Cat
by J. R. R. Tolkien

The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom –
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.


Bye, Pickle
We’re going to miss you.

= = =

This next note comes with the qualifier that, as a shellfish allergy sufferer I am not without some sympathy. That being said, my biggest reaction when this message arrived in my work in-box recently was “Oh come ON!”

-

From: (Deputy Minister)\
To: (Every Director on Floor 10 of our office tower, as well as Directors of teams some of whose members are located on the floor)
Subject: 10th Floor Severe Shellfish Allergy

I write to you today to seek your cooperation to protect the life of one of my employees. This employee has a life-threatening allergy to shellfish. On February 3rd, she went into anaphylaxic (sic) shock after someone brought food containing shellfish onto the 10th Floor. She was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and had to receive six (6) doses of Epinephrine to stabilize her.

She has a very severe allergy to shellfish which can be fatal. It is so sensitive that even exposure to the vapours (smell) from cooked or heated shellfish products can trigger a reaction. This includes vegetarian Asian food, as they often contain fish oil.

Signs, e-mails, information sessions with managers and directors have taken place, but food that clearly put this employee in danger continue to be brought onto the floor.

Attached you will find a Notice to Employees and information on Shellfish Allergy and Anaphylaxis that describes the severe consequences of this allergy. This information will be distributed to all 10th floor employees.

I ask that you reinforce these messages with your employees and ensure that new employees are informed of the situation.

Thank you for your cooperation in ensuring a safe work environment.

= = =

As the Deputy noted in the body of the message, there were also several thoughtfully appended attachments, including (i) essentially a copy of the message done up like a handbill and presumably meant to be posted all over the place; (ii) a two-page information sheet summarizing what anaphylaxsis is and listing no fewer than 13 separate food items in which shellfish might commonly be found, including those Government of Canada office building lunch hour staples bouillabaisse and jambalaya (no doubt wiping out several planned Mardi Gras potlucks at a single blow); and (iii) a pdf of a four-page Government of Canada information bulletin, complete with colour photos of dead fish and shellfish, that defined shellfish allergy as only a written-by-government-committee document can ("What is the difference between crustaceans and shellfish? Crustaceans are aquatic animals that have jointed legs, a hard shell and no backbone, such as crab, crayfish, lobster, prawns and shrimp. Shellfish (also known as molluscs) have a hinged two-part shell and include clams, mussels, oysters and scallops, and various types of octopus, snails and squid.") and also included advice on where cross contamination might occur. (“Cross contamination can happen during food manufacturing through shared production and packaging equipment; at retail through shared equipment, e.g. cheese and deli meats sliced on the same slicer; and through bulk display of food products, e.g. bins of baked goods, bulk nuts; and during food preparation at home or in restaurants through equipment, utensils and hands.”)

Taken together, the floor blanketed by this message includes a workforce of probably a couple hundred employees.(!) So my question to our Deputy is this: if you thought about it for a few more minutes, could you maybe consider moving Mohammed away from the mountain, instead of the entire friggin’ mountain away from Mohammed?

In this day and age (and here I speak from first-hand experience) linking an employee to a government office from a remote location can be accomplished with not only relative electronic ease, but also with remarkable thoroughness. In my case, I have a separately secured computer that is linked directly to my unit’s shared file drive and the department’s massive e-mail server. Throw a telephone into the mix and I’m essentially “at work” from the moment I turn on my computer each day. So it seems to me that no matter how essential this person’s work is, the means exist to link her as completely to the clam chowder lovers as if she were actually physically at the office – without endangering her life!

But no, our department would rather make a couple hundred people borderline paranoid about the simple act of showing up for work the morning after their weekend book club held a seafood and bloody Caesar fiesta in honour of this month’s “Moby Dick” selection.

= =

And finally, a diatribe. Recently I read that Macleans Magazine columnist, author and journalist / blogger Paul Wells had abandoned an ongoing pursuit of trying to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on at the uppermost levels of an organization called Rights and Democracy. It’s a large and complicated issue, but at its heart is a very well-documented effort by the federal Conservative government to take control of an agency that is supposed to be above politics. Along the way, you have Board members resigning en masse and in disgust, and a Board Chairman dying of a heart attack shortly after receiving a negative performance appraisal, the appraisal also being suggested by Wells as part of the take-control government agenda.

