I’ve long had a beef with the whole concept of “24-7” news coverage. There’s just so much that is wrong with it, I still am not convinced that anything good about it overturns all the reasons I believe it needs to be re-tooled – in a major way – as a means of communicating news.
To me, two recent examples of its inherent flaws have only served to reinforce my opinion. The tragedy of the Newfoundland oil rig helicopter crash in the North Atlantic began on CBC-TV Newsworld – the channel on which I was watching news at the time – as a “Breaking News” story, a typical soundburst for the all-news channels. At that moment, clearly the only thing the news reader had was “helicopter crash”. But instead of limiting herself to leaving it at that, she immediately went on to start conveying all sorts of speculation about how many people were on board (“because we know some of these flights are carrying workers to and from the rigs, but sometimes there’s only a maintenance crew carrying equipment”); about whether the helicopter had managed a controlled ditching or had experienced a more catastrophic crash (“we all remember the recent crash off Scotland where the chopper landed upright and everyone was saved just minutes afterwards”). In point of fact (which, to me, should be the lead driver in determining what comes out of a newsreader’s mouth), at the time she revealed the “breaking news” she knew only that coast guard helicopters were en route to the scene.
A few minutes later, in what I thought was the most appalling piece of misinformation to make it to air on this “news” channel, we were told that the helicopter had been spotted on the surface; two people had already been “plucked” from the water, and CBC further reported that two life rafts had been seen and the downed helicopter’s entire crew and passenger group (!) had been accounted for in the rafts. For several momentous minutes, we had another good news air crash story on our hands – our own “Miracle on the Hudson”. All conveyed to us by a newsreader from the comfort of her Toronto studio, with a telephone link to “someone” at the helicopter’s air base who may or may not have been actually speaking to one of the rescue pilots or who simply might have embellished what he or she thought had been overheard in a crackly air-to-shore communication as the coast guard helicopters arrived on the scene. (A radio operator’s “Can you see people in the rafts? Crew? Passengers?” might have been heard simply as a statement rather than a question and suddenly the message gets flashed back to the Toronto CBC studio where the newsreader smilingly conveys the news that the crew and all the passengers have been accounted for in the two life rafts.)
Well as we now know, the rafts were empty; the helicopter on the surface was upside down and sank in seconds after being “seen”, or possibly even before that and what had actually been seen was debris; two people were indeed pulled from the water but one, a young woman, was dead. And the sole survivor was fighting for his life in a St John’s hospital. The remaining 16 souls were missing.
Put yourself in the place of the families watching all this unfold, if indeed they were following CBC-TV Newsworld’s coverage. (If the helicopter company had been merciful, perhaps they had had the foresight to escort the worried family members to a comfortable waiting room with no television, and kept them up to date only with what they knew absolutely to be the case. Not what they had “heard” from hither and yon.) It gives tragic, real meaning to the often-used phrase, “emotional rollercoaster”. Your son’s helicopter has just crashed! Good news, he’s alive and well! No, wait, he’s missing and presumed drowned! Our thoughts and prayers are with you!
The second story concerns the even more recent “breaking news” that a trio of Médecins sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders aid workers, including a young Canadian woman, had been kidnapped in Sudan and God only knows who did it, where the hostages are being taken, and what is happening to them. But by the time we all went to bed on Friday night, we had been told by our newsreaders that all was well, they’d all been released and were “somewhere safe”. Fast forward to Saturday morning and the news is that whoops, they haven’t been released and that negotiations to secure their freedom are still going on with the kidnappers.
Well pardon me but how the [obscenity] did “news” of their release actually make it to air if it wasn’t fact?
When I was a wanna-be Edward R Murrow in Carleton University’s School of Journalism, one thing that was drilled into our heads was the importance of verifying your facts – double verifying in fact. (In fact, the process was called “fact checking”. Until it had been checked, you see, it wasn’t a fact. And until it was a fact, it stayed out of our “news” reports, whether written for print or broadcast.) One of our professors, a local legend named Phyllis S Wilson, even went so far as to inform us that anything we handed in with so much as a misspelled name would earn an automatic F. No appeal. Needless to say, we checked our name spelling carefully.
The biggest problem I see with 24-7 news is that from the outset, “breaking news” coverage of an event immediately jumbles both fact and speculation into such a hash that the listener / viewer doesn’t have a clue what has actually happened / is happening. Frequently, all we get is on-air description from someone in a studio who is watching the same images we are – broadcast from an overhead circling helicopter, for example – while their reporter “on the ground” (another phrase I really, really, really hate) is still en route to the scene. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a regularly scheduled “news conference” interrupted by “breaking news” as we are carried away to live coverage of huge, billowing clouds of black smoke from what eventually turns out to be a tire dump fire at a storage yard in some obscure suburb of Tuscaloosa – simply because the black clouds suggested that a huge disaster “could be unfolding”. No one knows anything, but hey! We don’t want to miss a second of what could be another 9-11 in the making, do we?
