TriumphAnt

“OPERATOR FOUR : 2X2L calling CQ... 2X2L calling CQ... 2X2L calling CQ... New York. Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone... 2X2L...” (A hesitant, frightened and lonely radio operator in the Orson Welles Mercury Theater of the Air’s version of “War of the Worlds”, after the waves of Martian invaders apparently have swept his neighbourhood clear of every living soul but him.)

There are occasional events in the life of a Canadian government media analyst that require extra attention. The yearly budget is one, as thousands of people working for various government programs watch it to wonder, “Will I have a job tomorrow?” The occasional breathless announcement by one’s department of a “bold new policy initiative” is another, as entire communication sections wonder, “Does anyone care?”

And the Speech from the Throne is another, as those same thousands of people and entire communication sections simply live for mention of a paragraph, a line or even – please God! – a mere word of mention in the government’s most important occasional “broad strokes” document. (An indication of the high importance attached to the Speech from the Throne is that its most recent pronouncements are, without exception, the basis for a question in every single job interview for someone seeking a federal government job in Canada.)

In my case, that “extra attention” means that I was expected to be at work at 5:30 am the day following the most recent Speech from the Throne in order to prepare reports for the policy and spin wonks who would begin meeting two hours later.

If one is a cubicle-dwelling 9 to 5er, seeing one’s office at 5:30 am is a weird experience. First of all, I arrived by cab, because not even OCTranspo has put its entire fleet of commuting buses on the road at that hour. Then I found that all the doors through which I typically enter my office building were locked. Finally, after completing almost three quarters of a 360-degree pedestrian orbit of the building’s exterior (no mean feat when one went to bed barely five hours earlier and one’s office building is pretty well an entire square city block, and one’s entire neural network is given over to an instinct-driven quest for “COFFEE!”), I found a beverage delivery guy heading knowingly towards one particular door. “You have to ring da buzzer,” he replied to my plaintive question about how to get in. He showed me how. (Well, to be accurate, he showed me _where_. In fact, I already know _how_ to push a buzzer’s button.)

In seconds, a helpful commissionaire was at the door to admit me as far as his desk, at which point I had to wait while he radioed for instructions about whether or not he was allowed to admit a full-time employee at that hour. He was.

When I got to my desk, it was to an entire floor of lighting subdued to “emergency illumination” levels. And it was dead quiet. I realized then just how much unnoticed “white noise” I work amid. There was no faint electronic hum from the overhead fluorescent lights. There was no idling hum from the banks of photocopiers and fax machines that sit within feet of my desk. They hadn’t been turned on yet. There was no barely audible background chatter from the always-on (or at least during a typical working day) televisions a little farther away in the Media Monitoring section.

And most eerily, there was not one single other person in my entire section until my French-language colleague arrived about ten minutes later. A wide range of people noises make up a huge part of my working environment, which sits in a large open concept space. Its complete absence, and its replacement by what I now understand writers mean when they refer to a “deafening silence”, made for an eerie beginning to that day.

I won’t bore you with a recounting of just what the heck it was I had to analyze, but even that was a deviation from the norm. It was, after all, only last February that the previous Speech from the Throne was read and the summer election returned the same government to power, albeit as a minority. So its agenda was pretty well the same, and most pundits speculated that the coverage would be largely NOT about what was in the Speech, but rather about whether or not the Opposition would support it. (Or if not, would the government take the defeat of its bouquet of platitudes as a vote of non-confidence and call yet another general election?)

And as it turned out, that’s exactly where the news coverage went about eight seconds after the Governor General leaned over to the Prime Minister after reading the latest Speech and asked, “So do I get to keep my day job?”

Which made for what eventually turned out to be a world’s record in brevity for a departmental Speech from the Throne media report this go ‘round.

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Strike’s off – for the moment. The government has “invited” the unions back to the bargaining table to consider another offer – or possibly a threat – and the union has announced that no general strike action will take place until they hear what the government has to say. That, at least, gets us through the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend without having a strike day. But I’ll bet it’s gonna put those on the bargaining team, whose weekend plans have just been toasted by the call to return to the negotiating process, in one heck of a surly mood. (“Hey! Did we say 5 per cent? Well we want 10 per cent! Per year! For five years! And we want Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq Liberation Days as new Statutory holidays!... No? Alright, everyone… This government clearly refuses to bargain in good faith! We’re on the line first thing Tuesday morning.”)

