TriumphAnt

If this is Monday… where’s my darned cellphone?!

On a recent Monday, while sitting in the foyer of the studio where my offspring takes piano lessons, the office manager came out and asked if any of us in the room had discovered a cellphone on or under our chairs. Someone had just phoned and, in the trip from studio to home had apparently lost his cellphone. Our immediate response was to begin rummaging around under our derrières (strictly our own, mind you) but the upshot was that no cellphone was discovered.

A few minutes later, offspring and I were out the door and walking to our car when I heard the distinct chirp of an electronic ringtone. “Did you hear that,” I asked?

“No,” came the reply. Given that, in our family, I am the one whose hearing is generally accepted to be fading (unless of course the message is “Time for bed!” in which case offspring becomes instantly stone deaf, especially if in the middle of an e-mail chat about any of a dozen anime interests, but I digress), I wrote it off to an imagined noise, or having been caused by an electronic device owned by one of the music teachers who was vigorously brushing snow from her car not too far away.

But a second later, I heard it again and it seemed to be coming from a direction that suggested something was ringing somewhere other than the pocket of the teacher.

Retracing my steps, I saw a faint blue glow coming from just underneath a thin layer of freshly fallen snow. As I approached it, the tone sounded again and, voilà – the missing cellphone was found, in part due to the good sense of the owner who had the insight to call his own cellphone number and trigger the ringtone. (The blue glow was from the viewscreen window, which cast a moderately bright glow under the snow, an illumination bright enough to read by once I’d excavated it.)

After turning it in, offspring and I resumed our homeward travels.

Just one week later, same offspring was in same studio while I drove off to a nearby grocery store to grab a couple items that had fallen to the “restock” level in our refrigerator.

As I walked into the store, there in the snow -- an edge just visible -- was yet another cellphone, this one tucked into one of those belt-clip holsters. I picked it up, brushed it off and deposited it at the Customer Service desk on the way into the store. Hopefully, the owner would have a vague idea where he or she had dropped it and the device would soon be once more slung where it belonged.

Two Mondays; two wayward cellphones.

There’s a deeper meaning there, but I’m deathly afraid that Paris Hilton* somehow figures into it and so I won’t be exploring it any further.

* From just one version of the story that was carried by almost about every last e-medium on the face of the Earth, beginning Monday February 21: “How Paris Hilton's little black book led to lots of little black looks By David Usborne in New York 22 February 2005 Friends of Paris Hilton, the pampered hotel heiress and social flit-about, are less than amused that a hack-attack into her T-Mobile telephone has exposed their private numbers to the world. And the world has been ringing them up. While her pals are livid, Ms Hilton is mortified. Not only did the perpetrators access every phone number and e-mail address stored in her phone, they also siphoned off private musings she had tapped into it, including notes about her favourite airlines and hotels…”

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Hey! We had it first, dangnabbit!

In a recent column of updates on current White House story spinning, this reference appears:

“CPAC Watch: Today's agenda for the Conservative Political Action Conference…”

There was a Canadian Parliamentary Affairs Channel (CPAC) long before the Grand Old Party and its minions decided to have their political action conference.

In fact, a quick Google run of “CPAC” reveals we’re number 1 and 2 of 344,000 or so (at this writing) hits. Their CPAC is in third place, just in front of the Computerized Pollution Abatement Corporation, the Centre for Process Analytical Chemistry, and the Children’s Protection and Advocacy Coalition.

So there!

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“Things are sure gonna be different when we cane toads get the vote.”:

The following comes from a website on cane toads, subject of one hilarious documentary: ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0130529/ )

“Cane toads are toxic. The source of the toxins is a large gland on the back of the neck. It is only toxic if ingested or rubbed into eyes. The toxin exudes over the toad's skin, it does not spurt out. Use two plastic shopping bags, or something similar to pick up the toad. Turn the bags inside out, grab the toad, turn the bags the correct way round again, tie the bags tightly and you'll have safely bagged your toad. Disposing of the toad. We have all heard stories of how people in other places kill cane toads. The most humane method of disposing of toads is to place your double-bagged toad in the freezer overnight. Cane toads are coming. They are fat, ugly and poisonous. They don't belong in Australia and they will harm our pets and native wildlife, but please remember they are still living creatures and feel pain too.”

Um… folks. Regardless of whatever encouraging messages you might have received from the Australian Dental Association, I am reliably informed that freezing – that is, the “to death” variety – does involve pain.

- 0 -

“Mmmm. What smells so good, Mom?” “Well I found this roast I guess I’d forgotten we had in the freezer.”

Eeeeeeewwwwwwww!

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Media fun, or “I know the accent didn’t appear in the script I read on air, but I also know there’s one in the damned word!”

An Ottawa late night newsreader recently reported that city police were surprised to discover a “ca-SHAY” of weapons in a local home.

That leads me to wonder just what greeted the police as they bludgeoned open the door of the suspected arsenal…

We take you now to the front step of a nondescript townhouse in the chilly February pre-dawn darkness where a unit of about 18 Special Police Tactical Troopers, cunningly camouflaged against the snowy evening in their midnight blue jumpsuits, have just been given the command, “Go!”

A blistering smash is heard as one of the officers, wielding a concrete-encased tube of stainless steel with a bullet-shaped nose (the tube, that is, not the officer) has battered open the townhouse’s single safety-chained door with one mighty ram.