In a February 24 blog post, Mr Wells summed up his reason for abandoning the pursuit of this story’s truth this way:

“I am going to very substantially scale back my writing about this issue. I have reached the point where I am wasting my breath. My consolation is that many tens of thousands of Canadians now see this charade for what it is; that this has turned into a very, very bad day at the office for all concerned, including a few strategic geniuses who thought they could narrow-cast their way to electoral gain while the rest of the country missed this story; and that I have managed to shine a bit of a light on some of the most squalid behaviour I have ever witnessed in 20 years as a reporter. I am so grateful to Maclean’s readers for following the details of this often-complex story.”

Mr Wells is simply among the most prominent of those who suffer under the Harper government’s thuggery to have said, essentially, “What’s the point?” There has always been the taint of corruption in some corners of government – any government. But never has there been – in this country, anyway – such a concerted and orchestrated effort to hold onto the reins of power by bullying your critics into submission. The Harper government’s approach when challenged is automatic – blast your critics. Never mind the message. It’s “How dare you suggest that we are doing anything that isn’t right! You must be evil.”

The growing litany of examples goes on forever. The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency in Canada raises serious concerns about the safety of a Chalk River Nuclear Reactor. The agency head is fired. Almost incidentally, the investigation into the state of the reactor resulted in its being shut down. Why? Because it was unsafe.

A senior Canadian diplomat with enormous experience in Afghanistan pointedly suggests, backed up by evidence, that a great many Canadian government higher-ups knew that prisoners – “detainees” in the euphemistic whitewashing doubletalk of governmentspeak – were very likely to be tortured after having been turned over to Afghan authorities. The government systematically accuses the man of lying and de facto cowardice because, they say, he’s never even been “outside the wire” (of the heavily guarded Canadian compound in Kandahar). Well not only had he been, he had been so dozens of times. He well knew whereof he wrote. An all-Party Committee investigation into the allegations is shut down, along with the Parliamentary system in this country, by the now-infamous prorogation, ostensibly to allow the government time to “recalibrate”. Oh, except for the mighty engine of announcing and re-announcing large government grants under its so-called “Economic Assistance Plan”. Hundreds of them, in fact – all while Parliament is officially prorogued.

And what of that diplomat? He’s now employed in a highly sensitive diplomatic post in Canada’s embassy in Washington, DC, a post that required him to hold the highest public service security clearance you can hold. Odd position to give to a liar and coward, that.

Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer publishes a report backed up by so many senior economists in the land that his position is irrefutable by anyone with an understanding of the difference between a financial statement “in the black” and one “in the red”. The report argues that government forecasts of a zero deficit for the 2009 fiscal year, perhaps even a small surplus, were not merely wrong, they were so wrong as to beggar the competence of anyone who shared that view. Among those who held it was Mr Harper’s Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty, who vowed there will never be a deficit while he is Finance Minister.

The outcome of the duelling arguments? The government slashed the budget of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, making his future economic research well nigh impossible. This government, in one short year, ran up the single biggest deficit in Canadian fiscal history. Oh, and Mr Flaherty is still Finance Minister

Those are just the ones that leap to mind without even turning to Google.

But what’s the point?

This government operates on the principle that the ends justify the means when the most important end is to continue to hold power in Canada. The Opposition is presently so lame that the Harper minority might as well be a majority because the Opposition will not be voting the government down on a confidence motion anytime soon.

This diatribe, incidentally, is being written shortly after another federal cabinet Minister, Helena Guergis, pretty much suffered a “meltdown” at the Charlottetown airport when, arriving only 15 minutes before departure time, she found she had to undergo the same security clearance procedures as everyone else travelling on the same aircraft. And this despite her “VIP” status. Over the span of about 15 minutes, she verbally tore into the security personnel doing their jobs, and her own assistant for not fetching her shoes fast enough. She condemned either the entire Island province or perhaps only the airport (she hasn’t clarified which) as a “hellhole”. She tried to push the wrong way through a locked security door into the boarding area – four Vancouver RCMP officers tasered an unfortunate Polish immigrant to death for doing not much more than the same thing a couple years ago.