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City of Ottawa 1: Skateboarders 0

(Sorry, but you’ll need to pay closer attention than usual here for this scintillating blog. When I’m talking about borders, I’m not talking about boarders, and vice versa. And that’s why voice recognition software will never work in English, but I digress.)

I know I’ve written about that concrete-heavy “park” I walk through twice each weekday on my way to and from work – the amusingly misnamed “Garden” (assuming cement is NOT a flowering plant) of the Provinces.

For months, it has been home to a late-afternoon group of skateboarders who have been inflicting an ever more debilitating battering on the concrete borders around the two rectangular patches of trees in the park. The surrounding border walls are about a foot high, a height that is perfect for the boarders to approach, leap up – board and all – and then try to resume their glide without fracturing any of their limbs.

In the process, they’ve missed many, many more times than they’ve hit and the concrete borders, as a result, have now become cracked, chipped, paint-scarred and just plain worn down by the repeated impact of thousands of skateboards, their wheels, and the occasional shinbone. The boarders ignore – or pay attention to only as long as it takes to laugh – the trio of graphically-rendered “No Skateboarding” signs placed in the park and, in fact, usually just topple them over to a face-down position on the concrete.

Well, Friday morning on my way into work, I noticed a team of workers energetically wielding power screwdrivers and screwing large steel cleats roughly every four feet around the full perimeter of both of the park’s rectangular tree refuges.. Each piece of steel looks like an upside-down capital “L”. The long arm is vertical, and two large screws were being driven through each. The shorter arm was in the horizontal portion on the top of the concrete border.

It reminded me of all the clamps the Borg Queen has to release to disengage her head and upper torso from her (*ahem*) battle bridge. (And if you never saw the movie, Star Trek: First Contact, or the finale of Star Trek: Voyager, you don’t know what I’m talking about. My apologies, but a quick Google search of “Borg Queen photos” will solve the mystery for anyone who wishes the diversion. In fact, I’ll save you the trouble. Here she is, clamps and all. You may need to scroll down slightly: http://www.krige-page.com/starburst3a.jpg )

By the time these workers were done – and they were by day end – there was a pile of cleats completely ringing each border -- some 300 in all (!), based on a quick count as I passed through the park on Friday afternoon. What the skateboarders will do in reaction to this latest bit of municipal deprivation of their right to turn any surface in the city into a runway or a launch ramp remains to be seen. Britannia might very well rule the waves, but Anarchy, after all, rules the boards.

Stay tuned.

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And file this under “Don’t raise the bridge; lower the river”. Washington DC’s Dulles and Reagan National Airports apparently have some pretty stringent rules governing the carrying of weapons by passengers.

Apparently, this still surprises and even angers some people because recently, members of a Virginia gun rights group took to wearing guns on their hips in public places to make their case that the airports’ rules are “overly restrictive.” So what did the National and Dulles Airport Authorities do? Well, since this is in the United States of America, where the NRA places the “Right to Bear Arms” on the same plateau of the Constitutional pedestal as the right to draw breath, they… uh, well, they changed the rules.

Now (and I am not making this up) passengers who are taking guns with them on flights will be allowed to carry them into the terminal, but “are supposed to make arrangements with airlines in advance.”

Frankly, I wish I were making this up. But it’s all in a story that appeared in the Washington Post online on October 7th (and which will probably happily turn up if you visit Google News and search its headline, “Weapons Rules Eased at Dulles and National”.)

And the kicker? “A spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration declined to comment on whether the change at Dulles and National would threaten passenger safety.”

No, of course not. After all, as true – perhaps even tragically true – as it one day will turn out to be, you clearly don’t want to piss off the people who now are carrying their guns into the building.

All of which gives a brand new air travel meaning to “terminal”.

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Finally, here’s a bit of phone conversation I overheard spilling over the wall from the next cubicle… “I had a great weekend! I made a banana bread that tasted just like banana bread!” Which makes me wonder what the alternative is, and how many variations of taste were experienced (and what they were), before the speaker achieved this obviously satisfying result.