All 18 troopers rush in. Immediately, they fan out throughout the unit, upstairs, main floor, basement. The townhouse is vacant, as it takes the driving troops all of about a dozen seconds to discover. Then suddenly, inexplicably, they pause, tensing… but not quite understanding why. They have been trained to a razor-sharp reaction pattern that would have had them hurling sleeping occupants to the floor, kneeling on their spines and swiftly trussing their hands behind them, had there been anyone inside on whom to exercise their practice-sharpened tactics.

But nothing had prepared them for silence. Silence, and a certain, not-quite-comprehended… something. Something in the air. (Cue the Phil Collins song.)

The unit leader – having centred himself in the townhouse’s ground floor front room, is the first to break the silence, but not with a word. Rather, he carefully peels back the infrared goggles from his eyes, lifts his nose, and… sniffs. Twice.

“Yeah, I’m getting that too,” says an overeager-to-please rookie. Tonight is his first raid and he wants to make a mark that says to all and sundry – but especially to his superiors – that there’s nothing wrong with his radar – visual, aural, olfactory… it’s all tuned to “Extreme”. If he had antennae, they’d be vibrating so fast they’d be humming.

“What IS that?” asks the team leader.

From the hallway, a seasoned veteran replies, “I think it’s Arma-Lube, sir.”

The other members of the team, at least those who hear him, gasp. Arma-Lube. Gun aficionados the world over know it simply as “the classic high performance gun oil”. (Trust me; it says so on their website.) In fact, it’s so coveted, it’s become its own verb. (Like Ski-Doo. Even Arctic Cat owners go “Ski-dooing”.) And the elite among gun collectors, at least those in the know, no longer “oil” their weapons. Rather they turn to their spouses and say, “I’m just going downstairs to Arma-Lube my Glock, sweetie”, leaving wives all over the continental US seething with envy over the attention, care and… lubricating their husbands’ 9mms are about to receive.

As word flits quickly throughout all members of the tactical unit, they stand in silent awe as they realize they are in the presence of no ordinary weapons smuggler.

This is a man with cachet.

(And I’m sure that’s exactly what that newsreader meant.)

(Ian – I’ll save you the trouble. Of course, being Canadian, we all know that what he actually said was, “a cache, eh?”)

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“Dilbertian”

NOW I understand.

At my place of work (and don’t think I didn’t try about 16 different terms that qualified it in varying degrees of fulmination!), we just received a ponderous sheet of paper – a newly revised and innocently enough named “Approval Sheet”. It indicates how many levels of internal hierarchy must be traversed before a document can be considered to be signed off. Sounds simple enough, right?

Did you forget we are talking about the Government of Canada here? This is the ladder, from the bottom up:

Communications officer
Officer
Director / Program
Director General / Program
Director / Communications
Assistant Deputy Minister / Program
English language quality control
French language quality control
Ministerial services
Director / Media affairs and analysis
Director / Events and Planning
Director General / Corporate Communications
Director General / Strategic and Program Communications Directorate
Director General / Executive and Ministerial Services
Assistant Deputy Minister / Communications
Bureau of Cabinet and Parliamentary Affairs (usually just referred to as “BCPA” in about the same tone as ordinary Germans used to say “Gestapo”, but I digress)
Deputy Minister
Communications Director
Chief of Staff
Minister

At the moment, two of the senior rungs on this ladder are helpfully named “Vacant”.

Now, to be fair, not every document has to clear every one of those rungs. But every document does have to clear at least one of the rungs at a similarly titled position level. For example, at least one Director is going to have to sign off on it. And if it crosses involvement by more than one Directorate (a piece of public communications, for example, about a ministerial event), you can bet both directors not only expect, they will demand sign-off authority on it.

Recently the federal government in this country announced the creation of a new agency called “Service Canada”, intended to be a local office in or near your town where you can get any of a multiplicity of government services, for example, your passport, old age security, pension, etc. The media use the derisive “one-stop shop” to describe it. The government prefers “modernization of services”. Government workers tend to refer to it as, “Oh GREAT! Another %^$#@&ing re-org!” But I digress.

But as I looked weakly and bleakly over the roster of positions on our most recent “Approval Sheet”, I couldn’t help but wonder if ever there were a process just crying out for “Let’s do like we say”, it would be the creation of a “one-stop shop” to move a document everywhere it needs to go within the department, without anyone’s having to be the sole physical agent (the “docket-chaser”) of all its required travel.

“She’s supposed to have ‘trans-warp’.” – Ensign Sulu, speaking about the just-launched “USS Excelsior” in the movie “Star Trek III – Search for Spock”.

“Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.” – Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, USS Enterprise, meaningfully responding to Ensign Sulu.

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Something I never knew before is that a corner of Auschwitz that was used for sorting anything seized from the prisoners that might have had even a shred of value was called “Canada”, apparently – and terribly – because it was a “place of abundance”.

So I live in a nation that at one time was viewed as the closest thing to heaven on earth that could be imagined by people living in the closest thing to hell on earth.

Maybe I won’t complain quite so much in future.

(Still, it is a bit jarring to read references like the caption on a photo of thousands of pieces of cutlery that “were left behind when the Nazis burned Canada to the ground”.)

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And finally… noted in passing.

In my neighbourhood is a store that sells a vast array of the sundries – useful and otherwise – required to make one’s wedding experience complete.

Recently, they set up a large billboard advertising their upcoming “Bridle Showcase”.

I’m thinking – typo, or a special event exclusively for those seeking a somewhat kinkier experience on their wedding night? (“A toast to the bride – Here’s to our queen for the day; may she enjoy her rein.”)

What’s even funnier is that not too far away down the road there is a saddlery and tack shop. Now I’m wondering if they’re owned by the same guy.

Happy New Month, all! See you in March.