TriumphAnt

My short and less-than-brilliant career as a cub reporter.

I don’t know about your job, but in the Public Service when your boss comes over and asks if you’d “like to do something interesting?”, if you take it to mean, “Something unexpected has come up and on such short notice we couldn’t find anyone else to do it and it’s a stretch to tie it to your job description, but here it is,” chances are that nine times out of ten, you’ll be right.

Well recently I got just such a request. For the record, I work as one point on a three-point triangle labelled 1. Media Relations; 2. Media Monitoring; 3. Media Analysis. I’m part of a small team who collectively make up the MA point (#3). On a recent day at work, the word came down from the folks on high (that’d be our Minister’s Office) that an Opposition news conference had been scheduled for Parliament Hill and someone finally noticed its title and decided that, whoops, it did indeed touch one of our Department’s many programs, and concluded it’d be a good idea for someone from the Department to attend and report back what was discussed.

No one who normally does that sort of thing was around, as it turned out, so somewhere down the line of desperation, my boss wound up in my cubicle asking me I wanted to be the one to fulfill the Minister’s Office request.

“No problemo,” I said. (Aloud, anyway. I’m sure my mind allowed other sentiments to rumble around momentarily like steel marbles in a pinball machine.)

So, arming me with a location, his cellphone number*, the title of the news conference, and a powerful local travel tool here in the National Capital Region called a taxi-chit book, my boss wished me well.

* This was after he had handed me his Blackberry in preparation for asking me to e-mail him the details the moment the news conference ended. “I’ve never used one,” I told him. “Oh… well maybe just take your cellphone then.” “I don’t have one,” I told him. He was beginning to look a little desperate. “Can’t I just call you from a payphone?” I asked. “Good idea – here’s my cellphone number.”

When I got into the cab, I looked at the office location – 130-S. I already knew that Parliament Hill addresses ending with the letter “W” refer to the West Block, so I confidently told the driver to take me to the South Block.

“There’s no such place,” he replied.

“Well,” I asked, “where are the ‘S’ offices?”

“That’s the Centre Block,” he said. “‘S’ is ‘Centre’”.

Of course, I thought, how could I have forgotten that little-known period of Canadian Parliamentary history – the Government of Canada’s Phonetic Literacy Initiative (PLI)? It had unfolded at precisely the same time as they were finishing the interior of the new Centre Block (after its destruction in the Great Fire of February 1916) and putting little brass office number signs on all its doors.

One of the shortest-lived literacy programs in Canada’s long history of educational initiatives, the PLI was abruptly ended scant weeks after its launch after an especially unfortunate incident involving 14 members of the Ottawa Women’s Christian Temperance Union who showed up at the Centre Block one afternoon in response to a Phonetic Literacy-written invitation and loudly announced that they were looking for their host, the then-Minister of War, A Luce Mandalay.

Today, just about the only remaining evidence that the PLI ever existed at all are the “S” number plates on the hundreds of Centre Block offices. But I digress.

Alright then, my good man, I directed the cab driver. Please take me to the Centre Block.

“I can’t,” he replied. “But I can take you to a place where you can get on a green shuttle.”

It’s those damned terrorists, again. There was a time, not so very long ago, when taxis and even private cars could drive right up to the front entrance of the Hill, the main door at the base of the Peace Tower. But no more. Now, you have to disembark – even from a taxi – at a stop in front of the West Block (the one on the left as you stand facing the Tower) where the green shuttle, in fact a cube van, passes by. Unless you have a cabinet-Minister-license-plated limousine, but they are as rare in Ottawa as red neckties these days.

En route we passed what was, in hindsight, an omen of the success I would achieve this day. At a different shuttle stop close to the Supreme Court building, my driver slowed down because there was a shuttle stopped there and he was going to let me board it right away. The uniformed RCMP officer standing at the stop clearly had a contrary opinion, however, because as my cab slowed down, the Mountie stepped forward and with great circular arm motions ordered my cabbie to keep right on moving.