Nothing – and I emphasize that – nothing in a detailed but anonymous after-the-fact report of the episode was disputed by the Minister. Her subsequent apology came only after the report’s content was made public.

Obviously, a fit of airport security rage by a junior minister is not so much an issue as the other examples cited above, but I cite it here simply to tie off the knot on what we can expect from this “recalibrated” government after its two-month long vacation.

More of the same behaviour – reflecting a belief that this government can hold sway by bullying and thuggery. It’s a sense of entitlement – unearned and certainly undeserved – that this very government condemned when it was made famous by a Minister in the previous Liberal government, David Dingwall, who defended both his lavish spending under the heading of “Expenses” and his even more lavish settlement after voluntarily resigning with the now infamous epitaph, “I’m entitled to my entitlements.”

My point? Well, my point is that it seems to be more and more pointless to complain, or whine, or rant about this travesty of elected representatives who insult the word “leader”.

So I’m going to dial it back for a while. The Harper Conservatives are always going to be what they are – thugs, bullies and, at least in their own minds, deserving rivals for the Sun King’s throne. But political expediency equally emasculates their Opposition while we, as a country, tolerate the presence of a uni-purpose one-province Separatist Party in our national House of Commons. So much about it is wrong. And Canadian political historians are going to scratch their academic heads one day wondering how a supposedly modern, rational population could let things sink to the level of the cesspool into which our Parliament has become immersed.

And hopefully, around about that same time, a political discussion can once again be held that allows for contrary views and legitimate criticism without having to suffer the rote mocking parroted outrage of the John Bairds, Peter McKays, Pierre Poilievres and Stephen Harpers of the world.

Until that time – well, there are lots of other things to write about.

- - -

Next time: Chicago. Really.

Beautiful city. Stunning architecture.

A long overdue post.

And maybe some Toronto Tut thrown in on the side.

Until la prochaine.

This story needs a headline like, “If you set out to write a satire about how stupid Canada Post can be, you couldn’t create a funnier sketch than this item”. It was on the Ottawa CBC-TV local newscasts on January 19.


A Gatineau couple finally noticed that for several weeks, they had received no mail delivery at their home. The family missuz walked down to the nearest postal station and asked if there had been some error about their address. The counter person they spoke to checked and said, nope, no error. He told them that because their entire driveway was covered over with a “Tempo” – a temporary plastic car shelter built on a tubular aluminum frame – the letter carrier refused to walk through it to their mailbox.


(PHOTO: CBC Ottawa) Now to be a little fair to Canada Post, in 2007 a local woman had made the Wile E Coyote-like decision to remove a huge build-up of snow from her Tempo – by standing inside it and trying to force the roof upwards to cause the snow to slide off. Sadly, she succeeded only in bursting the plastic, instantly weakening the entire structure. She died when it collapsed on her.

But that’s where fairness to Canada Post ends with this story. As the reporter demonstrated, this particular Tempo was actually on one half of a driveway shared with a neighbour and by the simple expedient of walking up the neighbour’s side, the reporter arrived midway between both homes’ doorways – with both mailboxes equally reachable.

Canada Post, however, stood their policy ground and the couple with the Tempo decided it wasn’t worth a fight. So they added a sidewall board at the front end of its frame and simply bolted their mailbox to the board. Mail delivery problem solved.

The “too funny to be true” part of this story comes from two add-ons. First, the neighbour with whom they shared the driveway just happened to be a Canada Post letter carrier and he said he’d never heard of the policy barring his unionized brothers and sisters from walking through a Tempo to get to a mailbox – a policy that the reporter said Canada Post was vigorously citing in this case. Then, probably realizing he was about to be quoted contravening something his employer was saying, he backpedalled a bit and said, “Maybe it's different because I work on the Ontario side, but that's new to me.”

Uh huh – different provincial delivery policies for a national corporation’s letter carriers? I don’t think so.

But my amusement turned into hilarity when the husband told the reporter that his wife asked the counter person just when Canada Post was planning to tell them that their residential mail delivery had been stopped. With a weary look of stupefied resignation, the husband looked at the reporter, “And do you know what he said to her? He said, ‘We did tell you. Didn’t you get our letter?’”

