TriumphAnt

We had a poster go up in the elevator foyers of our office tower recently. It announced that, this year, “Aboriginal Awareness Week” was “May 23 and 24”. I guess their thinking was that, if you couldn’t become aware of aboriginals in two days, you probably were never going to get it. Either that, or it’s an overwrite of an old poster and what used to be a week is now two days in metric.

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How long have I been a Government of Canada employee, you ask? Hey lemme tell ya, youngster. Why I can remember back to a time when it was called the Canadian War Museum, before the Liberals changed its name to the Canadian Museum of Disagreeable Overseas Encounters with Foreigners. How long have I been a Government of Canada employee, you ask? Why in the department I in which I work, I’ve just seen my fourth new Minister come through the door. Four Ministers! That’s how long I been in government, ya whippersnapper.

("Let’s see: Stewart, Volpe, Robillard, Stronach… so that’d be less than two years, then… right?")

Oh alright, be like that.

At least I started before they changed the Department’s name to Moulin Rouge.

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Groucho lives! (Globe and Mail editors, on the other hand, are obviously dead.)

Here’s a photo caption from The Globe and Mail’s May 20 online edition:

“A man reads the British tabloid paper 'The Sun' carrying a picture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in his underwear at a coffee shop in central London on Friday.”

Being me, of course, I immediately fired off a letter to the Globe castigating them for missing the real story: What the hell was Saddam Hussein doing in a central London coffee shop in his underwear?

(Oh: why Groucho, you ask? Because in the 1930 movie, "Animal Crackers", he said, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”)

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File this under, “When God’s got your number, you cash in.” Here are a few sentences from a larger story I read recently about the 60th anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bomb explosion. They recount the unbelievable chain of events that befell the man who, so far as is known, is the only Briton to have been killed in the blast:

“Corporal [Ronald] Shaw, from Edmonton, North London… was an engine fitter at the RAF base at Kalidjati on the island of Java, now Indonesia. On the way to Java, his aircraft was shot down and he was the only survivor. He was taken to hospital before being captured by the Japanese. In 1944 he was on his way to Japan, but the transport ship was sunk, almost certainly by an Allied torpedo. After being rescued, he was taken to Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands. In August 1945 he was working in the Mitsubishi shipyard in the centre of Nagasaki. The atom bomb dropped by the American B29 ‘Bock’s Car’ exploded a few hundred metres away and he was killed by falling masonry.”

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For the past couple weeks, I’ve had this old tune from the Five Man Electrical Band rattling around in my head. Because with the simple change of a single consonant, it’d be perfect for Peter MacKay to karaoke at this summer’s Conservative Party barbecue, doncha think?:

“Hello, hello Melinda,
I hung around and waited for ya.
This time you’ve gone too far;
I can’t take no more.
I told you so, Melinda,
Told you that you’d better start changin’ your ways;
Runnin’ round on me ev’ry day;
You say you’re gonna change. There ain’t no way;
I’m leavin’ even though you say you love me.

Hello Melinda, hello.
Melinda good bye.

I almost died, Melinda,
Thinkin’ ‘bout the time we had together
And wonderin’ why you ever
Changed your mind; treatin’ me unkind.
Don’t you cry Melinda.
There’s lots of other people in the world to love you,
Lots of people to be proud of you;
I’ll always think well of you,
Knowin’ for just a little while you loved me.

Hello Melinda, hello.
Melinda good bye.”

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Childhood bleats for the new millennium (first in a series: reader contributions welcome). Or things I never said to MY parents:

“It’s bedtime; tomorrow’s a school day!” I hollered recently to my daughter. “Just a sec,” came the reply, “I have to get to a save point in this game.” “A sec” stretched into about ten minutes as she battled either to slay yet another gatekeeper dragon and capture another hundred jewels (Spyro), or was it to find the medicine necessary to treat her sick pet chicken (Harvest Moon)? Whatever, being a Dad, I finally stomped downstairs to the family room and said, “I know where the ‘save’ button is…” and reached for the “Off” switch. “Ack!” she rebutted. We compromised. She turned off the monitor (remember when they were called “televisions”?), but left the PS2 running, her quest still short of having reached the next “save” point.

