; Pumpkins; Rice; Salads; Shellfish; Sugar; Syrup; Tea bags; Vegetables; Watermelon; Yogurt.
Paper products: Paper bags; Facial tissues; Freezer paper; Greasy pizza boxes; Microwave popcorn bags; Paper napkins / plates / cups; Paper towels; Waxed Paper.
Other Items: Dryer lint; Feathers; Hair; Houseplants; Leaf and yard waste; Nail clippings; Pet Hair; Popsicle sticks; Sawdust (in paper bags); Toothpicks; Wood ashes (cold – in paper bags); Wood chips.
Remember, absolutely no plastics in the Green Cart!”
Now there are still parts of Ancaster where they post yellow diamond-shaped signs advising you to keep an eye out for deer crossing the road. (And I have a trio of amazing memories connected with that: 1. a Christmas Eve walk where, at one point, we were strolling up a gently sloping street. As we neared the crest, we were suddenly confronted by the silhouettes of some eight to ten deer as they silently crossed the street a scant ten to 15 yards ahead; 2. the morning several years ago when we all woke up to find that a doe had decided to take her ease and lie down smack in my in-laws’ large backyard. She stayed long enough to allow us to take a few photos and admire her. Then she gently rose and ambled off somewhere else; and 3. another day when two rambunctious fawns, who looked large enough to probably be called teenagers, but still were possessed of their young coat dappling, were rambling around inside the yard along its tree line. With them, we played a gentle game of almost-tag. Get close, watch them bounce away among the trees, watch us as we got close again, bounce off again… several times until they decided it was time to move along to an adjacent yard to continue their explorations.)
In other words, there are still parts of Ancaster that are not that far removed from being more rural than urban. In recent years, it’s undergone an enormous residential build-up, but deer are still occasionally spotted, and raccoons abound. So take a look at that above list of Green Cart disposables again, especially the first paragraph, and take a minute to put yourself in the mindset of a raccoon.
Does the word, “buffet” (or whatever loose combination of sounds a raccoon might make to convey that thought) come to mind? Cause it should. Good heavens, the program even asks you to provide the napkins with which they can clean their little furry faces after chowing down on the contents of your Green Cart!
Its lid is no deterrent at all. It doesn’t, for example, lock but it is hinged and just swings over the cart’s large square opening to sit atop it. However, the Green Cart service website does have this helpful advice:
“The best places to store your cart ‘are in your garage or shed, or outside away from decks, stairs, walls or railings so that animals do not have any leverage to help them get in. Using a bungee cord tied over the lid (from the lips on each side of the cart) or a heavy object (brick or large rock) on the top of your green cart will also help.’”
All of which sounds wonderfully sensible and practical and maybe even workable, but at this point in the Green Cart planning meeting, the environmentalists must have gotten up en masse and gone to the bathroom, because a complete and utter fool appears to have hijacked the planning process: “Remember, bungee cords or any objects on top of your green cart MUST be removed before collection.”
Raccoons are not stupid creatures, as anyone will attest who has ever grappled with them in your attic or even among your garbage in what you thought were raccoon-proof containers. And if there’s a relatively simple way, or even a complicated way, to crack The Da-Liddy Code, you can pretty well count on a raccoon’s being able to figure it out.
But the Ancaster program actually requires that you unlock your lid, peel away the shock cords, or even lift the heavy brick off, before the poor but obviously powerfully unionized garbage collectors have to confront the apparently insurmountable inconvenience of doing it themselves. How many people, I wonder, will find themselves in the position of removing their lid fasteners early in the morning en route to work – hours, in some cases, before the garbage pick-up takes place on their street? (This brings us back to why the Green Cart says “buffet” in the mind of a raccoon.)
Plus when you factor in that this thing – the container – stand some four feet tall and measures about 16 – 20 inches on a side, wheels or no wheels it’s going to be a pain to hose out every week after the fastidious tuxedo-clad white-gloved garbage collectors have passed through the neighbourhood, deigning to allow your refuse to be added to the contents of their truck.
So not only don’t I think this program is going to work, I think it’s going to be a toss-up as to what complaint first makes it into the “Council Highlights” column of the community newspaper: the stench of a growing number of less-than-well-cleaned Green Carts on a hot August afternoon, or a blisteringly irate resident who one too many times had to clean up “buffet” debris that was raccoon-strewn along the street for fully half the length of his property’s frontage.
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Regular readers will recall that, occasionally, bits of official work-related messages will turn up here, along with an accompanying observation from me that reflects my (a) confusion; (b) frustration; or sometimes, (c) complete and utter befuddlement (a.k.a. “WHAT the hell were they thinking?!”)