= = =

Wanna know why public servants are depressed?

The Ottawa Citizen recently ran an article documenting a soaring number of cases of clinical depression and prolonged stress-related sick leaves in the federal public service. In the wake of the January 19th cabinet shuffle that saw Lisa Raitt given a new portfolio – Labour Minister – news watchers were told by almost everyone that the appointment was, for her, a huge step backwards.

Just imagine yourself as a public servant toiling away in the bowels of Phase II, Place du Portage, Gatineau, Quebec (where the Labour Department’s bureaucracy resides), and here’s what you read about the importance of your Department in the federal hierarchy:

“Shuffle demotes high-flyer who catapulted right into cabinet in 2008” (Canadian Press headline, January 19)

And this, in the following day’s Toronto Star: “Did one goof too many cost Lisa Raitt senior post?”

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper pushed the pause button on Lisa Raitt's once-soaring political career after the rookie GTA politician proved a magnet for controversy as natural resources minister... In Tuesday's cabinet shuffle, Raitt was moved out of natural resources – a post she got just weeks after winning a seat in Halton in October 2008 – and handed the low-profile job of labour minister. Harper denied Raitt was being demoted and suggested the cabinet move was not a fatal career blow – just a timeout. ‘Lisa Raitt is a minister who has shown a remarkable grasp of complex files,’ Harper said. ‘I think she has a great future. I think this move will give her a little more varied experience in government.’”

In other words, the generally-expressed analysis has your brand new Minister being given this job essentially because she needed to be consigned to a stool in the corner of the classroom with a dunce cap on. At least for a while. (Harper, by the way, was pretty much the only person around who had anything positive to say about Ms Raitt’s new job. Of course, he had to. He gave it to her!)

But as a Labour bureaucrat, how would you feel about even bothering to get up and going to work the next morning? Good luck whipping up any enthusiasm when you’ve just been told that you’re working in the Government of Canada’s version of Botany Bay in the 18th century – a penal colony as far removed from “civilization” as you could possibly find yourself at the time without actually leaving the planet. Good bye to any desire to do your job well. Why even bother when the government doesn’t give a flying fig about what you’re doing? Good bye to loyalty. Why hitch yourself to a leader who’s had her life jacket taken away and replaced with an anchor?

If it were up to me, I would sack a Minister whom I deemed no longer worthy of holding an important profile. You’d like to think that a Prime Minister’s responsibility is not to cheapen the work of any sphere of responsibility sufficiently important to be a Ministry. But not this Prime Minister. And I would bring in someone new – even try to cajole someone to cross the floor. (It’s not like that hasn’t happened before and I’m looking at you, Belinda Stronach.)

When you’ve effectively hamstrung a cabinet minister as “damaged goods”, it’s a slap in the face to any department’s bureaucracy to shunt that minister into any other such job for what the whole Canadian political world says is a “time out”.

= = =

Haiti.


(PHOTO: ABC-TV, Australia) As I write this, the earthquake is nine days ago; and the most heavily damaged areas of the country are beginning to suffer isolated but fierce outbreaks of the anarchy of the desperate. If you’ve seen the Cecil B DeMille movie, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, you might recall that one of its most famous scenes is the catastrophic train wreck that happens when one circus train rams into the back of another, which had stopped unexpectedly on the same track.

The collision is awesome in its staging and seems almost to be occurring in slow motion as rail cars are ploughed off the track and driven into an adjoining field, enormous steel beams spear through a passenger compartment and the wildlife cages are exploded into kindling, freeing many of the animals, including the big cats. The unstoppable momentum of the following locomotive reduces much of the circus’s material structure to rubble, badly injuring many of its performers in the process. (If your computer's video card lets you play You Tube clips, it's here. But I digress.)

I have thought of that collision often in the past few days as the coverage of the earthquake’s aftermath gets harder and harder to watch. Yesterday’s CBC-TV coverage, for example, included a report from Paul Hunter in Port-au-Prince and Mr Hunter was clearly on the verge of being emotionally overwhelmed by what was happening around him. He focused on an emergency hospital that was simply out of supplies, yet crowded with badly injured victims who had received no treatment whatsoever in eight days. “There are people dying in front of me!” he cried. He pointed out that this field hospital was no more than 200 metres from an airport jammed with planeloads of relief supplies and interjected a demand into his own report to the authorities to please get the aid flowing.

