(Sing the following in your best “Chairman of the Board” voice. Repeat as required.)
“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.
It’s from an old familiar score.
I know it well – that melody.”
(I’ve actually been doing some navel gazing about the growing number of my work-related communications howls of outrage appearing in this place. I think it boils down to my being doubly irritated by the simple fact that the people who produce these messages, are, like me, supposedly trained and hired to work as communicators. And frankly, it offends my professional training and my efforts to adhere to my job description that they are allowed to unleash this stuff on a public – or on subordinates and co-workers – who don’t deserve such shabby treatment. For me, it’s becoming an almost daily mutter to wonder where the devil the “Edit” function has gone in the senior offices in our department. We still have a unit labelled “Quality Control”, but the growing number of glaring abuses of The Mother Tongue has led me to view the mere fact of its existence as laughably oxymoronic. But I digress.)
So, (deep breath) continuing with my seemingly endless litany of spluttered complaints about the quality of messages put out by people in or near my government department who really should know better, here’s another. (With this most recent missile, I am seriously beginning to wonder if my department has been taken over by the Boys from Brazil.)
We received a system-wide memorandum about an unauthorized bit of software that apparently has been downloaded by some employees. The memo included the following bit of gentle phrasing:
“Due to a significant security vulnerability to the Departmental network, your Client Technical Services (CTS) teams have been instructed, starting immediately, to remove the free downloadable software, WinAmp, when it is found on Departmental workstations. Reports will be generated and any workstations with this software installed will be identified, WinAmp will be removed, and each case will be reported to the proper authorities. Under no circumstances is this software to be re-installed by any user of the Departmental Network.”
Text like, “reports will be generated…” and “each case will be reported to the proper authorities” sounds to me like something lifted straight from the script of movies like “Casablanca”, (“Round up the usual suspects!”) or “Lives of a Bengal Lancer” (“We have ways to make men talk… Little bamboo slivers… not much to look at, but when driven under the fingernails and set alight…”) except spoken with a very thick German accent. (Try channelling Otto Preminger in “Stalag 17” or Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard”.)
What bothers me most about this message is its implicit assumption that anyone with the offending program on his or her computer must have brought it aboard solely for the purpose of sabotaging this vital network, without which a quarter of a million Canadians might not receive their first Conservative government child care cheques on time.
As a totally programming-unschooled computer user who more than once has been advised by my computer, “You need to install the Thunderbolt-Humungo-TorrentStream Player 2007 to view this file. Do you wish to download it now?” and pushed the “Oh why not?” button, I can see that if the damned program does exist on my workstation, or on anyone else’s, more than likely it was downloaded with no more intent than to enable someone to view some highly creative Swedish commercial for Saab Turbo-photocopiers, or some such thing, that a co-worker sent along for one’s brief amusement.
The “guilty until proven innocent” tone of the message almost makes me think that it was composed by someone working in my local union office, not a person working in a division of our “work life balance” touchy-feely department, the home of employment insurance compassionate leave benefits in Canada.
Instead we get, “Compassion this, you bloody serfs!”
(Whoops, gotta run. I hear the sound of hobnailed boots on my front porch and someone with a Bavarian accent asking for “Der-schweinhund-who-vorks-in-der-media-readen-writen-watchen-und-schpitzen-back-out-again department”.)
= = =
Criswell predicts!
Wondering where popular literature is heading, indeed has already arrived? Well wonder no more. (Here at Baby Duck, it is part of our mission to save you the trouble of wandering off to your nearest bulgiblioteque to peruse the shelves for yourself. Instead, this’ll save you the trouble.)
At a recent visit to a local monster bookstore -- whose name is the same as the divisions of a typical book – the first thing I encountered as I entered the store was a large display table festooned with books under a sign, “If you liked the Da Vinci Code, here are some other titles you will enjoy”. On the table was gathered what, I am sure, must have been every last book in the entire store that had the word “Jesus” or “Templar” or “Code” somewhere in its title or sub-title.
Turning from that to the adjacent “New in Paperback” shelf, the first novel I picked up – Kathy Reichs’ “Cross Bones” – included this cutline in the front cover small print: “A spirited rival to The Da Vinci Code!” On the same shelf, the very next novel I picked up also bore on its cover the scorching news, “Fast paced! Unfolds in the manner of The Da Vinci Code!” (You mean with a beginning, followed by a middle and concluding with an end?) Elsewhere in the store, I noticed a Guide to Da Vinci Tourism in the travel section, several “Da Vinci Code” and “Code”-like board games and even, imagine my surprise, books about Leonardo da Vinci in the art section!
Can “The Da Vinci Cooking Code” (Mona Pizza? The Fast Supper?) or a “Laughing with Leonardo” joke book be far behind? (How many Florentines does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, Electricity hasn’t been invented yet! BWAAAAAHahahahahahahaha!)