Then I saw why. In front of the parked shuttle was a person lying on the road, covered in a bright purple blanket. He (or she, I couldn’t tell) was conscious, because there were several uniforms among the people clustered around, and it looked to me (at the quick glance I was able to cast as we passed) that an interview was underway with the casualty and a shuttle driver, a Hill security officer and at least one other Mountie.

By the time we got to the next shuttle stop, we were at the front door to the West Block and as the driver waited while I filled out a taxi chit, another shuttle drove by. (A taxi chit is a marvelous little piece of travel power for people who work in government. They’re contained in little booklets and treated for all intents and purposes as cash by the National Capital Region’s taxi companies. You fill out where you’re coming from and where you’re going, and when you get there you just circle an appropriate fare value from the list of $1 to $20 already printed on the chit, which also includes an “Other” choice.)

Now the West Block’s front door is a five minute walk – if you’re walking veeeeerrrrry slowly – from the Centre Block’s main entrance. I made a mental “To hell with the shuttle” decision and walked the couple hundred yards up the drive to the front door of the Centre Block in about two minutes.

To the front door of the Centre Block of Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

I hadn’t been here in a very long time and as I climbed the steps that lead up to the massive door, I realized that it still gave me a bit of a flutter to be at the gateway to the very seat of government in Canada, about to step into the building that is a gateway to the very heart of the people’s democracy.

I had taken exactly two steps into the building when a very large security guard held up an equally very large hand (Well no, that’s wrong isn’t it? That says his hand is the same size he was. To say a “proportionally” very large hand would be better.) Where was I? Oh yes, at the entrance to the “office” of my government. In effect, my space as a citizen of Canada.

“You can’t come in here,” he said in a very large voice.

“Pardon?” I asked.

“Oh, sorry,” he hesitated at my obvious shock at being barred from my House. “Have you got a badge?” I showed him my government employee identification. “That’s no good here.”

“Um, I have a notepad,” I said, hoping to reinforce the impression that I was here to attend a news conference. In fact, that’s what I told him.

His deferential manner had vanished. He pointed back out the door. “You want to go down the ramp under this entrance. Just tell them you’re here on Parliamentary business.”

Now this was more like it. Armed with the magic incantation, “I’m here on Parliamentary business,” I strode boldly in the door under the Peace Tower’s main entrance. And smack into another security guard.

Hah hah! I thought to myself. “I’m here on Parliamentary business,” I said. The large guard (“big and tall” must lead this job’s Statement of Qualifications) didn’t even hesitate. He pointed to one of those security arches that every air traveler in the world has to pass through these days. As I stepped through, I immediately triggered what sounded like four different bell tones.

“Are you wearing a watch?”, asked the guard on the other side. Back out the arch. This time, obviously and correctly sensing me to be a first timer, he rattled off a practiced series of “Are you wearing… Do you have…?”s that had me swiftly filling their little plastic box with watch, wallet, ballpoint pen, coil notebook. Once more through the gate and once more came the disharmonious jangle of the bells.

The guard looked at me. “I’m wearing a tensor bandage on my knee,” I offered, “and it has six metal clips holding it in place”. Now he passed a wand over my knee. Sure enough, it squealed. “Show me, please.” “Look”, I said, tugging the cuff of my corduroy pants, “there is no way I can pull this up over my knee.” “I’ll have to pat you down then,” he said, “Do you mind?”

I tried to imagine who would ever say no to that question from a security guard when it followed that explanation. After patting me down and satisfying himself that the swelling at the mid point of my leg between my thigh and my shin was indeed a fully wound tensor bandage, he motioned me one more time to the arch.

“Oh yes,” I remembered as the bells detonated for a third time, “I forgot that these shoes have steel caps in them.” And they did. (Don’t ask. I have exceptionally wide feet and sometimes what governs my choice of shoe is nothing more than, “Does it fit?” Little distractions like steel caps are secondary to finding a shoe that fits my “EEEEE”.) This time he just took his hand and banged lightly on the toes of my shoes. Then he ran the wand up and down me once more, for what he must have thought would be the last time, getting squeals from my toes, knee… and waist. He sighed. “Belt?”