Or how many times have we seen another scheduled event interrupted by a cutaway to some other previously-unheard-of subdivision where “We’ve just heard that police have surrounded a home on a quiet residential street in Oak Glade, California where one or possibly two gunmen are holding as many as six family members hostage.” [Cut to a live shot (“Breaking News”, of course) from a circling helicopter over a scene where about eight police cars with flashing red lights can be seen parked on a street outside the house in question. The house itself is pretty much obscured by overhanging tree branches in the front yard, but hey! Look at all those flashing lights! So something is happening and we don’t want to miss a second of what could be another Charles Manson in the making, do we?] “CNN has a reporter on the ground in nearby [big city name], who is en route to the scene. CBC News will bring you more information just as soon as we can.” [In other words, we have someone here in the studio who is watching CNN’s coverage.] “For now, let’s go back to Sudbury where the Prime Minister is announcing a major new government initiative that will be good news for nickel miners who have been unable to find work for the past eleven years.”
In those same days when I was a J-school undergrad, national and international television news was a 20-minute newcast at 11pm every night. Teams of writers and reporters had spent the entire day writing, checking their sources, adding to what they knew, checking those sources, and preparing a meticulous script for the anchor. A major news item might get five minutes; most were 30 to 60 seconds. They were tightly written, but utterly packed with facts – the W5 commandments of the news. (Sometimes just the W4 – the “Why?” might be left to the print journalists to flesh out in the next day’s press.) Local news was a half-hour typically at suppertime and it bundled local weather and sports into the package, as well. You got “live” coverage if something was “live” as the newscast went to air – assuming it was important enough and that was damned rare.
If I were king of the forest, much of that would return to the news channels. The news would air when it had been determined by competent senior editors to be news. Does the public really need to live a disaster as it unfolds? Do “news” people even need to be there until someone determines that what is unfolding is sufficiently newsworthy to justify coverage? And does speculation in the absence of fact contribute anything worthwhile to the news of an event? Despite the Bachelor of Journalism I hold, I’m afraid I answer a resounding no to all three of those questions.
That’s why I whine about it; because no news organization on the planet today would accept me on their staff. I’m not unhappy about that. I’m unhappy about what my one-time-might-have-been profession has become.
PS... Breaking News: I see the very latest on the kidnapped MSF workers is – again – that they have been released. The source? The Sudanese government. Run “Government of Sudan” by Google and spend a couple minutes browsing to see how many words pass before “rape” and “genocide” appears in what you’re reading.(“Couple minutes” is probably way too generous as a descriptor of the time required for this to happen.) So to my might-have-been colleagues, how about you please just shut the [obscenity] up until you have images of these people smiling from the window of a van labelled “UN”, preferably in a location other than Sudan. Is that too much to ask? I also see the young Canadian is being described as the “closest thing to an angel” that MSF has among their volunteers. God, one hopes not.
= =
To the 16:
"Eternal Father, strong to save
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave.
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed their raging at Thy word
Who walked'st on the foaming deep
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep.
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease
And give, for wild confusion, peace
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
O Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour
From rock and tempest, fire and foe
Protect them wheresoe'er they go.
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea."/em>
(For Those in Peril on the Sea, by William Whiting)
Friday, March 13, 2009
Katie and I experienced a Twilight Zone moment recently – well, “Twilight Zone” for me anyway. Here’s how it unfolded. Leslie and I routinely take late night constitutionals around the neighbourhood. (One disadvantage of working with my workstation at home is that I miss my daily walks – which used to total about an hour per day when I commuted.) A couple weeks ago, we saw an unusual series of animal tracks in the freshly fallen light covering of snow. But thanks to a long-ago stint at the Hamilton–Wentworth Outdoor Education Centre as part of my teachers’ college training, I recognized them as most likely to be red fox prints. A red fox trail is unique in that the prints follow an almost draftsman’s quality straight line with a very regular spacing. In fact, one finds it hard to believe that four paws are involved in making such a trail. (Photo: animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu)
After we returned home, we Googled ‘em up and pretty much confirmed that, despite their unlikely location on a residential street, it appeared there had indeed been a red fox recently on our walkabout route.
Fast forward one day to a suppertime TV newscast when the BBC happened to show an item about a vixen that had been adopted as a pet by a family who lives one floor above a pet shop in England. Apparently someone had rescued a newborn fox kit one day and, having no animal rescue service anywhere in town, brought it to the pet shop in hopes of saving its life. The pet shop owner enlisted the help of the upstairs residents and by the time the animal was old enough to manage for itself, everyone involved concluded that it had become so completely domesticated it would likely be a cruelty to attempt to return it to the wild. Hence one of England’s more unusual family pets.
A mere couple hours later, I was driving Katie to somewhere she needed to be. It was dark, and by way of conversation, I started telling her about the fox that had been adopted and turned into a wonderful, if decidedly unusual, English family pet. And at the precise moment I was regaling her with the animal’s conversion from a weak, baseball-sized mound of newborn fur to healthy adulthood, Katie, looking ahead of the car where our headlights were illuminating the snowy street, suddenly said, “Speaking of foxes...”
