If I should ever get to thinking that Canadian government bureaucracy is overlarge and overcumbersome, I should just consider this:

“The country is ruled by an elected Council of 60, who appoints 2 captain regents (from opposing political parties, no less) to administer governmental affairs for six-month term. Talk about preserving liberties through division of authority!”

The country in question? The Republic of San Marino, 24 square miles with a population of just over 28,000 (when last counted in 2005).

= = =

Is your job fun, too?

Early one recent morning, my boss’s boss asked me to take a package of a dozen English-language news articles that had been published in various Canadian media and send them for translation because they are part of a larger background package that will be used in a test to be taken by candidates competing for a management position in our unit. And federal government competitions are always fully bilingual.

He also advised me that I should not discuss this at all with (here he gave me three names of colleagues in my unit) because each of the three is a candidate in the competition. The problem (for me) is that two of the three are also the people in our unit who typically deal with ordering any translation we need from the vast administrative maw that is the Government of Canada’s translation service.

It took the better part of a morning for me to finally get to the point where I was able to send the material off for translation. Along the way, I had to set up a personal account with the Government of Canada’s translation service; I had to seek out and include administrative data that identified our unit by a 12-digit numerical code under which translation expenses are authorized. In order to do this, I had to speak to no fewer than seven different people. I really could have gotten the information from either of two people in our unit, but as was earlier noted, both are candidates in this competition and my boss’s boss was specific about not even asking them for information about the process, much less the particulars of the articles in question.

Then, to top of the truly satisfying success that comes only with the knowledge of a job well-done, about half an hour after sending the package off, I got a call from the Government of Canada’s translation bureau. They told me they will not even begin to translate news clippings unless each clipping is accompanied by a release of copyright.

I sent my boss’s boss a three-word update: “Over to you.”

So, to sum up: I was asked to do a task I had never done before, and told specifically not to ask for information about how to do it from the only people I know who know how to do it and, after having finally found out how to do it was told by the people who actually do the task that they won’t do it.

Your tax dollars at work.

= = =

Too funny not to share…

These come straight from a blog called Miss Cellania, and are the latest in the ongoing weblists of odd calls to Tech Customer Support Centres. They come, of course, with the usual caveat that their truthiness depends on how much credibility you attach to the citation, “I read it on the Internet.” Their funnyness, however, is not in dispute:

CALL CENTER CUSTOMERS

Customer: "I've been ringing 0700 2300 for two days and can't get through to enquiries, can you help?"
Operator: "Where did you get that number from, sir?"
Customer: "It was on the door to the travel centre".
Operator: "They're our opening hours".

Caller: "Can you give me the telephone number for Jack?"
Operator: I'm sorry, sir, I don't understand who you are talking about".
Caller: "In the user guide it clearly states I need to unplug the fax machine from the wall socket and telephone Jack before cleaning. Can you give me his number?"
Operator: "I think you mean the telephone point on the wall".

Caller: Does your European Breakdown Policy cover me when I am travelling in Australia?"
Operator: " Doesn't the name of the product give you a clue?"

Caller: "If I register my car in France, do I have to change the steering wheel to the other side of the car?"

Caller: "I''d like the number of the Argoed Fish Bar in Cardiff please".
Operator: "I'm sorry, there's no listing. Is the spelling correct?"
Caller: "Well, it used to be called the Bargoed Fish Bar but the ‘B’ fell off".

Then there was the caller who asked for a knitwear company in Woven.
Operator: "Woven? Are you sure?"
Caller: "Yes. That''s what it says on the label: Woven in Scotland".

On another occasion, a man making heavy breathing sounds from a phone box told a worried operator: "I haven't got a pen, so I''m steaming up the window to write the number on"."

Tech Support: "I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop".
Customer: "OK" .
Tech Support: "Did you get a pop-up menu?"
Customer: "No" .
Tech Support: "OK. Right-Click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?"
Customer: "No" .
Tech Support: "OK. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?"
Customer: "Sure. You told me to write 'click' and I wrote 'click'".

Tech Support: "OK. In the bottom left hand side of the screen, can you see the 'OK' button displayed?"
Customer: "Wow. How can you see my screen from there?"

= = =

Closing the loop…

In the previous entry, you might recall I recounted how the House of Commons, buttressed by a petition of over 100,000 signatures, had unanimously approved to hold a state funeral for the last of the three known surviving veterans of WWI, only to find out that not one of them wants the honour.

