TriumphAnt

Happy New Year, everybody! So you realize this online bit of ego-sharing is almost two years old? That's damned near teen-aged in blog years!

And today I got a Happy New Year greeting from my employer!

(Pay no attention to that small microphone-ish-looking object nesting among your pencils and pens.) Early this afternoon, I returned from lunch to find this printed-out note perched between the “QWERTY” and the numeric rows of my keyboard: “Dear client: The following CIRs have been installed on your workstation while you were out: ‘NXXXXX – MCPI – Missing Critical Patch Installer’; ‘5XXXX – MS Office XP Updates’; ‘5XXXXX – Quick View Plus 8.0 French DF (If applicable / si applicable)’; 5XXXXX – MS Office Project 2003 Pro Addin’; ‘5XXXX (If applicable / si applicable)’; ‘5XXXX – Project Web Access for Project Server’; ‘5XXXXX – Macromedia 8.022 Critical Update’; NXXXXX – ITD Web Interface (NCR / RCN)”

I don’t know if there is anything buried in that list of sinister-sounding names (“Missing Critical Patch Installer” ?) I should worry about but you can bet I am sure as hell going to keep an eye on my floppy drive.

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Just call me Nostradamus.

Regular readers (you both know who you are) will recall my review of our office Christmas party performance by a festive belly dancer (um… not be taken as referring to a dance of a festive belly), at the end of which I opined that, combined with one particular martial music choice of the dee-jay, the overall theme of this year’s gathering might well have been The Battle of the Bulge.

Well there were a couple occasions over the holidays when I was mentally capable of absolutely nothing more thought-requiring than sitting down and pointing my remote at the television. And on one such night, I happened to linger on The History Channel, which was airing – and I realize this requires a credibility stretch – a series of programs under its overall theme this day, “A Day of Tanks”.

And imagine my surprise and delight to find that the movie they had chosen for the cinematic representation of the theme was, you guessed it, the 1965 ensemble-cast classic, Battle of the Bulge. (Just check the cast list.)

It’s not a great movie; it’s not even a great war movie (You will note, for example, that “This movie sucks!” features prominently among the few reviews on the link’s page). It does take some rather appalling liberties with the actual history of the event whose story it purports to tell. But it is entertaining and once you get past little niggles like the fact its Hollywood-ized American Patton tanks look absolutely nothing like the Panthers, Tigers and King Tigers that crashed into the US forces in the Ardennes forest in December 1944, you can sit back and enjoy it as a not-too-bad diversion.

For me, one of the highlights is a scene where the overall German tank commander – an Aryan blonde-dyed Robert Shaw, if you can believe it – has demanded to meet with his individual tank captains, and is at first disheartened to discover that they are “Boys… too many boys”. One of them, sensing his commander’s uncertainty, takes the bold step – not of speaking out of turn, but rather singing out of turn – and launches into one of moviedom’s all-time stirring military marches, with which he is swiftly joined in a thundering baritone chorus by the entire roomful of tankers, all the while as each thumps a single booted foot in an accompanying march rhythm. It’s entitled Panzerlied.

Everybody now – Ein, zwei, drei…

“Panzerleid

Ob's stürmt oder schneit,
Ob die Sonne uns lacht,
Der Tag glühend heiß
Oder eiskalt die Nacht.
Bestaubt sind die Gesichter,
Doch froh ist unser Sinn,
Ist unser Sinn;
Es braust unser Panzer
Im Sturmwind dahin.

Und läßt uns im Stich
Einst das treulose Glück,
Und kehren wir nicht mehr
Zur Heimat zurück,
Trifft uns die Todeskugel,
Ruft uns das Schicksal ab,
Ja Schicksal ab,
Dann wird uns der Panzer
Ein ehernes Grab.”

“Vas ist die scheiss?” You might well ask.

Well of course, I rendered two of the five German verses just so you can truly appreciate it after it has been run through the meticulous and always-accurate online translator, Babelfish.

How can one not be stirred by:

“Tank wrong

Ob's storms or snows,
whether the sun us laughs,
the day glowing hot
or ice cold the night.
The faces are dust-laden,
but our sense is glad,
is our sense;
It brews our tank
in the storm wind there.

And to us in the pass
once the perfidious luck leaves,
and does not return
we no more to the homeland,
meets us the death ball,
calls us up the fate,
off fate,
then us the tank
becomes a ehernes grave.”

(Hmmmm… I think it’s probably much better in the original German. Either that, or Babelfish still needs a little fine tuning.)

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Memo to my Union: Go Auto-Procreate (expressed somewhat more colloquially)

Got home tonight to a notification from Canada Post that I had a Registered Letter waiting for me.

Knowing that one of my credit cards is no more than a couple months away from expiration, I assumed it was the early arrival of its replacement. But instead, when I opened my registered letter, I found instead a demand from an entity that signed itself not even with a name, but rather with the identifier, “CEIU NHQ Region Disciplinary Committee”. (CEIU – the Canada Employment and Immigration Union – is the division of the public service union to which I belong as a federal public servant.)

I could quote it here, but doing so would require my keying it in and that would likely cause me to seize my somewhat expensive flatscreen home monitor and hurl it through my home-office window out into the snow of my backyard in the growing rage of reading it one more time. So let me sum up its highlights in a few brief points:

-- CEIU has no record of having reported for picket duty last October 12, 13, and 14, when the Public Service Alliance of Canada (pronounced pee-sack) was on strike;
-- CEIU is therefore providing me the opportunity to explain my “reason for not picketing as required”;
-- CEIU gives me a couple choices: if I stayed home and refused to draw pay, then show them the pay stubs from that period, reflecting three payless days; if I was on approved leave (vacation or sick leave), then show them my approved leave form.
-- CEIU closes by cheerfully advising me that failure to provide the necessary documentation will be considered strikebreaking and the disciplinary committee will be left with no choice but to recommend to the general membership that I be disciplined “appropriate to the circumstances”.

It takes CEIU a full page to spell out all that horseshit, but that is its aromatic essence.

There is so much wrong with this… to put it kindly… ill-advised letter that it’s hard to know where to begin.

What I find most galling about the whole thing is that the option of their having made an error doesn’t even enter into their correspondence. I am being told they have no record of my having walked the line, therefore I did not walk the line.

But I received three days’ strike pay, and to do that, I had to show up many weeks later at a table in our office building to initial the very record they now claim they don’t have – the sign-in / sign-out sheet we had to sign each day of picketing. (Plus longer-term Baby Ducklings will recall my happily blogging all three days I spent with a picket sign around my neck – it’s in the archives. But hey, I could’a just made all that up, right?)

So anyway, I have written my union brothers and sisters (well, to be wholly accurate, the conveniently anonymous “Disciplinary Committee”) and copied my missive to the union President and Executive Vice President. (And I will gladly acknowledge here that I owe my better half a word of thanks for a pre-writing lecture that resulted in my preparing a letter that, while still mightily angry, was absent the thesaurus of four-letter words I had originally planned to write.)

I closed by telling them (not asking them) to amend their records. If the masters of diplomatic correspondence choose to pursue the matter, I’ll keep you posted.

Assuming I still have my monitor, that is.

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I see the Liberals have just launched their most recent wave of good reasons to vote for them. Apparently you should vote Liberal because Stephen Harper has been known to masticate undeveloped chicken embryos.

Scrambled.

For breakfast.

The horror. The horror.

Vote early; vote often!

À la prochaine.