At the same moment, I stepped on the brakes because the animal that had suddenly stepped from a side street directly into our path was indeed a full-grown red fox. And it stopped – obviously manifesting the [animal name here]-in-the-headlights paralysis that has become such a cliché. When the car was fully stopped, we were sitting no more than 10 feet away from it. The car’s stopping action obviously un-hypnotized it, because after blinking a couple times, it turned and casually trotted along its original route across the street in front of us. Pausing just long enough at a snowbank to turn and, I have no doubt, think something along the fox-talk lines of “Thanks very much for that”, it disappeared up a neighbouring driveway around the house.
Still later that evening, as Leslie and I took another stroll, I withheld telling her the story until we reached the driveway. At that point, I drew her attention to the same trail we had seen a couple nights previous, and then told her that Katie and I had actually seen the trailmaker.
It isn’t the first time we’ve seen a fox in the neighbourhood – several years ago we saw one trotting bold as brass in broad daylight right down the centreline of our own street. Rabbits, raccoons and skunks are frequent visitors – one of the latter one day let go a blast that we figured must have deterred a cat attack right outside our living room window because the sudden stench inside the house was so powerful it made our eyes water. And we’ve had the occasional hawk show up casting covetous eyes on the smaller birds clustered around our backyard feeder. But a fox is a rare sighting and its coming on the scene as it did with a scriptwriter’s sense of timing was what will cement it forever as a truly Rod Serling-esque moment in my mind.
= = = = =
I have, in the past, occasionally slammed the bureaucratic lunacy that seems all too pervasive in the Government of Canada department in which I toil.
Oh hell, let’s be honest, when I have had anything at all to say about it in the past, it’s been to slam it. After all, I work for the same government whose first major spending decision after being elected was to take the literacy funding contributions that the previous government provided for hundreds of organizations across Canada that ran thousands of programs aimed at improving adult learning and literacy in what the government itself calls “The Knowledge Economy” – programs that co-ordinated the services of tens of thousands of volunteers – and cancelled them. How can you not slam organizational thinking like that?
But lost among the numbing sea of my departmental procedures and approval hierarchies and Agenda for Excellence Achievement Award reports are the people with whom I work. And I actually like them – many of them a lot. I find especially that my affection has grown tremendously since I began working at home a few months ago (but admitting that would probably give the wrong impression. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is the reason, not what you were thinking.)
But really, what can you say about someone who welcomes you to that most dreaded of bureaucratic days – The Team Retreat – with a little Japanese-sushi-bamboo-lunchbox style of kit just full of odd little objects and this Table of Contents? (Quoted verbatim – right down to the punctuation – and in its entirety... actually, in its English language entirety. Every one of the following sentences was also thoughtfully provided in French.) (Oh, “MCS” is “Ministerial Communications Services”. That’d be us.):
= = =
“MCS Survival Kit
Marble – So you’ll have an extra one when you lose yours!
Rubber Band – To stretch yourself beyond your limits.
Penny – So you’ll have enough cents to realize you’re a valuable asset to our team.
Eraser – Because everyone makes mistakes. That’s OK, so long as we learn by our mistakes.
Hugs and Kisses chocolate – To remind you that someone cares about you!!!
String – To tie things together when everything falls apart.
Paperclip – To help you hold it all together.
Gum* – To remind you that if you stick with it, you can accomplish anything.
Pen – To list your accomplishments everyday.
Lapel pin – To remind you that we can overcome and not fear change.**
Stress toy – When nothing else works, hold on tight and take a breath!"
= = =
* The gum brand? Excel, of course.
** It is actually a pin left over from the days when our department had a different name. So apparently when I wear a no-longer-applicable lapel pin to promote our department, I am actually saying, “I do not fear change”. Maybe I’ll give it to a panhandler.
Continuing with our Fun Times at Work theme, recently we had yet another branch meeting in order to inaugurate a new “initiative” in our Department – employee awards! (I’m seriously beginning to think the only way to get through these branch meetings is to take my lead from their name and fortify myself in advance with several ounces of bourbon and branch water.)
The moment we arrived, the lights in the auditorium-cum-theatre in which we were seated darkened. Wonderful! It seemed they were actually going to forego the usual rah-rahs from senior bureaucrats for whom “public speaking” typically sits far down their skill sets in favour of a professional production.
The onscreen appearance of the renowned National Film Board of Canada logo onscreen further cheered me. We had been advised in advance that there would be a “dress code” for this branch meeting – “black and white”. And so, as the theatre’s speakers gave forth with the first few notes of a classical piano, for one brief sparkling moment I thought that perhaps we were in for a showing of a stunning work by Norman McLaren, one that would have been wholly appropriate to the theme: Pas de Deux.
(Photo source: www.tbray.org)
But alas, it was not to be. Here are a few highlights from one website’s synopsis of the half hour to which we were next subjected (CM Magazine, Vol. XI, No.17):
“Mr. Mergler's Gift is about how a chance meeting in the park between an old man and young girl has a life-transforming effect on both of them.