Well, here’s the opening paragraph of a story that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on January 4:

“The federal government has officially scrapped plans for a state funeral to mark the passing of Canada's last First World War veteran after the families of each of the three surviving participants in the 1914-1918 conflict declined the country's offer, CanWest News Service has learned.”

The story goes on to note that government is instead discussing the possibility of crafting a wide observance such as a national day of mourning to mark the passing of the last of the three (although with no great cognitive leap, I thought that would fit nicely with the purpose of November 11, but they didn’t ask me.)

= = =

Irony watch 1

I surely cannot be the only person on the planet who chokes on the torrent of media coverage earlier this month that was… um, complaining about the torrent of media coverage earlier this month on three fronts (two of which we’ve already moved on from, and one which, I fear, will be with us for the next couple years at least) – (i) the latest Royal Squeeze, (ii) the instant addition of six children to a Jehovah Witness family in Vancouver and (iii) the beginning of the Pickton trial in BC. But with TV news humming away in the background over the course of each working day, sometimes it seems to me that your typical on-air TV news personalities wouldn’t recognize a bit of ironic scripting if it raced full-tilt across the studio floor, leapt up onto their desks, tore away their lavaliere microphones and launched into a loud rendition of “I Read the News Today, Oh Boy” by The Beatles.

In the first of the three above-mentioned stories, almost all of the coverage on this side of the water has been on the order of, oh my, isn’t it awful that the paparazzi, who are suspected of contributing to, if not outright causing the death of the Princess of Wales, are gathering in hordes to monitor the every move of the latest frequent date of a young Royal. (Yes, it’s really terrible. So leave the young lady alone, why don’t you?)

And in the second, the Canadian media (because it was, after all, a Canadian story) waxed mickle frustrated over the fact that the family has been unwilling, for some as yet to be [to the media, anyway] satisfactorily explained reason, to divulge their name or any details of the recent birth of sextuplets. Although – to this writing – no one (thankfully) among the journalists covering the multiple birth that I’ve seen has yet bleated, “But the public has a right to know!”, I’m just waiting for it.. CBC-TV’s Newsworld’s Nancy Wilson is among the most unsettling of the reporters, pitching questions to her on-site stringers that smack of, “Well I can certainly understand why the family would like to remain anonymous and hold onto their privacy, but [we at the CBC are going to do our level best to ensure that this just ain’t gonna happen!]

And Pickton? Well, suffice to say it fits the same execrable mold, but since I literally shut off my radio and TV, and turn to a wholly other newspaper page whenever the name is mentioned, I have no comment and you’ll hear no more about it here.

Irony watch 2 (or “You really can’t make this stuff up”)

A news item about Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay’s January 9 meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf reported, in all seriousness, that MacKay, when asked to assist Pakistan in developing ways to deter Taliban insurgents from nipping over to Afghanistan to shoot or blow up Canadian troops stationed there, responded thus: “MacKay said at a news conference in Islamabad that Canada is willing to help Pakistan improve its border security with Afghanistan by training [border] guards.” (cbc.ca website, January 9)

Now Canada, you may recall, is a country whose border guards seem almost proud of their collective agreement clause, which permits them – when they receive notice of a possible inbound threat such as an armed fugitive who has escaped from a US prison – to abandon their posts and, not to put too fine a point on it, run like hell.

Does one really need training to do that?

= = =

Well Officer, it’s like this…

On a not-long-ago Wednesday evening, had you been driving or walking along my residential street, you would have seen me (in the glare of the streetlights, because it was already dark) walking down the middle of the road, pushing a rather large Boos Block kitchen trolley.

It’s not a long story, but there is a moral, so hence its place in this forum. A few weeks ago, we made the domestic decision to upgrade the cutting block-topped trolley we had in our kitchen because the previous one had become almost hopelessly wobbly and no longer matched what we wanted it to be. (It had become a surface on which we could actually pass a knife back and forth through something like a loaf of bread while having to walk gradually across the floor as the wobbly trolley merrily rolled at each push.)

The kitchen products company from whom we bought it had us registered in their files, because we have made other purchases there in the past. But it turned out they had our address wrong and here’s what I discovered. When a vendor is setting up a delivery file for you and asks only for your postal code – because that’s the controller they have on their file system – make damned sure you verify with them that your actual house number is also in their file. Because a postal code, you see, applies to a range of addresses, not simply to your unique home.

And here’s how the conversation went the day we arranged delivery:

THEY: And your postal code?
WE: [Postal Code]
THEY: Mr [my name]?
WE: That’s right.

(pause while a few tippy-taps are entered at “THEY”s half of the conversation.)