= = =
I work in a windowed cubicle on an upper floor of a National Capital Region building that affords a nice view of the Ottawa River (I guess that’d be the Outaouais River on this side of the water) and the back of the National Library and Supreme Court of Canada, as well as the new National War Museum. None of which is relevant to the point of this comment except to note that a spider, by the time it gets this high above the street far below, has to be a rather large and especially robust species.
Call me squeamish, but there is something gut-churningly horrific in watching a spider that measures about two inches from leg tip to leg tip explode out of its corner nook to sweep over a hapless mayfly that has become snarled in its web. The motion of its charge caught my eye on a recent cloudy afternoon and it took all of 15 seconds for the arachnid to envelop the winged insect, spin it around half a dozen times to coil it up in webstrands, then drag it back to the top corner of the window frame where it, presumably, began snacking while it sat and waited for exactly that same sort of web-tickle to occur again.
Watching this little nature drama unfold just outside my window, all I could think of was that, “Help me… heeeelllllllllppp me…” final scene of the old Vincent Price classic B horror flick, “The Fly”, where the tiny half-fly / half-human is overwhelmed by the relentlessly advancing spider.
= = =
And while we’re on the subject of horrors of nature, we undertook a family camping excursion on the Canada Day Weekend. Lakeside campsite: $32 a night; small bag of firewood: $5; buying three folding chairs because we forgot our own at home: $45. Being far, far away from the nation’s capital during the annual Canada Day orgy: Priceless. (And yes, being a guy, I did relieve myself in the woods on a couple occasions. But no photographers were present.)
And I hasten to add that the simple fact of camping was not what I meant when I referred to the “horrors of nature”. Rather, it was early one morning as we were sitting at our site’s picnic table enjoying our first cup of coffee (Brief digression: my daughter now understands the metaphor, “sister-kisser”, because I used it several times to describe the questionable purpose of even bothering to brew de-caff coffee in a blue-enamelled steel coffee pot while camping) when I saw a flash of motion among the many tree trunks in the short stretch of woods that separated our site from the lakeshore. I almost dropped my mug when I realized it was a Great Blue Heron that was striding purposefully up the hill from the water. When we spotted him, he was already about 10 yards inland and still moving forward. Suddenly, he stopped and froze. This bird was enormous! For a few puzzled seconds, I had no idea what had brought him this far ashore.
As my wife and I watched, completely mesmerized (he was by now no more than a half dozen yards away), his head darted forward and down. A short, sharp, very urgent squeal was abruptly cut off by two snapped “clack-clack” sounds. Then the heron triumphantly lifted his head to reveal to us a newly-dead small red squirrel hanging from his long, sword-shaped beak. Then he turned and headed swiftly back down to the lake.
The next sound to enter this little drama of the wild was that of my wife’s and my jaws dropping simultaneously, punctuated by my, “Holy shit!” My wife at least had the presence of mind to grab the digital camera and stalk the avian hunter back to the shoreline where she caught this pretty darned good photo of predator and prey just seconds before the heron flew off with his catch:
Now a Great Blue Heron (which is so majestic, its name is rendered in Capital Letters even when spoken) is not an unusual sight in eastern Ontario and I have seen many in my lifetime, some even seen in the act of catching small fish at the edge of the lake or river where I have spotted them. But I have never, until that moment, been aware that a small mammal was on a heron’s menu. And in that, it seems I am not alone. Here, for example, is a note on the heron’s eating habits from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Animal Diversity website (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Ardea_herodias.html):
“Great blue herons fish in both the night and the day, with most of their activity occurring around dawn and dusk. Herons use their long legs to wade in shallow water and their sharp "spearlike" bills to catch their food. Great blue herons' diet consists of mainly fish, but also includes frogs, salamanders, lizards, snakes, birds, shrimps, crabs, crayfish, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and many other aquatic insects. Herons locate their food by sight and usually swallow it whole. Herons have been known to choke on prey that is too large. (Ferguson, 1998)”
I don’t even see mammals on that list, much less “terminally startled squirrels”. But “small mammals” does show up if you Google deeper into the enormous bird’s diet. Suffice to say we felt a kind of grisly, fascinated privilege in being permitted to view this rather harsh display of one little link in Ontario’s wildlife food chain on the shore of Sharbot Lake.
= = =
On a more sublime note, I am of the opinion that one of ornithology’s most egregious mistakes is in having allowed the official English language name of the bird genus “Gavia Immer” to be entered into the world’s bird rosters as “common loon”.
We had a family of loons – a male, a female and a fuzzy brown chick -- pay a twice-daily visit to the shoreline by our site, first in the early morning and again in the early evening. And there is nothing whatsoever that is “common” about these utterly stunning birds, including their fierce devotion as parents.
