I work for a team in a unit of a branch in a department of the federal government (and the wheels on the car go round and round) whose boss has just recently informed all of us who labour therein that we have an “Agenda for Excellence”. (Let’s just call it our “AFE” from this point on.)

The document that specifies the details of our new AFE apparently is so important that the copies handed to us at a recent staff retreat were printed in colour – English on one side, French on the other – and laminated. Now if that doesn’t say, “We mean business!”, well then I don’t know what does.

First of all, the layout. Picture this: start with a large box divided into six smaller boxes, three across, two down. Outside the large box at the top is a title: “Agenda for Excellence”. Outside the large box at the bottom are two lines of text. Line 1: “Drivers: Leadership, Accountability, Creativity, Communication”. Line 2: “Next steps: Identifying objectives, activities and benchmarks”.

Also outside the large box on the right is: “Toward Policy, Program, and Service Excellence” What is that, a motto? (“I don’ know, paysan, what’s a motto for you?” Hahahahahahaha… er… But I digress.)

Inside the large box is a line that divides it horizontally through the middle and which is over-captioned with an all-capital-letters word, “EXCELLENCE”.

(Hmmm… I’m beginning to think there’s a concept here they’d like us to get hold of.)

The top line of three boxes is identified with the word, “Internal”. So no bonus points for guessing that the bottom line of three boxes is labelled “External”. Now, each column of two boxes is labelled, in turn, “People”, “Partnerships”, Knowledge”. (Still with me here? If you want to take a sheet of paper and draw it out, I can wait.)

The point is that we have been determined to be fulfilling a six-part mission: Internal People, External People; Internal Partnerships, External Partnerships, and finally, Internal Knowledge, External Knowledge. (Four quadrants were enough for populist management guru Stephen Covey, who made a bazillion dollars telling people to classify everything that they do as one of: Important and Urgent; Important, but not Urgent; Urgent, but not Important; and neither Important nor Urgent. But we’ve got to have six. Well take that, Mr Seven-Habits-of-Highly-Effective-Whatevers!)

But wait, there’s more! Here is what we will do under each of those points on our AFE:

For Internal People: “To create a healthy working environment where all employees are enabled to learn, contribute to the organization’s mandate, and be leaders”;

For External People: “To engage, inform and serve Canadians using an accountable, citizen-centred approach that focuses on results”;

Over to column 2

For Internal Partnerships (but not, presumably, with people, who are already covered in column 1): “To build a culture of teamwork within the organization toward innovative approaches to common goals and objectives”;

For External Partnerships: “To encourage partnerships by creating the strategic capacity to manage a spectrum of external relationships in order to better position the Department as a leader in knowledge, policy, and programs”;

And finally, in column 3

For Internal Knowledge: “To build the capacity to create, share, and use knowledge to enhance organizational productivity and effectiveness”;

And last, but not least, for External Knowledge: “To generate, contribute, and share knowledge that will support and inform decision making, as well as engage Canadians in creating knowledge”.

I’ll pause now while all you Baby Ducklings go apply a soothing poultice to your stinging eyes. Not to mention while you grab the nearest piece of anything textual – even a TV Guide! – in the possibly vain hope of re-assuring yourself that the English language still retains an ability, somewhere, actually to say something clearly. Or actually just to say something.

Anything at all.

Our “mission” is a veritable thesaurus of weasel-words: “To build a culture”, “To build the capacity”, “To encourage”, “contribute”… To me, they all smack of, “We won’t actually do anything; we’ll simply get ready to do something”. It’s what we do best in government… strategize… plan… brainstorm… consult (internally AND externally)… “blue-sky”. But “do”??? Who do you think we are, Yoda? (“Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.”)

Will someone please tell me just how anyone actually “creates knowledge”?

Just what the hell is someone expected to do when told you will “inform decision making”?

And I’m sorry, but I can’t hear “Engage…” anything or anyone without hearing Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s famous signal, “Inform Star Fleet – we have engaged the Borg”. (Don’t laugh. There’s more that is relevant to the Government of Canada in that bit of Star Trek dialogue than might be apparent at first glance.)

And so we soldier on.

= = =

Meanwhile, from the tooth-gnash-of-the-day file:

Recently – also at work, of course – I had to seek out a new workstation to use because my own had suffered the temporary loss of its computer, which our techs had hauled away to try to discover why my video card had pretty well died. At my new workstation, I found myself sitting down to a computer whose keyboard appeared to be missing several of the characters I use routinely in my day-to-day work. And nothing wildly unusual – but characters like an apostrophe, and quotation marks.