“Yes,” I murmured, valiantly resisting the urge to snarkily explain its purpose vis-à-vis my pants. “Undo it,” he said. “Pardon?” I said back, thinking for one heartstopping moment he was going to ask me to drop my pants and give him visual confirmation of the tensor bandage.

“Please undo it and hold the buckle away from your waist.” When I did, he thrust the wand at my navel. Fortunately, I had consumed a low-iron breakfast that morning, which yielded no beep from my torso. So he concluded it had indeed been my buckle that set off the bells. Rather than persist with what was fast becoming a Laurel and Hardy routine for the new millennium, he finally waved me through, pointing to another desk. “Just go to the guard over there.”

My heart sank. Another guard? (This is why terrorists will never succeed in attacking our Parliament. We’ll just bureaucratize them right into the ground.)

At this desk, I was asked where I wished to go. Re-assuming what was left of my reporter’s confidence, I said, “I’m going to an NDP news conference in Room 130-S.” I gave him my name and showed him my employee i.d. to ensure he would have its correct spelling.

“You’re not on the list,” he said with a finality that made it clear there was no appeal. “It’s not a big room and there are only six people cleared. That’s why they’re recording it for broadcast.”

As I shuffled morosely away from Parliament Hill, I thought back to my days in the not-for-profit private sector working for an organization that, when we gave a news conference, would have been thrilled to have had a freelancer from the Friends of the Almonte Public Library’s Monthly Bulletin show up to cover it. Now you have to be on a list.

Muttering dark imprecations at Osama bloody bin Laden, I walked the 20 minutes back to my office to report my failure to Editor-in-Chief Perry White. Jimmy Olsen, I thought, would have gotten into that news conference. He would have stood behind a pillar and beamed a laser pointer at the guard, then walked right past him while he was feverishly rubbing away the large purple dots that had suddenly leapt to the fore in his field of vision.

I wonder if the Department issues laser pointers.

= = =

OCTranspo, where service is not just a word, it’s… Actually, then again, maybe it is just a word!

In the past couple weeks, downtown bus stops along OCTranspo’s east-west rush-hour routes have sprouted these four-foot high plywood tent signs that effectively warn commuters (paraphrasing): At each stop, our buses will stop once, and only once. When you see your bus come to a halt, go to where it is.

That seems perfectly logical for city bus stops that aren’t located on the rush hour lines. But for anyone who uses the damnable service downtown at a rush hour time of day, it’s an insult that says, “Our schedules are more important than our passengers.”

Because during a typical rush hour (in Public-Service-heavy Ottawa, that begins at about 3 pm), sometimes there is a solid train of buses that can literally stretch through the entire downtown core’s span of ten or twelve blocks, broken only by crossing intersections. What this means at an individual bus stop is that your bus will occasionally be brought to a halt several bus lengths away from the actual stop. It will then creep forward, one bus length at a time as a preceding bus moves along, until it actually reaches the stop point – a route sign sunk into the concrete sidewalk. At less busy times, drivers in fact are often quite rigid about first reaching this sign before they consider themselves to be “at the stop” to open their doors. Witness the fact that frequently, they will thunder past people waiting at any of several other elements of the bus stop – a shelter, another sign marked with route numbers, a long and wide concrete island where hopeful commuters stand – only to “stop” officially at the sign, often blowing past would-be passengers waving at them several yards back along the length of the bus stop, forcing them to run along the platform to get to the bus’s open door.

Well to me, what these idiotic signs are telling us is that OCTranspo is saying to its commuting passengers, “Now we’re going to play a little game. Guess which of my several start-and-stops was the official stop. Whoops! You guessed wrong because it was actually three bus lengths back at the beginning of the platform. Bye!” And if the driver has already made his or her “official” stop, well you can be waving a big red bedsheet and that bus won’t even slow down as it rolls past the sign, accelerating to traffic speed.

I have actually witnessed this policy in practice as drivers, having stopped once farther down the platform, will roll right past riders trying to flag them down at the actual stop point – the one marked by the route sign. In one extreme example, the bus on which I was riding one morning stopped to let a couple passengers out while still some 50 yards short of the sign. Then, the driver had the gall to swing out of line and pass four or five other buses moving towards the posted stop point. From my window vantage point, I saw several snarling platform standees who had been waiting for him watch in helpless rage as their bus roared past, separated from them by a lane occupied by the other buses that stayed in the morning rush-hour flow.