Our site was located at a small bay at one end of Sharbot Lake. It is calm even on windy days and its shore is, in parts, quite weedy and marshy – exactly the sort of thing a loon looks at as prime real estate. It’s clearly the time of year for mom and dad to be teaching Junior the ropes because Junior was just past the “ride on parent’s back” stage. Instead, the little one was happily bobbing around under the carefully watchful eyes of always at least one, often both of its parents.
We spent a considerable time watching our resident trio. Anyone familiar with the loon will already know that this bird often dives and remains underwater for as long as a couple minutes at a time, popping up several hundred yards from where it first dove. But with our little family, there were very few instances where both parents were underwater at the same time. In fact, I recall that happened only once, and Junior was bobbing solo for all of two seconds before the fishing parent re-appeared very near by.
There were also several occasions when the birds were disturbed by approaching paddlers or (I hesitate to use the word) boaters. (“Hesitate” because the craft in question was one of those damnable banes of the small Ontario lake, the Sea-Doo, or whatever of several imitators – all of them sounding like dirt-bikes on water – it might have spawned).
Even the well-intentioned canoeists obviously would find, as they quietly drifted towards the trio for a better look, that an invisible boundary of about 30 yards in diameter ringed the family. If they drifted too close, one of the birds would emit a relatively quiet, single-tone note that clearly serves as an advisory to the entire family to get ready. Then, if the canoe continued to drift even closer, the calling bird’s note changed to that classic throat-shaking vibrato call that is undoubtedly the source of the noun “loon” in the bird’s name. Then Zang! One bird disappears underwater and re-appears a few seconds later, farther away from the other parent with the chick, but still calling loudly and repeatedly, making itself the centre of attention, rather than the youngster. This took place several times in quick succession as the bird would duck, resurface and shrill its trademark “laugh”.
I have seen a land-based equivalent displayed by a delicate-looking little bird called the kildeer. When I was cycling across a field once, I was suddenly distracted by an adult bird that threw itself in my direction, beating about on one wing as though it were unable to fly, clearly trying to demonstrate to me that it was injured and, therefore, easy prey. I stopped and watched as the bird repeated its thrashings, each time moving slightly closer to me. Looking around, I spotted a quartet of barely visible babies, each looking like a small brown egg on stilts, not too far away from what I presumed was a well-concealed nest sited among some wild grass tufts in the field. My “Aha!” lightbulb clicked, so I slowly resumed pedalling towards the thrashing parent as she carefully steered me away from her brood. Then, when she got to what she obviously assumed was a “cancel red alert” distance, she soared into the air and made a wide circle before coming back to her nestlings from the other side. What else could I do but heartily applaud her magnificent performance?
To return to our aquatic visitors, without exception every canoeist we saw drew no closer when this lovely and noisy piece of theatre occurred. There’s something about a canoeist, I think, that carries an automatic respect for nature and a healthy admiration for the amount of work that a parent puts into defending its young. Once the canoeists were safely back outside the loon’s “intruder alert” radar, the diving, calling parent would duck one last time, to re-appear back among the remaining pair of its family. And here they are, as caught by my eagle-eyed (or perhaps, in this case, loon-lensed) photographer daughter, cropped by my equally adept spouse:
= = =
Finally, to close the circle of this entry where it began, here’s a parting shot at my department’s communication skills, this one from as far up the ladder you can go before you have to be elected to office and appointed a Minister:
We just received a department-wide e-mailed “Glad to be here” message from our new Deputy Minister. It included this short paragraph:
“I am excited to be part of such a dynamic department that impacts on the quality of life in Canada. The policies, programs and services of this department touch Canadians throughout their lives. It is a privilege to be part of a department that is responsible for so many of the supports that enable Canadians to access the opportunities of this great country and fulfill their potential.”
As long-time readers of this whine – and particularly members of my own immediate, long-suffering family – will correctly have concluded, the enverbiating of “impacts” and “access” a mere 44 words apart just delighted me, oh, let me tell you.
I could also go on a rant about the fact that this paragraph consists of three sentences that all say exactly the same thing: “Gee whillikers, I'm happy to be working in a department that gives money to Canadians.”
But I won’t. (The sighs of reader relief are noted.)
In fact, recalling this couplet from the Cantate Domino, “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen”, from this day forward let’s just accept the fact that I work as a communicator for a government department home to many communicators who communicate – and probably will forever continue to do so – in often appallingly bad language. And let’s agree that I'll try to inflict them upon y’all no more. Doing so is getting to be like writing, “The sun rose again this morning.” (But it is my blog and I do reserve the right to insert an especially stupid or laughable example at some future date. But given the norm recently on display here, you just know anything that makes the cut in future is going to be worth it.)
Besides, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to upload photos on Blogger, finding much more interesting stuff to whine about, or applaud, should be easy!
À la prochaine...
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