After a while, I gave up the “pick a card – any card” random approach in my efforts to determine what keystrike would instill them into my documents. So I typed each and every character, line by line, first in uppercase and then directly below it in lowercase. And I was truly boggled by how many characters actually produced things on the screen that simply did not appear on the keys.

For example, I found that when I typed a key adorned with a capital E with a “grave” French accent (that’s the one that leans to the left) – nothing else – I got a single quotation mark (not the apostrophe – see below). And coincidentally, it was the same key, except when typed in uppercase, that yielded up my missing double quotation marks. Directly beside it was a key indicating a capital A, also with a “grave” accent on it. In uppercase, this would produce a thin vertical line and, in lowercase, a solidus leaning to the left (backslash).

Still with me? Well, I don’t blame you a bit. Doing this was ridiculous enough. Reading about my doing it must be just paralyzingly dull! But don’t let that stop me from rabbiting on a bit more about it…

Without making up a darned thing, here are a couple other peculiarities of this particular keyboard:

The “tilde” was hidden (that's the “ ~ ” mark -- I call it a Victorian hyphen) as were the curly brackets, square brackets and, as noted, the apostrophe. Other unlabelled surprises turned up my question mark, left and right arrows, and a solidus (forward slash) in places other than where the key symbols suggested they would be.

But not just characters. The standard keyboard abbreviations CTRL, ALT and DEL had vanished, and been replaced by, respectively, a ship`s wheel (for “CONTROL” – get it?), a symbol that looked like a sign meaning “railroad siding ahead” (“ALTERNATE” – get it?) and three diagonal lines that look like a weather map’s sign for rain meant “DELETE” (Rain washes away all sins?) And there are symbols that make no sense whatsoever to me: an almost fully completed circle with an arrowhead pointing through its gap at 11 o’clock (push this key to give you a one-hour warning for lunchtime?); a lowercase “a” nesting inside a large downward pointing V (your ass is down here, you dummy?). The keyboard has no brand name on it, but I’m not surprised. The design company probably consisted of two teenagers with fine paintbrushes who sold $1,500,000 worth of these things to the federal government, than promptly sold their shop, and high-tailed it for Bora Bora, there to watch in happy amusement at the antics of Keith Richards and his Rolling Stones bandmates.

= = =

Thanks so much for clearing that up…

This almost makes one long for the good old days when the Allies were fighting a host of mono-syllabic, typically insulting names that were used to identify the enemy. Recently, I was reading a website (globalpolicy.org) that identified the groups the US is fighting in Iraq. Here’s the key passage: “its four main groups: Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, al-Jaysh al-Islami fil-’Iraq, and al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Muqawama al-’Iraqiya”.

Kind of makes it hard to find a modern equivalent to the old fighter pilot’s admonition to “Beware of the Hun in the sun”, doesn’t it?

= = =

Thanks so much for clearing that up (2)…

The Guardian online on Thursday June 15 published the following correction:

“The Nazi laws prohibiting Jews marrying aliens, mentioned in the Writ large column, page 13, June 12, banned marriages with Aryans, not aliens.”

So memo to Fraulein Helga “Buzz Bomb” Herrenlieber: That little elopement you were planning with the Gorn? Looks like it’s a go after all. * phew *

= = =

And finally, I’m not sure but I think someone at work recently called me a tongue.

(Recorded for posterity)

The real irony here is that the unit I work for is officially a communications division. Recently, the entire team received this painfully worded message of thanks from our director. It includes one of the most memorably bizarre metaphors I have ever read:

“In short, I would like each and every one of you from all of my teams to know that you are very, very appreciated! The accomplishments I’ve named as well as the countless ones unmentioned are the muscles of the Department’s mouth: they all work in unison to continually give the Department the strong, confident voice for which we are recognised throughout the government.”

To be fair, I suppose it’s possible that the text was rendered by someone whose first language is French, and who perhaps was challenged by the boss (the author of the message) to come up with a colourful, quasi-Churchillian way of saying, “You give power to our messages”, or some such thing. It’s possible, I suppose.

But while that might be a darned good reason, it’s no excuse. And “You are the muscles of our mouth” really lacks the pizzazz of, “You are the wind beneath my wings.”

I can’t help thinking that, were I ever to be asked to produce a message on behalf of our unit and responded by asking, “So do you want me to put my muscle in your mouth?”, I would be in front of the Ontario Human Rights Commission the very next day.

At the latest.

I remain orally yours, etc... etc.