Daniel Mergler is a 77-year-old man suffering from colon cancer. He is in the last year of his life, has just retired from teaching piano and is sitting on a park bench, not doing well emotionally. A man and his daughter ride their bicycles through the park; then the father sits on the next bench while his nine-year-old daughter plays on a swing. The father and Daniel Mergler strike up a conversation...
Mr. Mergler soon realizes that Xin Ben is the most gifted student he has ever had. She learns with such speed and with such feeling that it exhilarates him, and he forgets about his illness. He teaches her about the great composers and gets her to read about them in books from the library. He tells her to know the story of the music in her mind so that when she plays it, the story is playing in her mind.
After the twenty-sixth lesson, Mr. Mergler's cancer progresses to the point that he becomes very weak and can no longer walk. He falls down while alone at his apartment and needs to call 911. He mails Xin Ben's parents a note and tells them of his situation. He asks that they visit him but not bring their daughter because it would be too emotional for them.
This is a sad time for all of them. Xin Ben's piano lessons mean more to her than anything else, and she is devastated by her teacher's illness. Mr. Mergler feels a responsibility to Xin Ben. He cares for her like a daughter, but he also recognizes that her gift cannot be wasted. His fear is that she will end up with a mediocre teacher who will not develop her talent...
The documentary would also be a good launching off point for discussions about death and dying.”
= =
I am not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that as the lights came back on, people in the theatre were openly weeping. On with the feel-good awards!
To their credit, the event’s emcees tried gamely to bring the mood up somewhat from the profound sorrow into which it had sunk by extolling the message of finding inspiration within oneself, but as I said to another correspondent after the meeting, it had the same effect of launching a retirement party by showing a documentary about the horrific effects of the Hiroshima explosion, then going immediately to a segue like, “You think that was a blast??!! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! On with the party!”
Then, adding insult to injury, the trio of awards they disbursed included the presentation of a “Creativity in Communications” Award to a department whose job description can be pretty much reduced to “Do communications creatively”. I think next year I’ll nominate myself for accepting a paycheque every two weeks – the Analysis of English Language Media Award. (“And the winner is... Holy cow! Our English language Media Analyst!”)
Works for me.
= = =
Bits and pieces of this and that...
-- I suppose I should thank the Globe and Mail for freeing up my time to read other things. All it took was encountering this sub-headline on the front page of a recent weekend’s G&M’s "Focus and Books" section to send me and my Saturday morning café au lait to the day’s Ottawa Citizen instead: “The vagina doesn't always agree with the brain, says Meredith Chivers, Canada's rising star of the science world.”
-- "CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE WON THE WINING PRIZE" was the title of a recent e-mailed message that got by my SPAM traps. At first I was thinking maybe this whiny little corner of the blogosphere had finally garnered a significant trophy. Then I realized the typo could have just as easily have been perhaps not a typo at all and maybe I’d won a random draw from the Natalie (“Red and White and Drunk All Over”) Maclean monthly wine bulletin I receive. Sadly, it will forever remain the stuff of speculation because I didn’t open the SPAM message to discover in which incarnation I’d been designated a “winer”.
-- A few days back, we had to have a tech from Rogers home video drop by to discover that the problem a telephone-based cable signal troubleshooting technician had earlier determined from a remote location did not, in fact, exist. Why was I not surprised? When I first booked the appointment with a telephone-based customer service person, I advised him we have call identification and asked how I would know it was the Rogers tech person calling on the day of the appointment to confirm I was at home. The phone tech had no idea so I decided I’d just take my lumps during the assigned three-hour phone confirmation window and answer anyone who phoned at that time.
I needn’t have worried. Barely an hour into the three-hour window, the phone rang and the call identification window informed me that the call was coming from someone named “Tech Nition”. Obviously Mr and Mrs Nition knew with Nostradamus-like clarity where their little boy Tech would wind up when they held their naming ceremony for him.
-- While I appreciate the Damascus-like conversion to “clean” energy and “economic stimulus” by the Harper Tories to all things Obama-ish since the day the Prez dropped into Ottawa for a Beavertail, I am already so sick and tired of their repeatedly invoking the new President as the source of all Tory policy that if I hear one more Harper cabinet minister drop his name during Question Period, I am going to e-mail the US House of Representatives and urge them to sue the Harper government either for plagiarism or false advertising.
-- To whom do we owe a thank you for creating a world where it seems harder and harder to get a simple apology for a simple error? I only ask because I was recently in our local corner store (actually, it’s in a strip mall, not on a corner, but “corner store” evokes exactly what it is) and took three items to the cash: a can of spaghetti sauce; a package of pita bread and the Sunday Ottawa Citizen. The cashier rang it in and pronounced the total to me: $15.44.
I paused in the act of opening my wallet, looked at him, looked at the LCD panel on the cash register where $15.44 was indeed happily glowing away in bright green light, and said, “Fifteen forty-four???!!”