This one is a category (a). I’m confused. Recently I received this in my e-mailbox at work:
“Invitation to the first Interdepartmental Visible Minorities Symposium
You are cordially invited to the first Interdepartmental Visibly Minorities Symposium, on Wednesday, May 3rd, starting at 8:00 a.m. at the Cadieux Auditorium, Lester B. Pearson Building, 125 Sussex Drive. The symposium is hosted by the Visible Minorities Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the National Council of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service of Canada.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves in our country’s ethnic diversity. Diversity makes us stronger as a country. As members of the public service, we constantly strive for employment equity in the workplace. In accordance with this, the themes of the symposium will be Employment Equity and Diversity and the Public Service Modernization Act.
The symposium is open to all employees in the public service who agree to maintain a scent-free environment throughout the day.
For more information, or to confirm your attendance, please contact (a non-Anglo-Saxon name).”
No, it’s not the unintentionally hilarious typo “visibly minorities” in line 1. (“You’re not just a minority; you’re visibly a minority!”)
It’s not even the theme of the memo. Visible minorities, employment equity and diversity all touch on laudable goals in the public service. In fact, to my mind, the Day of Jubilation will come when someone uses a term like that in conversation and people tilt their heads in a sort of puzzlement because they work in places where people routinely are employed for reasons of their relevant education, experience and ability to do the work, not because they’re a “visible minority” or because the department has actually had to be ordered to observe “employment equity” and “diversity” in its hiring criteria. Because when you hire based on experience and ability, you’re going to get equity and diversity by default. But I digress.
No, what puzzled me most about that invitation is this line: “open to all employees in the public service who agree to maintain a scent-free environment throughout the day”.
Can anyone tell me why I am apparently being asked to be an advocate of a “scent-free [workplace] environment” before I’ll be accepted at a visible minorities symposium?
And can anyone tell me how this invitation is NOT saying either, “Hey: visible minorities: you smell” or “Hey, everybody else BUT visible minorities: you smell!”? (Because one or the other of you has to toe the olfactory line before we’ll even let you in the door.)
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For the record, another of my imaginary friends recently asked me to add a comment about where I stand on the great flag debate. It’s like this: I really, really, REALLY resent the fact that the people we elect, and the wailing members of the fifth estate, have decided to use the return to Canada of four caskets containing the bodies of Canadian soldiers recently killed in Afghanistan as the hook upon which to hang their political commentaries. Scoring points by burying the tragedy and its accompanying solemnity under a torrent of sleazy histrionics has, if such were possible, even further eroded my respect for those who would claim the right to lead us.
That’s probably not what you wanted to know but, in the words of Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that”.
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And finally, recall that in my Grenada ramblings I referred to the street etiquette represented by the incessant use of the car horn. I offer by way of contrast the following:
On a recent walk portion of my daily commute, I was waiting at a busy intersection’s island delta for a break in the traffic. This particular intersection has no pedestrian crossings. Traversing it is supposed to be accomplished by means of a nearby tunnel. The problem is that you have to walk some distance out of your way to get to the tunnel entrance. Then, once out on the other side, you either have to travel even farther out of your way to come back to the sidewalk you left to get to the tunnel in the first place, or you have to hike up a steep, grass-covered slope to get back up onto the sidewalk. (I am sure that hill, in fact, was erected solely for the entertainment value it undoubtedly provides a cluster of hidden city workers who on wet days pass their coffee breaks watching people trying unsuccessfully not to slip and slide all the way back down its slick grass slope.)
The net outcome is that a great many people simply avoid the tunnel and cross on the surface, keeping a careful eye on the array of motor and pedal-powered vehicles being directed by a battery of timed traffic lights either to go straight, or to take one of several possible turns through the intersection.
On this morning, I had already decided that the oncoming tide of cars would require a few seconds’ waiting, so I had turned my head to look elsewhere when I heard a “beep beep”. Now at that intersection, sympathetic motorists will frequently slow down to allow waiting pedestrians to cross. In my case, having turned my head, I heard the horn and concluded that one such sympathetic motorist was saying, “Go ahead, my friend”.
But as I started across and looked up to give my benefactor a wave, I noticed that, in fact, he was just completing the process of giving an adjacent driver the finger – the culmination, I assume, of some exchange that had begun long before both arrived at my intersection. The “beep beep” was to get that driver’s attention. For my part, instead of seeing a driver waiting patiently with a smile and a wave while I crossed in front of him, I was suddenly confronted with a swiftly accelerating grille, to which was attached a car of no small size, coming right at me as the driver was leaning out the window, looking backwards, giving his parting gesture a grand flourish.
I’m not sure he ever did see me. But he might have caught a glimpse of the brief cloud of dust I raised as I suddenly charged through what was left to cross of the intersection. He might even have caught a bit of the four-letter stream of expletives I loudly directed his way as he blew past. But even if he had, I doubt very much he gave a damn.
The moral of the story is obvious. There are two parts to the information conveyed by a car horn – what you hear and what you see. Never, never assume anything about either until the actual evidence of both has been fully assimilated.
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