THEY: And your address is 488 [streetname]?
WE: No, our address is 520 [streetname].
THEY: Oh, sorry. We code our files by postal code and 488 is probably the street number at which your postal code begins. I’ll enter the correct address and make sure the delivery guys have it as well.

Well the thing about Baby Duck is there are no big mysteries because you, dear friends, family and readers, know all too well where one of my typical stories is going to go, doncha?

Yep, on my arrival home the day it was supposed to be delivered (the aforementioned Wednesday), the appointed hour came and went, but no trolley.

A phone call later, I was speaking to the cheery manager of the store’s shipping department who recognized my name and immediately launched into a story about how the guys had delivered the trolley and even managed to roll it into a position sheltered from the weather and was I happy with it?

“Well, it’s like this,” I replied, “It’s not here.”

There followed a perfect illustration of the phrase, “pregnant pause”. When she rediscovered her tongue, it was to convey a state that could only be described as flummoxed. In fact, her first five words were “But…”. All five of them. Add the fact that the entire delivery department had already gone home and she was just on the way out the door herself, and you have a situation where no one with the information was going to be available until start-of-business the next day.

So recalling the store encounter and postal code confusion, I stepped outside and first did a complete walkabout of our house, just in case their interpretation of “sheltered from the weather” meant under one of our backyard trees. But no, there was no trolley anywhere on our property. So down the street I went to 488 and sure enough, at the far end of their driveway, almost in their backyard, under a large sheet of ordinary corrugated cardboard, was the trolley.

There was no one home at 488, but I did notice a neighbour looking out her driveway-side window while I had been prowling about the premises looking for the trolley in the first place. When I knocked on her door, she answered and listened in great amusement while I described the reason for my visit to the driveway between her neighbour’s home and hers, and asked her please not to phone the police when she saw me wheeling a large trolley table down their shared driveway.

It’s now happily ensconced in our kitchen, none the worse for its having already logged more mileage in its first day out of the store than most kitchen trolleys travel in a year.

= = =

And finally, an organization called “Safe Kids Canada” is in the news a lot these days because they advocate the mandatory, legislated use of helmets by kids and adults while… tobogganing.

This is their complete safe tobogganing manifesto, from their website:

“Sledding / Tobogganing:

Ensure that the hill is free of hazards - trees, rocks, bumps, fences and bare spots. Do not sled on ice-covered areas.

Ensure that the hill is situated away from roads, rivers or railroads and that there is plenty of room to stop at the bottom of the hill.

Look for a hill which is not too steep (less than 30 degrees is recommended for children) and has a long, clear runoff area.

Inspect the toboggan to ensure it is in good condition.

Use only proper sliding equipment with good brakes and steering. Inner tubes and plastic discs are not recommended because they are difficult to control.

Many tobogganing injuries are cold-related, such as frostbite and hypothermia. Heat loss is particularly significant in children under age 3 because their heads account for a larger proportion of their overall body size. Children should be dressed warmly in layers.

After tobogganing children should get out of wet clothes and boots quickly to prevent frostbite.

Young children should always be supervised by an adult. They should never toboggan alone.

The safest position to be in while tobogganing is kneeling. Sliding on your stomach, headfirst, offers the least protection from a head injury. Laying flat on the back increases the risk of injuring the spine or spinal cord.

Look out for the other guy - move quickly to the side and walk up and away from the sliding path after finishing a run.

Children should not toboggan at night.

Head injuries while sledding can be serious. Children should wear a helmet with a thin, warm cap underneath to protect ears from frostbite. A ski or hockey helmet is recommended, because they are designed for use in cold weather and for similar falls and speeds.”

I’m sorry but “Do not sled on ice-covered areas” ??? “Good brakes and steering” ??? “Inner tubes and plastic disks are not recommended because they are difficult to control”??? Are you people out of your frigging minds? You’ve just condemned absolutely everything that makes sliding fun, damn it!

The single most memorable sliding experience of my life was one truly hilarious weekend when a group of us adults went to a friend’s property and – yes, at night – went sliding down a quarter mile-or-so steeply sloped curve of a long driveway so ice-slicked it was like glass. By the time the slope began to level off, we were probably clocking something like 20 – 30 miles per hour, not that much when you set it next to the velocity of an Olympic skeleton sled, but pretty darned exciting nonetheless.

And it was only the next morning when I stood beside my car on level ground feeling distinctly like I was leaning backwards that I discovered the previous evening’s desperate braking in order to avoid being launched off the outside of the curve had worn fully three-quarters of an inch off both my boot heels.