Then he looked at the three items on the counter, and at the glowing number, and said, “No, that’s not good, is it?” He picked up each item individually and keyed them in again. This time the number lit up as $9.49. We did our eye contact thing again. Without a word, he re-entered, for a third time, a trio of prices and got a number very close to what I had already mentally tallied as a total: $6 and change. All he had to say next was, “You want bag?” No, what I wanted was to hear something like, “Sorry about that.” Not a lavish apology; not an offer of free corner store groceries for a month; simply a halfway contrite acknowledgement of the mistake. But instead, what I got was really a response that seemed to suggest it happens all the time. No big deal.
On a different day, or perhaps the same day many hours later and much closer to bedtime, I might have passed over a $20 bill, accepted the $4.56 in change and gone on my way without even absorbing the mistake.
(A few years back, on a long drive along Highway 401 that included a very late-night fuel stop at one of their service centres, I filled up and gave the attendant – who had helpfully come out to my car – enough money to cover the number I pronounced aloud. He gave me a quizzical look, but he gave me the right change. About ten minutes later, several kilometres down the highway, I suddenly realized I’d never spent that much for gas in my life with this car, even when the tank was nearly bone dry. Then it hit me – the number I had pronounced had been the number of litres I had pumped into the car. The two tally wheels, of course, sit one atop the other on a gas pump and I had given the attendant the volume count, rather than the price. Gas then cost somewhere in the vicinity of about $0.50 a litre, as I recall. Obviously, I was not going to turn around on the 401, and had I elected to exit at the next ramp, backtrack to the first ramp on the other side of the Service Centre so as to come back to it and argue with the attendant, I would have consumed a measurable quantity of the gas whose payment I would have been disputing. But what galled me – and why that recollection sticks so clearly in my mind – is that the attendant actually turned to look at the two numbers on the pump, and even though he knew I had read aloud the wrong one as the price, he silently accepted the money and, I have no doubt, pocketed the difference.)
My point in recalling that episode is that I probably don’t always pay 100 per cent crystal clear attention to every single cash transaction I make. Coming back to my corner store on this sunny Sunday, had I not been vaguely conscious of the approximate price of the three items, I might well have paid what I was told to pay. No questions asked. I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting his error was deliberate. But error it was. And my Mom and Dad taught me to say “Sorry” when I make a mistake.
(Incidentally, for the past year or so I’ve been paying for gas by swiping a credit card through a slot at the pump. No contact at all with an attendant. I might still occasionally misread the money total, but the magnetic stripe reader on the pump never does. Score one for technology over bleary-eyed late-night drivers.)
-- Talk about covering your bases... Here’s a recent Globe and Mail headline: “McGuinty calls on banks to pass on rate cut”. So if the banks follow the Fed’s lead and reduce their lending rates for the ordinary consumer, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty can say, “That’s what I told them to do – pass the Fed’s rate reduction on to the small borrower”. And if the banks refuse and keep their consumer lending rates where they are, Mr McGuinty can say, “That’s what I told them to do – give it a pass this time and keep those rates right where they are.” I guess that’s why we pay our politicians the big bucks. Because they’re never wrong.
-- I’d like to close by issuing an open apology to a whole bunch of generous friends, family and neighbours. Over the years, we have been the happy recipients of all manner of home-prepared jams, jellies, chutneys and, in larger measure, wine, cakes, cupcakes, even leftover roast lamb on one occasion. The end result has been a steady growth in the population of our pantry’s store of Mason jars
and an almost endless variety of Tupperware (none of whose lids seem to match the containers when I’m looking for one, incidentally, but I digress). And not one of which I can recall our ever having returned. So I just want to apologize here and now to all of the aforementioned people who muttered darkly at discovering they lacked enough preserving jars to use for this year’s project because Mike and Leslie didn’t give last year’s empty gift jar back. (Although I will gladly add that I use “Mike and Leslie” merely for identification. All blame is mine and mine alone. First of all, it’s in the husband job description. Secondly, only one of us is an incurable hoarder – even in the kitchen – and it’s not Leslie.)
PS...
If you haven’t already seen it, do see “Slumdog Millionaire”. You can debate the flood of Oscars it got this year until the sacred cows come home, but it is an immensely watchable movie. It’s a tough slog at times (after all, vast chunks of it are set in the slums of Mumbai, not the best of “feel good” atmospheres) but its difference from the Hollywood type of movie alone makes it a thoroughly mesmerizing diversion.
À la next time, when I”ll (hopefully) rivet you with some observations gleaned from a recent three-day sojourn to Montreal. (Literally “rivet”. I touched a few that were used to hold a section of the RMS Titanic’s -- Yes, that one -- hull plates in place.)
After we returned home, we Googled ‘em up and pretty much confirmed that, despite their unlikely location on a residential street, it appeared there had indeed been a red fox recently on our walkabout route.
Fast forward one day to a suppertime TV newscast when the BBC happened to show an item about a vixen that had been adopted as a pet by a family who lives one floor above a pet shop in England. Apparently someone had rescued a newborn fox kit one day and, having no animal rescue service anywhere in town, brought it to the pet shop in hopes of saving its life. The pet shop owner enlisted the help of the upstairs residents and by the time the animal was old enough to manage for itself, everyone involved concluded that it had become so completely domesticated it would likely be a cruelty to attempt to return it to the wild. Hence one of England’s more unusual family pets.