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Childhood bleats for the new millennium (second in a series: reader contributions welcome).

Sunday night, 10:30: “My printer’s colour cartridge isn’t working and I’ll lose marks if I turn in my assignment in black-and-white.”

For the record, the grown-ups in the house are tied to a printer that only prints black-and-white, so using it was out as an option. Phone Staples. “Do you have a walk-in colour print service if someone brings in a four-page long document on disk?” “Yes we do, but it’s first-come, first-served and right now it’s about a 45 minute wait.” (For four pages??!!!) Sigh.

Tugging on my jacket and pulling a pair of sweatpants on over my pajama bottoms, into which I had happily settled in “lazy rainy Sunday night mode” a couple hours earlier, I steeled myself for a trip out into the cold wet night and a drive to Staples, 15 minutes away by car, there to slump down beside what I suspected would be about a dozen other surly dads whose offspring were enrolled in a school that awards merit points for providing essay information on a colour print-out and who, like myself, were just told by those same offspring that the family’s state-of-the-art colour printer – inevitably tied to the kids’ computer because, well because everything in the house that’s state of the art belongs to the kids, right? – is either failing to connect or has suddenly lit up its cheerless “Replace Colour Cartridge Now!” light because offspring has spent the afternoon printing out colour images of Anakin-bloody-Skywalker that used enough colour ink to illustrate the gay rights rainbow coalition's pamphlets for the next decade!

Oh… it turned out that through some as yet not-fully-understood (by me) miracle combination of rebooting the computer, removing the printer’s colour ink cartridge and banging its nozzle repeatedly on a sheet of paper, offspring was able to announce, “Got it working!”

For every high tech problem, there is a low tech solution. That’s surely destined to be the epitaph for our e-driven information age. (Just out of curiosity, have we already reached the place where teachers are hearing, “I don’t have my homework done because my dog accidentally pushed the ‘file delete’ button”?)

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Every once in a while something gets under my skin that, in the grand scheme of things, probably doesn’t merit the attention my bent mind decides I should give it, but which nonetheless makes me go mentally beyond a shrug to a snarl, voiced to no one in particular, “What the… are you people thinking?!!!”.

This is one such something. In fact, were Douglas Adams still alive, I know he’d find grist enough here for an entire new Hitchhiker’s novel.

It sure seemed like a really good idea when I first heard about it. At work, a couple weeks ago, posters went up announcing that the department had agreed to partner with OCTranspo (our local public transit company) to offer a reduced-fee bus pass in an effort to encourage more people to take public transit to work. The only rider (pun intended) is that you have to commit to use public transportation for at last a year.

I’ve been a regular for about three years now and have no intention of changing my pattern, especially given that even if I should suddenly decide we’re going to buy a second family car and I’m going to apply for a parking space, there’s about a four to five-year waiting list. So, as they say, it was a no-brainer for me. When I saw the poster, I figured I’d just wait for the W5 note and happily hop aboard the program.

Well, who knew that they would apply the exact same philosophy (absence of brain) to the whole damned (*** WARNING: Upcoming utterly meaningless government noun ALERT ***… in 3 – 2 – 1 – ) initiative?

Recently, the terms and conditions of participating in the program landed in all employee e-mailboxes. For sheer weight of ponderous, intrusive bureaucracy gone mad and lawyers run amuck, it’s tough to beat. Take a nice friendly idea like “Ride the bus and we’ll save you a few bucks”. Add equal parts lawyers and bureaucrats. Blend and bake. (Well… half-bake, anyway.)

The actual message announcing the “Here are the how-to’s” was a staggering 1,250 word introduction to the program (yes, I ran it through the word count, and this just for Ontario residents). In it, there are no fewer than 16 separate points of agreement. You cannot, in other words, simply say, “OK, sounds good to me”. Nope, you’ve got to sign onto a regimen of conditions that makes Donald Trump’s most recent pre-nup look like the recipe for re-heating soup.