This new policy places the drivers’ schedule first and foremost. And OCTranspo wonders why more and more commuters are thumbing their noses at the giant red-and-white limos and opting instead for almost any other means of motoring to work. Their attitude reminds me of nothing quite so much as a sci-fi short story by Robert A Heinlein, whose title could, with complete accuracy, be changed to “OC Transpo Must Roll”. It’s an easy substitution to make in this brief review of the classic, “The Roads Must Roll”:

“’The Roads Must Roll’ gives you get a good sense of just why Heinlein came to dominate the science fiction field so rapidly, as the story rings with real world ambience, even though the envisioned technology is one case where Heinlein got it seriously wrong, seeing giant conveyor belts, or rolling roads, as replacing the car and railroads, thus leading to a strong dependence of the economy on them. Those who keep those roads rolling are in an obvious position of power and the story is all about one such case of the ‘little guy’ attempting to force things to go his way. The story is well told, the characters on both sides of this battle are quite believable, the social organization makes sense. Thematically, the story addresses the sense that many who work in essential industries have that THEY should be the ones who make all the decisions, who cannot see that our civilization is made of many specialties, all of whom are necessary to the continued functioning of the society as a whole. Within the confines of this story there is an encapsulation of many of the larger battles caused by this attitude, from the great owner/union fights of the early portion of twentieth century, to the more generalized battle between the ideas of socialism and capitalism.”

Or, in the case of my whine, to the more generalized battle of a belief by an entire region’s transit users that the service should be… well, a service, and the company’s contrary belief that it’s a bloody fine privilege so shut up, sit down (or, in many cases, stand up) and just let us get on with driving the damned buses our way, and on our schedule. Have a nice day.

= = =

And finally: Disincentive lead sentences (reader contributions welcome).

I’m sure these openings were all written with the writer’s breathless belief that its first few words would draw you into the story, hungry for the information contained in the sentences that followed.

But in my case, each one stopped me dead, hungry only for the little online “X” to close the site. Or maybe lunch. But most definitely not hungry for the urge to read any further.

The first two are that rarest of eye-glazing encounters, a twofer of lead sentences on the same subject:

1.
“Even before their experiment in perfecting
human genetics comes to fruition, Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie's unborn child is already
doing charity work just like mom and dad.”
(Rogers / yahoo.rogers.com
“In the Spotlight”, May 18)

2.
“LANGSTRAND, Namibia (Reuters) - Half of
Namibians voting in an informal radio survey
believe the day Angelina Jolie gives birth
should be declared a national holiday, an
honour usually reserved for kings, queens
and national heroes.” (Reuters online, May 23)

and

3.
“Less than 12 hours after Madonna crucified
herself on a mirrored cross, the Catholic League
expressed its discontent with the concert stunt.”
(Globe and Mail online, May 23)

Now I don’t blame the Globe for the ennui that last sentence induced. After all, Madonna’s attraction of anti-Catholic venom goes back to her writhing about an altar in the “Like a Prayer” video, animating a statue of a black Jesus in the process. (Lord knows it probably could have resurrected King Tut!) No, in this case it’s the fact that the world recently has been so inundated with coverage of official Catholic “discontent” with The Da Vinci Code, reading that there’s one more thing they’re upset about inspires a yawning, “So what else is new?” from me. (A Vatican call for a boycott of the film in Italy led to the biggest opening weekend in history for a movie in that country. And truth to tell, I suspect there are artists out there who would sell their St Christopher medals to get blacklisted by the Catholics.) But I did manage a hasty redirection to see whether there were any online images of the mirrored crucifixion. There aren’t, yet, but there is this consolation prize showing the woman’s almost uncanny Blossom Dearie way with a fine lyric:

http://thebosh.com/archives/upload/2006/04/Madonna-wants-to-turn.jpg

Until next time…