A mere couple hours later, I was driving Katie to somewhere she needed to be. It was dark, and by way of conversation, I started telling her about the fox that had been adopted and turned into a wonderful, if decidedly unusual, English family pet. And at the precise moment I was regaling her with the animal’s conversion from a weak, baseball-sized mound of newborn fur to healthy adulthood, Katie, looking ahead of the car where our headlights were illuminating the snowy street, suddenly said, “Speaking of foxes...”
At the same moment, I stepped on the brakes because the animal that had suddenly stepped from a side street directly into our path was indeed a full-grown red fox. And it stopped – obviously manifesting the [animal name here]-in-the-headlights paralysis that has become such a cliché. When the car was fully stopped, we were sitting no more than 10 feet away from it. The car’s stopping action obviously un-hypnotized it, because after blinking a couple times, it turned and casually trotted along its original route across the street in front of us. Pausing just long enough at a snowbank to turn and, I have no doubt, think something along the fox-talk lines of “Thanks very much for that”, it disappeared up a neighbouring driveway around the house.
Still later that evening, as Leslie and I took another stroll, I withheld telling her the story until we reached the driveway. At that point, I drew her attention to the same trail we had seen a couple nights previous, and then told her that Katie and I had actually seen the trailmaker.
It isn’t the first time we’ve seen a fox in the neighbourhood – several years ago we saw one trotting bold as brass in broad daylight right down the centreline of our own street. Rabbits, raccoons and skunks are frequent visitors – one of the latter one day let go a blast that we figured must have deterred a cat attack right outside our living room window because the sudden stench inside the house was so powerful it made our eyes water. And we’ve had the occasional hawk show up casting covetous eyes on the smaller birds clustered around our backyard feeder. But a fox is a rare sighting and its coming on the scene as it did with a scriptwriter’s sense of timing was what will cement it forever as a truly Rod Serling-esque moment in my mind.
= = = = =
I have, in the past, occasionally slammed the bureaucratic lunacy that seems all too pervasive in the Government of Canada department in which I toil.
Oh hell, let’s be honest, when I have had anything at all to say about it in the past, it’s been to slam it. After all, I work for the same government whose first major spending decision after being elected was to take the literacy funding contributions that the previous government provided for hundreds of organizations across Canada that ran thousands of programs aimed at improving adult learning and literacy in what the government itself calls “The Knowledge Economy” – programs that co-ordinated the services of tens of thousands of volunteers – and cancelled them. How can you not slam organizational thinking like that?
But lost among the numbing sea of my departmental procedures and approval hierarchies and Agenda for Excellence Achievement Award reports are the people with whom I work. And I actually like them – many of them a lot. I find especially that my affection has grown tremendously since I began working at home a few months ago (but admitting that would probably give the wrong impression. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is the reason, not what you were thinking.)
But really, what can you say about someone who welcomes you to that most dreaded of bureaucratic days – The Team Retreat – with a little Japanese-sushi-bamboo-lunchbox style of kit just full of odd little objects and this Table of Contents? (Quoted verbatim – right down to the punctuation – and in its entirety... actually, in its English language entirety. Every one of the following sentences was also thoughtfully provided in French.) (Oh, “MCS” is “Ministerial Communications Services”. That’d be us.):
= = =
“MCS Survival Kit
Marble – So you’ll have an extra one when you lose yours!
Rubber Band – To stretch yourself beyond your limits.
Penny – So you’ll have enough cents to realize you’re a valuable asset to our team.
Eraser – Because everyone makes mistakes. That’s OK, so long as we learn by our mistakes.
Hugs and Kisses chocolate – To remind you that someone cares about you!!!
String – To tie things together when everything falls apart.
Paperclip – To help you hold it all together.
Gum* – To remind you that if you stick with it, you can accomplish anything.
Pen – To list your accomplishments everyday.
Lapel pin – To remind you that we can overcome and not fear change.**
Stress toy – When nothing else works, hold on tight and take a breath!"
= = =
* The gum brand? Excel, of course.
** It is actually a pin left over from the days when our department had a different name. So apparently when I wear a no-longer-applicable lapel pin to promote our department, I am actually saying, “I do not fear change”. Maybe I’ll give it to a panhandler.
Continuing with our Fun Times at Work theme, recently we had yet another branch meeting in order to inaugurate a new “initiative” in our Department – employee awards! (I’m seriously beginning to think the only way to get through these branch meetings is to take my lead from their name and fortify myself in advance with several ounces of bourbon and branch water.)
The moment we arrived, the lights in the auditorium-cum-theatre in which we were seated darkened. Wonderful! It seemed they were actually going to forego the usual rah-rahs from senior bureaucrats for whom “public speaking” typically sits far down their skill sets in favour of a professional production.