I appreciate that Safe Kids Canada begins with a noble mandate. But recreational tobogganing and helmets go together like the proverbial fish and bicycle. And be honest now – has anyone among you ever seen a toboggan with a “braking system” any more complicated than dragging through the swiftly passing snow whatever of your major appendages is hanging over the edge?

Until next time…

Happy New Year!

One of my New Year’s goals (I can hardly call it a resolution, because the likelihood of its being realized is none too strong) is to become smarter.

Because…

1. My wife is smarter than I am.

Santa, indeed, was most happily compliant this year in delivering to me a small but necessary piece of electronics called a “pre-amp”, that sits between my record turntable and my computer, providing the power necessary for my LP records’ music to be “heard” by my computer’s digital recording software. This is a necessary process if I am ever to convert my records to an alternative medium like a CD.

After several long hours of fiddling with the various ports on the back of my computer, and fiddling, too, with the resident automatic sound level-setting features of the software program I am trying to learn, I was still being told the hook-up had failed to connect. But I was also bound and determined to avoid reaching the point I have reached in the past with over-optimistically named plug-and-play hardware. (Readers will recall, for example, my recent experience with an iPod that resulted in my passing it along to my wife, rather than pulverizing it on my concrete garage floor in a fit of frustration.)

Fortunately, in this case, my wife has no use for a pre-amp and thus, the option of passing it along to her simply isn’t there.

So I asked for her patient assistance after my software informed me – for about the 50th time – that it was still faithfully “searching for the audio from the turntable”, and still faithfully unable to hear so much as a single plucked guitar string.

In very short order, my wife looked at my hook-up and asked, in all innocence, “Shouldn’t the wires from the turntable to the pre-amp connect to its [the pre-amp’s] ‘Line in’, and the wires running from the pre-amp come from its ‘Line out’ port?”

Being a guy, I realized I had just been asked the equivalent of “Is it plugged in?” “Of course they should.” I replied.

Well of course they weren’t. Somewhere in the course of hooking up the pre-amp, I had reversed both my brain and the line-in-line-out links, in the process immediately deleting that simple correction process as a factor in trying to figure out why the software wasn’t finding a signal. Because there’s no way I would have done anything that dumb. Right?

Right?

Sigh.

It took about seven seconds to make the swap and immediately my software’s sound level indicators leapt across my monitor in response to each note of the music emanating from the record.

Up next… I ask my wife for help tying my shoes and she informs me that they have velcro fasteners.

= = =

2. A longtime good friend of mine is smarter than I am.

About a year ago, I received an e-mail out of the blue. The subject line was addressing me by a nickname I hadn’t heard for about 40 years, followed by “Is that you?” It was a message from a guy I last knew when he and his family lived right next door to us while my Dad was stationed at RCAF Station St Hubert, Quebec. After a brief exchange of “Holy cow, what the heck are you up to?” messages, we met at a local pub and swapped stories for more than two hours.

It turned out he had tripped over my name in the departmental e-mail directory and decided to send me the message. Now I realize that it might seem unlikely to have missed each other for the past few years while both of us were working for the same government department, but consider that our department has a population about the same as the entire City of London, Ontario and we’re scattered across not only several buildings in Ottawa and Gatineau, but also in lots of regional offices all across Canada.

Fast forward to a recent day when I received another message from him, suggesting that we get together once again. Then he really surprised me by describing in his message a person he sees almost every morning on his walk to work, and the time of day and location when and where he sees this person. But absent even a flicker of recognition from that person (you just know where this going, don’t you?) he had steadfastly refrained from extending a greeting.

And so once again, he asked me by e-mail, “Is that you?” And after reviewing the time of day and location in his message, I realized that of course it is. And the very next morning, there he was. Again. And this time we stopped and said hello to one another.

For my part, I could only plead the fact that, on a typical morning at about 7:15 am, I am sufficiently alert to remember no more than that “walking” is accomplished by placing one foot in front of the other. Later, some 10 ounces of black African dark roast coffee later, I am capable of more direct (a) recollection and (b) communication.

And despite his follow-up message that included the line, “What a couple of nimrods we are,” I know he meant just me.

And he’d be right.

= = =

3. My boss is smarter than I am.

When we greeted each other after returning to work on Tuesday the 2nd, he told me he had just “opened the TV” (a common francophone rendition of the many English verb options employed to describe the process of switching on an electric appliance or light) to discover that former US President Gerald Ford had died. I was frankly astonished to discover that he hadn’t viewed a moment of news coverage since he left the office before Christmas. I had always assumed that passive media monitoring ruled his life, even when he is officially “off duty”. (I confess I had occasionally dialed in a news channel just to provide some noise when I was in a “puttering around” mode during this year’s holiday.)