I expend a great deal of bandwidth in this blog whining about poor service, so in the spirit of fair play I think it’s about time to share an example of service that left “good” in its dust as it soared into “above and beyond the call of client expectation” airspace.

At home, we recently had our roof re-shingled. The job actually took a total of three full days spread over Friday, Saturday, Sunday evening and Monday morning. That’s right – Sunday evening. And here’s why.

Near the end of the Saturday working day, the roofing crew’s foreman told me they were almost done, but wouldn’t be able to finish entirely that day. There was still roughly 1/3 of one side of our roof that was nothing but plywood sheeting hanging out in the admittedly wonderful elements – sunny and warm. But he assured me that his crew, before going home, would roll tarpaper onto that part of the roof. If no rain fell between then and the time they re-started Monday morning, that paper would serve as the shingle underlay. If it did rain, he said, they would simply tear that paper up, and roll down a layer of new stuff before finishing the shingling.

An hour or so later, the rest of his crew departed.

Sunday dawned wonderfully, sunny, warm and with the promise of no threat at all to the freshly rolled-out… wait a minute. As I backed out the driveway with the rest of our small family en route to our traditional Sunday ABH breakfast (Anywhere But Home), I looked up at the roof and noticed a couple of tarpaper rolls were perched at one end near the chimney, but the unshingled portion was still bare plywood.

But as the day went on, it started to look like Sunday wasn’t going to end the way it began. A quick check of the weather channel confirmed that rain, possibly accompanied by thunder and lightning, was inbound for overnight.

At this point, I went into Guy “Minimal Inconvenience” Mode (GMIM is, I believe, a generally accepted condition among men who will come up with any excuse in order to avoid having to actually deal with a problem. At its most extreme, GMIM is marked by a sincerely-held male belief that aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy will arrive and fix the problem before we have to look for tools like the correct size of Philips screwdriver that I was pretty damned sure I left in the laundry room after removing the old light fixture…, “So no, I don’t have to deal with it.” But as mid-day became late afternoon and the overhead cloud cover continued its relentless thickening, I decided to phone the roofing company. Because they also operate a chimney maintenance division, they have a 24-hour emergency service number and, being as it was Sunday and I knew there would be no one working in their office, I headed straight to that number.

The fellow I spoke to, after hearing why I was calling, admitted to me he knew nothing about the company’s roofing division but promised to check into it right away and, if there was a problem, he would call back. That was at about 4:30 Sunday afternoon.

Some four hours later, while sitting in quiet Sunday evening mode (a state partly induced by a tremendously successful effort earlier that afternoon at discovering a really good way to make excellent margaritas at home), we suddenly heard a barrage of thumping from overhead. Looking out the front window, we saw the roofing crew’s truck on the street and a ladder on the front porch step running straight up to the roof.

As it turned out, the roofing company’s emergency contact person had initiated not just a callback, but the dispatching of the roofing crew to the job site – at 8:30 on a Sunday evening! – to finish off what, it seems, they should have done before they left the previous evening.

Before they left this evening, the foreman knocked on our front door just to assure us that the thumping we had been hearing overhead for the half hour or so it took to complete the job was not the prelude to the arrival of a SWAT team in search of a marijuana grow-op.

And that night, it did indeed rain very heavily for a short time.

So if you live in the Ottawa area and you happen to be looking for a roofing / chimney company* that not only provides a very good price (which is why we contracted with them in the first place), but who clearly will also respond in a hugely satisfying manner to a client’s concerns, then have I got a name for you!

(*Hint: Fill in the blank in this Irving Berlin song lyric):

“I'm puttin' on my _t—h—_
Tyin' up my white tie
Brushin' off my tails

I'm dudein' up my shirt front
Puttin' in the shirt studs
Polishin' my nails

I'm steppin' out, my dear
To breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks with class
And I trust that you'll excuse my dust when I step on the gas”

To repeat: 8:30 on a Sunday evening!

= = = = = = = = = =

And for those days when you really haven’t said, F*** LABOUR UNIONS!! often enough, let me give you this latest concerning one of this country’s labour darlings, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) (from the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, May 31):

“Rural residents left in the lurch by the sudden loss of home mail delivery are appealing for political help as Canada Post continues to shut down country mail routes for health and safety reasons.

Some New Brunswick residents, including seniors and people with disabilities, were told by Canada Post on Tuesday they will have to make 40-kilometre round trips to get their mail.

‘We feel like second-class citizens,’ said John Moreau, who lives in a farming community about 20 kilometres from the Fredericton post office where his mail is now being held.