The onscreen appearance of the renowned National Film Board of Canada logo onscreen further cheered me. We had been advised in advance that there would be a “dress code” for this branch meeting – “black and white”. And so, as the theatre’s speakers gave forth with the first few notes of a classical piano, for one brief sparkling moment I thought that perhaps we were in for a showing of a stunning work by Norman McLaren, one that would have been wholly appropriate to the theme: Pas de Deux.
(Photo source: www.tbray.org)
But alas, it was not to be. Here are a few highlights from one website’s synopsis of the half hour to which we were next subjected (CM Magazine, Vol. XI, No.17):
“Mr. Mergler's Gift is about how a chance meeting in the park between an old man and young girl has a life-transforming effect on both of them.
Daniel Mergler is a 77-year-old man suffering from colon cancer. He is in the last year of his life, has just retired from teaching piano and is sitting on a park bench, not doing well emotionally. A man and his daughter ride their bicycles through the park; then the father sits on the next bench while his nine-year-old daughter plays on a swing. The father and Daniel Mergler strike up a conversation...
Mr. Mergler soon realizes that Xin Ben is the most gifted student he has ever had. She learns with such speed and with such feeling that it exhilarates him, and he forgets about his illness. He teaches her about the great composers and gets her to read about them in books from the library. He tells her to know the story of the music in her mind so that when she plays it, the story is playing in her mind.
After the twenty-sixth lesson, Mr. Mergler's cancer progresses to the point that he becomes very weak and can no longer walk. He falls down while alone at his apartment and needs to call 911. He mails Xin Ben's parents a note and tells them of his situation. He asks that they visit him but not bring their daughter because it would be too emotional for them.
This is a sad time for all of them. Xin Ben's piano lessons mean more to her than anything else, and she is devastated by her teacher's illness. Mr. Mergler feels a responsibility to Xin Ben. He cares for her like a daughter, but he also recognizes that her gift cannot be wasted. His fear is that she will end up with a mediocre teacher who will not develop her talent...
The documentary would also be a good launching off point for discussions about death and dying.”
= =
I am not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that as the lights came back on, people in the theatre were openly weeping. On with the feel-good awards!
To their credit, the event’s emcees tried gamely to bring the mood up somewhat from the profound sorrow into which it had sunk by extolling the message of finding inspiration within oneself, but as I said to another correspondent after the meeting, it had the same effect of launching a retirement party by showing a documentary about the horrific effects of the Hiroshima explosion, then going immediately to a segue like, “You think that was a blast??!! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! On with the party!”
Then, adding insult to injury, the trio of awards they disbursed included the presentation of a “Creativity in Communications” Award to a department whose job description can be pretty much reduced to “Do communications creatively”. I think next year I’ll nominate myself for accepting a paycheque every two weeks – the Analysis of English Language Media Award. (“And the winner is... Holy cow! Our English language Media Analyst!”)
Works for me.
= = =
Bits and pieces of this and that...
-- I suppose I should thank the Globe and Mail for freeing up my time to read other things. All it took was encountering this sub-headline on the front page of a recent weekend’s G&M’s "Focus and Books" section to send me and my Saturday morning café au lait to the day’s Ottawa Citizen instead: “The vagina doesn't always agree with the brain, says Meredith Chivers, Canada's rising star of the science world.”
-- "CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE WON THE WINING PRIZE" was the title of a recent e-mailed message that got by my SPAM traps. At first I was thinking maybe this whiny little corner of the blogosphere had finally garnered a significant trophy. Then I realized the typo could have just as easily have been perhaps not a typo at all and maybe I’d won a random draw from the Natalie (“Red and White and Drunk All Over”) Maclean monthly wine bulletin I receive. Sadly, it will forever remain the stuff of speculation because I didn’t open the SPAM message to discover in which incarnation I’d been designated a “winer”.
-- A few days back, we had to have a tech from Rogers home video drop by to discover that the problem a telephone-based cable signal troubleshooting technician had earlier determined from a remote location did not, in fact, exist. Why was I not surprised? When I first booked the appointment with a telephone-based customer service person, I advised him we have call identification and asked how I would know it was the Rogers tech person calling on the day of the appointment to confirm I was at home. The phone tech had no idea so I decided I’d just take my lumps during the assigned three-hour phone confirmation window and answer anyone who phoned at that time.
I needn’t have worried. Barely an hour into the three-hour window, the phone rang and the call identification window informed me that the call was coming from someone named “Tech Nition”. Obviously Mr and Mrs Nition knew with Nostradamus-like clarity where their little boy Tech would wind up when they held their naming ceremony for him.
-- While I appreciate the Damascus-like conversion to “clean” energy and “economic stimulus” by the Harper Tories to all things Obama-ish since the day the Prez dropped into Ottawa for a Beavertail, I am already so sick and tired of their repeatedly invoking the new President as the source of all Tory policy that if I hear one more Harper cabinet minister drop his name during Question Period, I am going to e-mail the US House of Representatives and urge them to sue the Harper government either for plagiarism or false advertising.
-- To whom do we owe a thank you for creating a world where it seems harder and harder to get a simple apology for a simple error? I only ask because I was recently in our local corner store (actually, it’s in a strip mall, not on a corner, but “corner store” evokes exactly what it is) and took three items to the cash: a can of spaghetti sauce; a package of pita bread and the Sunday Ottawa Citizen. The cashier rang it in and pronounced the total to me: $15.44.