Much of Haiti’s western region today is like De Mille’s ruined circus trains. But that’s where fiction and reality part ways. De Mille’s plucky troupe of wounded performers manage to cobble together a show, and parade into town with makeshift animal cages, patched up costumes and, in some cases, performers, and-oh-by-gosh-golly they put on a show!


(PHOTO: Not Haiti. Following The Greatest Show on Earth’s train wreck, as injured circus boss Charlton Heston is being treated amidst the rubble of two wrecked trains, he and several of the troupe’s performers agree that the three-rings’ sawdust coursing through their veins demands that the show must go on.)

Sadly, Haiti’s wounds are not Hollywood staging; and its desolate victims are not driven by any such “show must go on” mentality. They are driven – and driven more desperately with each passing day – by the most basic of instincts: simply to stay alive. And in more and more cases, the foreign aid delivery system is ramping up too slowly – so many injured or starving Haitians are no longer capable of managing even that. Today’s news finally tells us that the port in Port-au-Prince has been sufficiently cleared to allow ships to dock, so aid is beginning to arrive by the shipload in addition to the 130 or so daily flights the airport is capable of handling. But getting it off the docks and out to the population is happening too slowly. Too slowly. Too slow.

I don’t have a solution. But there are good and well-intentioned people in-country as I write this. Agencies like the Red Cross are doing what agencies like the Red Cross do best – providing basic emergency shelter, first-aid, water and food needs to as many people as they can reach. Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders has teams that are operating literally under canvas in the street – a fictitious M*A*S*H episode recreated in the fearsome reality of a world crumbled into ruin. Amputations of crushed limbs, the news reports grimly tell us, are far and away the most frequently repeated procedures.

Pick your cause, but please pick a cause. I mentioned the two above because it’s my blog and those are two to whom have I sent money. There are many other good agencies out there. I would ignore the Billy Graham Crusade and other like-minded churches who see the quake as an opportunity to flood the country with missionaries. You can’t eat bibles and despite the power of that book’s message (at least in the right hands), bibles make lousy building materials.

Oh, and send money. Not shoes or clothing you’re done with. Not canned food that’s been sitting in your pantry for a few weeks. The most effective help right now is people with specific emergency skills, and the equipment and supplies they need to do their jobs. Getting them there is expensive but collectively, they are what Haiti needs at the moment. So send money to one or two. Every little bit helps and some agencies have already collected an astonishingly large number of “little bits”. It’s not such a big planet and one of our neighbours is hurting badly.

Thanks a bunch.

À la next time.

PS... I just did a quick roll back through the most recent entries and saw that in the post before I said good bye to my father-in-law, I promised some notes about a long weekend spent in Chicago. That’s what I’ll do next time.

I suppose since we’re still under a month into 2010, a Duck-wide “Happy New Year!” wish is still apropos. Consider it wished. Heartily.

Some random bits to enter the last year of the new millennium’s first decade. (And don’t let anyone tell you different. Count the first ten numbers – beginning with “one” -- out loud. Is the last number you say nine or ten? Same thing with the first decade of the 2000s. It ends one second after December 31, 2010 at 23:59:59. The second decade begins one second later when the Times Square ball is still rattling into its settled position at the base of the pole after having launched 2011. OK? But I digress.)

--

Mike and Leslie’s rules for being Canadian. Begun after several days of minorly depressing news stories and some head-shakingly obvious sentences on evening neighbourhood walkabouts. (And to all the hordes of BD readers – please feel free to augment these with any you feel appropriate.)

-- Don’t snowmobile across a surface that, in summer, spring and fall, is open water. Canada has enough land you can use without having to become a statistic in a news story that always seems to include a line like, “Searchers followed the snowmobile tracks across the surface of a lake on often dangerously thin ice until they ended at a large hole. The search has now become a recovery.”

Corollary. Don’t snowmobile at night. The related news story usually ends similarly, but inevitably includes more grisly descriptions like “was decapitated by a barbed wire fence”, or “was crushed when he rocketed out onto a lumber road directly into the path of a logging truck”.