‘There has been no consultation, no public forum whatsoever. We've just been abandoned.’

The corporation said this week it is reviewing its entire rural mail service following complaints from the unionized workers who deliver the mail.

The workers say they are suffering repetitive stress injuries from reaching into mailboxes. As well, there are concerns about heavy traffic on some roads.

Rural service in a number of communities across Canada already has been suspended, including several communities in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.”

= = =

Just so you understand what is happening there, you have a postal union whose members are complaining of RPI (Repetitive Stress Injury) due to their having to repeatedly reach into rural mailboxes to deliver the mail.

The gales of laughter that should have greeted that little beauty were, instead, trounced underfoot by the regional postal service (a term that, if not already there, has assuredly earned for itself a fixed-in-stone place on the list of oxymorons for the New Millennium). The posties’ union’s prompt response was to stop rural delivery in that part of the country and order residents who live along those routes to start picking up their mail at a more central location – like say, a corner store and, like say, some 20 km away from their homes.

I can’t help thinking we haven’t heard the end of this. I haven’t ruled out the possibility of a nationwide wildcat postal strike launched by CUPW in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in rural New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Neither rain, sleet, snow nor dead of night shall stay this faithful courier from his appointed rounds… OK, so in fairness to those poor, hard-done-by mail deliverers, that classic mail carrier’s motto really says nothing about tennis elbow.

= = = = =

Spotted on an OC Transpo bus: During a recent morning commute, I noticed a woman sitting opposite who was sporting a tank top and gym shorts, certainly not the most common form of commuter wardrobe early in the morning on a weekday. On her top was emblazoned in large letters, “Thai Boxing”. (Without even Googling it*, I’m pretty sure Thai boxing is a combination of what North Americans understand as boxing, with the added attraction of being able to kick your opponent. A really proficient Thai boxer can actually deliver a roundhouse foot to the side of his or her opponent’s head.)

And its practitioners are incredibly fit.

I awarded a quick mental checkmark of approval for someone who chooses to undertake such a rigorous form of exercise in the name of enhanced personal fitness.

Then she stood up to exit the bus and I saw the slogan emblazoned across the back of her shirt: “Givin’ guys black eyes”.

Oh.

Swiftly averting my glance, I returned to re-immersing myself in Book 4 of the Otherland tetrology.

Lest I should’st suffer the black’ning of mine own orbs.

* OK, so I broke down after I wrote my brief description above: http://www.thaiboxing.com/

= = = = =

RIP

A few days ago, on May 24, Desmond Dekker died. A few weeks ago, that name would have meant nothing whatsoever to me. But as readers of our Grenada trip experiences might recall, I was inspired to seek out a few examples of reggae music upon my return, the better to carry the Island experience to our screened back porch this summer (well, that, and a pitcher of ice-cold rum punch).

In my search, Desmond Dekker’s name made a frequent appearance on almost every “Best of…” reggae album whose liner notes I read.

And I can almost promise you that you have heard the song for which he is best known: The Israelites. The song also recurs in a great many covers by other bands, including some who fall under the much harsher “punk” stream. Talk about a crossover!

It might even be a song you don’t even know you knew, but if you seek out a website that offers the opportunity to stream it through your computer’s speakers, even if in no more than a 30-second snip, you’ll probably end up saying something like, “Oh, well I’ve heard that before!”

So with a cheery reggae bop by way of a lament, rest in peace, Mr Dekker / Dacres, and thank you. Now everybody! (Just jump in anywhere):

(The Israelites, by Desmond Dacres & Leslie Kong, as recorded in 1969 by Desmond Dekker and the Aces)

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

After a storm there must be a calm.
They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Poor me, the Israelite.
I wonder who I'm working for.
Poor me, Israelite.

= = = = =

And finally, a tale from the urban graffiti jungle (suburban wags’ edition).

During a recent visit to a large grocery store where I shop, after paying at the cash I passed by a phalanx of large cardboard boxes in which were stored brand new propane barbecues that the store was offering at a special price. (Don’t get me going – having a grocery store that sells hardware and appliances is another debate. But I digress.)

On one box, which obviously had been opened and then re-taped shut, a helpful if perhaps not fully literate store employee had taped this handwritten sign, “handel is missing”.

Directly underneath, someone had penned, “And what good is a barbecue without music?”

Poor me, the Baby Duck.
I wonder who I’m working for.
Poor me, the Baby Duck.

(With a sign-off nod to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll.)
.