As everyone likely recalls, there were in fact three newsworthy deaths of note all within days of each other over the Christmas holiday period.

I found great amusement in watching the near schizophrenic turns exhibited by the more rabid US newsreaders and they wrenched their faces around in search of the appropriate expression to use to describe, often as items 1, 2, 3 of the same newscast, the latest information about each of the three competing passings that commanded much of the holiday headline news: James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein.

The former required an “entertainment level” of respect – that’d be on the order of: “We’re sorry he’s gone, but let’s applaud a wonderful body of work.” (And with James Brown, most people are really hard-pressed to name anything other than “AooooWWWWW – I feel GOOD!”) Now granted, that dutiful combination of respect and celebration also was occasionally conveyed with a facial expression that combined shock and outright puzzlement – of the type normally reserved for passing a massive roadside trainwreck – when the “reclusive King of Pop”, Michael Jackson, stepped to the microphone and lamented Mr Brown’s death with his (Jackson’s) three-octaves-higher-than-normal, “And I love you very much.”

Gerald Ford-related coverage required that the newsreader look respectful, pensive, especially when he or she repeated the late President’s signature quote: “Our long national nightmare is over.” Bonus points for avoiding an obvious onscreen look that said, “Oh Lord, I can’t wait until the first President to follow the current one uses the same quote!”

And as for Hussein, just about anything without smugness would pass for objectivity. (For my part, I screamed at my doorstep Globe and Mail the day it arrived with its third consecutive front-page, “The last moments of Saddam Hussein’s life” article, complete with photo. But that’s probably just me.)

And in the occasional newscast where coverage of all three led the line-up, watching the newsreader get whiplash in the transition from one facial expression to another was far more fun than this one lowly media analyst should be allowed to have while watching TV news.

= = =

But all’s not gloomy on the subject of who’s smarter than whom. The good news is that I’m still way smarter than the Canadian government.

Anyone following the news round about November 11 just this past year might recall that considerable pressure was put on the Canadian government to hold a state funeral for the last veteran of World War I. (One presumes that’ll only happen after he dies, but never underestimate stupidity. But I digress.) At last count, there were officially three left; all are over 100 years old; the oldest is 107. After receiving a petition with over 100,000 names on it calling for a state funeral, the government acquiesced. On November 21, Canada’s Parliament voted unanimously to hold a state funeral. So the balls are in the air; the game is afoot. The nation begins to wonder who will be the lucky “winner” in the macabre last-man-to-die-gets-a-state-funeral lottery. Nothing will be held back. Everything has been taken into consideration.

Let’s see, is there absolutely anything else we should have thought of? Anything?

(from the CBC website / cbc.ca):
“First World War veterans don't want state funeral
(Last Updated: Tuesday, January 2, 2007 | 12:07 PM ET)
The Canadian government has agreed to hold a state funeral for the last First World War veteran to die, but none of the three veterans still living wants a state funeral.”

Oh.

= = =

Random quote.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, author Paul Theroux, I thought, resonates globally with this description of contemporary America:

“We are passing through a confused period of aggression and fear, characterized by our confrontational government, the decline of diplomacy, a pugnacious foreign policy and a settled belief that the surest way to get people to tell the truth is to torture them. (And by the way, ‘water boarding’ was a torture technique at the worst of the Khmer Rouge prisons.) It is no wonder we have begun to squint at strangers. This is a corrosive situation in a country where more and more people, most of them strangers, are a feature of daily life. Americans as a people I believe to be easygoing, compassionate, not looking for a fight. But surely I am not the only one who has noticed that we are ruder, more offhand, readier to take offense, a nation of shouters and blamers.” (“America the Overfull”, December 31, 2006)

The next step is to find someone who can just as effectively articulate a solution. Part 3 involves convincing everyone to adopt it. (Somehow, I have a feeling it will have to be something other than, “Kill all the infidels”.)

= = =

And finally, “Taps”, if you will. A last, lingering note on the current events topic of celebrity farewells. Say what you want about the US military, no one, but no one, can belt out the concluding verse of The Battle Hymn of the Republic like an all-male voice choir of the US Marines, who did just that during a service in Grand Rapids Michigan, the final public event in the long road to interment for former President Gerald Ford who, in death, was described as the most widely traveled Presidential corpse since Lincoln. My admittedly cynical view of course, is that the American way of honouring their late former Commanders-in-Chief and their war dead is so damned good because they get so very much practice at it.

Until next time.