-- Don’t ski off the marked trails in avalanche country. For that matter, don’t ski in avalanche country. Period. In fact, for that matter, don’t ski, snowmobile, snowboard and probably don’t even snowshoe in avalanche country.

-- To quote a Facebook friend, you’re courting trouble when a description of your hobbies and interests uses the words “tiger” and “pet” in the same sentence. So don’t keep a tiger as a pet. Especially when they’ve fully grown and lost all the cute kitten-ness. Keep in mind that some particulars about tigers include: adult weight can be as much as 600 pounds; their claws can reach five inches in length; their canine teeth can run two-and-a-half to three inches long; they eat raw meat and they use the aforementioned teeth and claws not only to kill the sources of their raw meat, but also to rip it into bite-sized chunks. As an aside, searching for information about tiger’s teeth led me to one of the all-time stupidest answers I’ve ever seen in answer to someone’s having asked, “How long are a tiger’s teeth?” Here’s what a website called WikiAnswers responded: “Well since the tiger is an animal that would depend on the size of the tiger, but if it were a rodent (such as rats, mice, hampsters [sic], squirrels) the teeth would never stop growing.”

That’ll do for starters. Like I said, feel free to send me other good Canadian rules that seem appallingly sensible but always seem to need re-issuing at least annually.

--

In the long gap since my last post here, I’ve been dabbling about on Facebook, which is going to receive no further “What is it?” explanation here. If you don’t know what it is by now, you’re probably not reading blogs either.

But lately I’ve also wondered about the merits of the micro-bloggery that is Twitter and have come to the conclusion that “tweeting” is one social medium I can do without – for now anyway – as a receiver / reader, and as a sender / writer will not be inflicting my “tweets” on others any time soon.

I honestly have not yet been able to find much good said about the brave new medium that lets you communicate 140 characters at a time. So far in my reading, it has garnered far more publicity for its lavishly shallow misuse by vacuous celebrities who seem to have assumed people genuinely care when they’re about to soap their groins in the shower or mix a high fibre cereal with granola for breakfast. (Of course, this cranking on my part could also all just be attributable to my wondering how in hell anyone can say anything useful in 140 characters or less!)

But the swiftness with which Facebook exchanges get relegated to the site’s deep archives even leaves me wondering how well spent is Facebook time. Bottom line? It’s mostly fun. As for being a medium of social good, at this writing I’m genuinely interested in seeing how much of a force for change “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” will become – at the moment it's over 200,000 and still growing. If it serves only to give pause for thought to the moronic brains trust advising the Prime Minister before they unveil their next “position him as a decisive leader” stratagem, then it will have done a good thing.

--

Leslie and I both think we’re getting to the point – well short of curmudgeonly, but well past “Oh well, that’s alright then” – when we won’t just tolerate it when the quality of a service (or the lack of same) falls short of what we both agree are perfectly reasonable expectations. At least when we talk about them, they don’t seem the least bit unreasonable.

Here’s a recent example of an experience of hers that prompted its addition to our growing list of related examples.

At the car dealership where we get our car serviced, they have a not-too-badly-appointed cafeteria where, customers are told, they will find complimentary coffee while they are waiting either for the free shuttle van to take them to work, or if it’s a fairly short-term repair job, while waiting for the work to be finished. Leslie was waiting for the shuttle when she decided to take advantage of the offer. But when she arrived in the cafeteria, there was no one at the counter to serve the beverage happily giving off steam from the carafe into which it had just been brewed.


(PHOTO: www.happyworker.com) So she helped herself and just as she was finishing, sure enough, the counter attendant returned. Sensing that he was waiting for her to offer payment, she smiled and said she was waiting for the shuttle and had decided to accept one of the dealer’s free coffees. The attendant looked at the styrofoam cup she was holding and said, “It’s only small coffees that are free.” (Leslie apparently had poured herself a “medium”.)

Without missing a beat, Leslie said, “OK, I’ll just pour it into this,” as she reached for an officially “small” cup.