And all of them are worded just like this (this is the actual point number 16 in the agreement): “I acknowledge and agree that the duration and validity of the transit privileges incorporated in my Transit Pass are dependent on the duration and continued validity of the Transit Pass Program adhered to by my Employer, and that in the event the said program is terminated at the initiative of OC Transpo or my Employer, my transit privileges under the pass issued to me will, as a consequence thereof, cease on a date to coincide with the date of termination of the Program, without recourse on my part against either OC Transpo or my Employer.”

In no fewer than four separate places among those 1,250 words, you are directed to a follow-on link that takes you to a 14-page (!) legally binding agreement under the headline, “Transit Pass Program”.

And it begins, “WHEREAS the Employer and OCTranspo wish to implement, on the terms hereinafter set forth, the Transit Pass Program, designed to reduce air emissions in the National Capital region (NCR) by encouraging the use of public transit to and from work by the Employer’s Employees through the purchase, at discount rates, of transit passes offered by OC Transpo to the said Employees in the NCR, and payable by the said Employees through payroll deductions periodically remitted to OC Transpo; WHEREAS the Employer is a federal Employer operating in the NCR willing to facilitate the adherence of its Employees to the said program by making the independent purchase of a transit pass issued by OC Transpo at discount rates, feasible to Employees through payroll deductions...”

The contract then goes on helpfully to list six “clarifying” definitions, including: “’Adherence form’ means the form hereunto annexed as Appendix ‘F’ whereby any of the federal departments, agencies or instrumentalities operating or having a presence in the National Capital Region (NCR) and listed in Appendix B agrees, through execution of the form, in the same way and to the same extent as is the said federal department, agency or instrumentality, through its Deputy head or counterpart, had executed this agreement in the place and stead of the Deputy Minister of Transport;”

You get the idea. For heaven’s sake, the purpose of this program is nothing more complicated than to get people to walk to their nearest bus stop and jump aboard. Thanks to the Government of Canada and OCTranspo, it’s been introduced with enough bureaucratic bafflegab to fertilize Prince Edward Island’s potato crop for the next ten years.

All to save myself $6.30 a month?

$75.60 a year?

I can’t even begin to imagine the legal fees that have been consumed drafting up the terms and conditions and “annexed” documents, but it is surely in the tens, if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars because the massive document that landed with a “Whumph!” in my e-mailbox clearly suggests the peristaltic work of whole teams of lawyers, no doubt on both the government and OC Transpo sides of the agreement.

But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve cleared the actual steps required to join the program, you then have to sign on to one of the most cumbersome systems ever invented to pay for something. Say hello to “payroll deduction”, and a mountain of fresh bureaucracy I would next have to scale to instruct my payroll unit to process the fees required.

No. Thank you very much. But no.

If Henry Ford had hit walls like this when he first proposed a wheeled vehicle, we’d all still be packing horse-poop shovels in our landaus.

So I’m considering taking an even wiser step to initiate a much more effective reduction of air emissions – the air in question being of the “hot” variety – and telling these idiots to go to hell. Maybe, in future, they’ll craft a program that features, oh, I don’t know, maybe something like a cheerily worded poster that directs me to a work-site desk where I will show my current OCTranspo pass, pay the reduced fee and get a new pass for the coming month.

But I’m not holding my breath.

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And finally, I’m just finishing up a letter to the Vatican nominating my brother-in-law for sainthood. He volunteered to take some time off work on Friday (the 27th) and brave the online traffic in what I was sure would be a wasted effort to somehow get tickets to the August 28th Rolling Stones concert here in Ottawa. Well, son of a gun if he didn’t manage to score them! Very early this morning, he pre-set himself up with a Ticketmaster account. Then, about ten minutes before the online sales opened up at 10:00 am, he dialled in the site, and just began hitting the “Refresh” button on his link. In no time, he was rewarded when the “Ticket sales begin at 10:00 am” flash was replaced with “Tickets now on sale”. Bingo! (And a good thing, too. Two hours later, the concert was sold out.)

So a whole gang of us who are only slightly younger than the performers themselves are going to the Raging Grandpas show! (Step 1: Find your seat. Step 2. Note the location of the nearest defibrillator.)

"Start me up!"