I paused in the act of opening my wallet, looked at him, looked at the LCD panel on the cash register where $15.44 was indeed happily glowing away in bright green light, and said, “Fifteen forty-four???!!”
Then he looked at the three items on the counter, and at the glowing number, and said, “No, that’s not good, is it?” He picked up each item individually and keyed them in again. This time the number lit up as $9.49. We did our eye contact thing again. Without a word, he re-entered, for a third time, a trio of prices and got a number very close to what I had already mentally tallied as a total: $6 and change. All he had to say next was, “You want bag?” No, what I wanted was to hear something like, “Sorry about that.” Not a lavish apology; not an offer of free corner store groceries for a month; simply a halfway contrite acknowledgement of the mistake. But instead, what I got was really a response that seemed to suggest it happens all the time. No big deal.
On a different day, or perhaps the same day many hours later and much closer to bedtime, I might have passed over a $20 bill, accepted the $4.56 in change and gone on my way without even absorbing the mistake.
(A few years back, on a long drive along Highway 401 that included a very late-night fuel stop at one of their service centres, I filled up and gave the attendant – who had helpfully come out to my car – enough money to cover the number I pronounced aloud. He gave me a quizzical look, but he gave me the right change. About ten minutes later, several kilometres down the highway, I suddenly realized I’d never spent that much for gas in my life with this car, even when the tank was nearly bone dry. Then it hit me – the number I had pronounced had been the number of litres I had pumped into the car. The two tally wheels, of course, sit one atop the other on a gas pump and I had given the attendant the volume count, rather than the price. Gas then cost somewhere in the vicinity of about $0.50 a litre, as I recall. Obviously, I was not going to turn around on the 401, and had I elected to exit at the next ramp, backtrack to the first ramp on the other side of the Service Centre so as to come back to it and argue with the attendant, I would have consumed a measurable quantity of the gas whose payment I would have been disputing. But what galled me – and why that recollection sticks so clearly in my mind – is that the attendant actually turned to look at the two numbers on the pump, and even though he knew I had read aloud the wrong one as the price, he silently accepted the money and, I have no doubt, pocketed the difference.)
My point in recalling that episode is that I probably don’t always pay 100 per cent crystal clear attention to every single cash transaction I make. Coming back to my corner store on this sunny Sunday, had I not been vaguely conscious of the approximate price of the three items, I might well have paid what I was told to pay. No questions asked. I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting his error was deliberate. But error it was. And my Mom and Dad taught me to say “Sorry” when I make a mistake.
(Incidentally, for the past year or so I’ve been paying for gas by swiping a credit card through a slot at the pump. No contact at all with an attendant. I might still occasionally misread the money total, but the magnetic stripe reader on the pump never does. Score one for technology over bleary-eyed late-night drivers.)
-- Talk about covering your bases... Here’s a recent Globe and Mail headline: “McGuinty calls on banks to pass on rate cut”. So if the banks follow the Fed’s lead and reduce their lending rates for the ordinary consumer, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty can say, “That’s what I told them to do – pass the Fed’s rate reduction on to the small borrower”. And if the banks refuse and keep their consumer lending rates where they are, Mr McGuinty can say, “That’s what I told them to do – give it a pass this time and keep those rates right where they are.” I guess that’s why we pay our politicians the big bucks. Because they’re never wrong.
-- I’d like to close by issuing an open apology to a whole bunch of generous friends, family and neighbours. Over the years, we have been the happy recipients of all manner of home-prepared jams, jellies, chutneys and, in larger measure, wine, cakes, cupcakes, even leftover roast lamb on one occasion. The end result has been a steady growth in the population of our pantry’s store of Mason jars
and an almost endless variety of Tupperware (none of whose lids seem to match the containers when I’m looking for one, incidentally, but I digress). And not one of which I can recall our ever having returned. So I just want to apologize here and now to all of the aforementioned people who muttered darkly at discovering they lacked enough preserving jars to use for this year’s project because Mike and Leslie didn’t give last year’s empty gift jar back. (Although I will gladly add that I use “Mike and Leslie” merely for identification. All blame is mine and mine alone. First of all, it’s in the husband job description. Secondly, only one of us is an incurable hoarder – even in the kitchen – and it’s not Leslie.)
PS...
If you haven’t already seen it, do see “Slumdog Millionaire”. You can debate the flood of Oscars it got this year until the sacred cows come home, but it is an immensely watchable movie. It’s a tough slog at times (after all, vast chunks of it are set in the slums of Mumbai, not the best of “feel good” atmospheres) but its difference from the Hollywood type of movie alone makes it a thoroughly mesmerizing diversion.
À la next time, when I”ll (hopefully) rivet you with some observations gleaned from a recent three-day sojourn to Montreal. (Literally “rivet”. I touched a few that were used to hold a section of the RMS Titanic’s -- Yes, that one -- hull plates in place.)
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