The attendant opted for the better part of valour and, after thinking about it, “generously” told her she could keep the cup she had, adding by way of explanation, “Oh that’s OK; after all, I wasn’t here to serve you when you wanted your coffee so don’t worry about it.”

From such small events are great discussions born and, when she described this, it launched us into a conversation about the nature of that particular service, and how few options were obviously within the decision-making authority range of the attendant that made it necessary for him to admonish her in the first place.

But it’s not just something that happened at our car dealer on this one day.

More and more, it’s damned near everywhere. If you are seeking a service that even slightly deviates from what a staff person has been told is allowable, you’ll get an argument either about why they won’t provide that service, or worse, why you shouldn’t even expect it. And in almost every single encounter, it’s a tiresome variation on “Because we can’t do that”. And of course they can. It’s just that they won’t. If you probe deeper, you may get the staffer to admit that he was told not to.

It’s not the “only small coffee is free” nonsense that I’m ranting about here. This particular dealership has just built a huge new flagship sales and service centre that is much farther removed from the downtown area of Ottawa than its previous home was. But they are selling a popular car and therefore probably are moving hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory out the door in any given month. Add the huge profit intake of their vast new service floor and you tell us that you still have to have some hapless cafeteria attendant enforce a policy that requires you to make sure customers are aware that only the small coffee is free? And to tell them when they are in violation of that policy? That’s not even an issue of nickel-and-diming. It’s pennying!

As a last straw, Leslie noted they have a battered Styrofoam “Tips” cup sitting by the cash. She said she was able to restrain herself from asking the attendant “What’s 15% of free?” I’m not sure I could have held myself back. (Don’t get me going on the “Tips” cup and the astonishing range of locations in which it is turning up. That’s a separate rant for a different day.)

= = =

And what’s a Baby Duck without a “bafflegab” rail?

Here are two of several paragraphs in a message I received recently at work from our senior admin people, introducing our "champions and co-champions". Exactly as received. For best effect, read it out loud.

“Champions and Co-Champions are senior executives who, in addition to carrying out their regular responsibilities, drive progress on cross-cutting departmental objectives. They enhance our capacity to reach out, engage employees, advance our thinking and take action in various areas. They are enablers of an organizational culture founded on renewal and excellence.

Their focus is on horizontal initiatives related to people, communities of practice and other priorities across the three business lines. Fundamentally, they contribute to sustaining and strengthening a high performing organization by facilitating initiatives that cross departmental branches and regions. The list has been integrated to reflect the mandate of the champions across all business lines and to strengthen and broaden the scope of each mandate to be more inclusive of issues important to our Department.”

Now, close your eyes, think about what you just read – hopefully aloud – for a second or two. Hey, take a week. OK, now answer this question: “What in hell does that mean?” If you can come up with an answer (other than “Your department is administered by hopelessly self-absorbed bureaucrats who should have their Dilbert comic collections – because they fail to recognize the strip as humour – forcefully prised from their grubby hands.”), you’re a better person than I.

But I will admit my mind still goes to weird places whenever I read “horizontal initiatives” in any review of management priorities. It sounds... unclean.

And speaking of things that sound dirty, but aren’t, not so long ago I was introduced to a couple kitchen-y terms that harbour the potential for being, in the literary hands of a less scrupulous occasional blogger than I, ripe for misuse. The first, I added to our implement drawer when I saw it used at a coffee shop to pat espresso coffee down into its holder before clicking the espresso holder into the machine. I have a home espresso machine and I try to replicate the flavour of machines costing bazillions of dollars more. The device in question, it turns out, is also mainly designed to press pastry dough into tart trays when you’re home baking. It’s called a tart tamper. To my mind, that could also be a great name for an aphrodisiac.


(PHOTO: www.foxgig.com) And to counter it, well, this one comes from my own mother, no less, who was describing a method of cooking whole chicken that apparently speeds the process up somewhat and helps it cook more evenly, especially on a grille. What you do is remove the bird’s backbone and butterfly it. It’s supposed to be a great alternative to rotisserie cooking. The process of preparing a chicken this way is called spatchcocking.

Which sounds to me like something that might happen to some guy who was attempting to tamper a tart who did not want to be tampered.

And it sounds like it would hurt.

A lot.

Until la prochaine.