TriumphAnt

A recent visit to the dentist…

On arrival at the office, I checked in immediately with the receptionist. "I'm Mike. I'm here for my 8:40 with Dr P." They crossed my name off and then a hygienist I've never seen before showed me into a room that I'd never been in before. (First clue that something was not entirely in order.) I was in there for 60 seconds when the hygienist came back in, and said, "Oh, sorry. Can you please just have a seat in the waiting room? It'll just be a couple minutes." (I'd just come from the waiting room. Second clue.)

While I was in the waiting room, the receptionist looked at me and said, "So you've lost a filling, right?" "No," I said, "I'm here for a cavity." (Third clue.) "What's your last name?" she asked. (Fourth clue. I said it and spelled it.) "We don't have you on our calendar," she said.

"What did you just cross off the list?" I asked. "That was a different 'Mike' who was also scheduled for 8:40." (She giggled.) "But we're going to take you anyway because he hasn't shown up yet."

"Alright," I said, "but would you please make sure you have my folder and not his?" (She laughed.)

Two minutes later, the dentist – Dr P – comes in, gives the folder a brief look, then looks at me and says, "So what can we do for you today?"

Now I'm starting to get a little pissed off. But you'd have been proud of me. I didn't let it show. And here are the next couple minutes of back and forth:

Me: "You booked me for a cavity."
Her: "Oh." (looks back at folder.) "You've left it a little long."
Me: "Pardon?"
Her: "Well... this goes back to last November."
Me: "No, it goes back three weeks when I was last here."
Her: (Returning to folder) "Oh?" Then she starts to probe around -- now she's actually hunting for the cavity!

Me: (before this gets too far along) "You also asked me to consider a crown. I've talked it over with my wife and I think I'm going to go ahead with that. What do I have to do?"
Her: "Well, you give me an OK to proceed. I contact your insurer. Are you insured?"
Me: "Yes, Government of Canada."
Her: "OK, so it'll take about a month. Then they'll either contact you or me. If they contact me first, I'll contact you. If they contact you first, you contact me and we'll schedule the appointments."
Me: "Appointments?"
Her: "Yes. The first one is about an hour; the second one is about 20 minutes."
Me: "Is it the same tooth as the cavity?"
Her: (Re-visiting my mouth.) "Ummmmmmmmm... yes."
Me: "So should I still go ahead with the repair today?"
Her: "Oh. No, if you decide to get the crown, we'd repair it as part of the crown process."
Me: "I see. And so do you need anything more from me other than the verbal OK I've just given you?" (That'd be the "I think I'm going to go ahead with that" above.)
Her: "Oh... No."
Me: "So we're done for today?"
Her: "Um...... yes."

And a $20 cab ride later, there I was, Bob’s-your-uncle, back at work. Still cavitied. Soon to be crowned. (Assuming they don’t inadvertently confuse me with someone looking for a full set of dentures.)

= = =

The good, the bad, but (knock on wood) no ugly…

Let’s get the moral out of the way first. Keep your receipts. No receipt too big. No receipt too small. Keep your receipts.

The bad: At home, one of our relatively new toilets has just started the somewhat disconcerting habit of generating a water flow sound, roughly every hour to hour-and-a-half. Typically, the water runs for about a minute, and then stops. After lifting the tank lid off, we noticed that what was happening over that time was the water level in the tank was ever so gradually falling a half to three quarters of an inch, until it reached the level where it tripped the tank re-filling process. At which point the tank refilled and it was that sound – of the water level’s being boosted back up to “full” – that we were hearing every 60 to 90 minutes.

So we called the people who sold us the toilets and were informed that it is likely a leaky “flapper”. (If you look into your toilet tank, the flapper is the large rubber plug that lifts away from – and then re-closes over – the main drain hole in the bottom of the tank every time you flush.) Having a leaky flapper is not catastrophic. The water leaking out just trickles into the toilet bowl, rather than the more disastrous outcome of, say, a leaky tank, which likely as not would send water trickling onto your floor. But it’s still a slow waste of water, no matter that it’s flowing into a perfectly safe place for collection.

So Preston Hardware (where we bought the toilets) informed us that they would order a replacement flapper valve – which is about a $12 part. It would be free, they said, if we had the receipt. Well we’ve looked high and low and the best we’ve been able to produce is a MasterCard bill which shows a payment to Preston Hardware on the date we know we purchased the toilets. But that’s not a “receipt”. So our new flapper isn’t free. Fortunately, it’s only a $12 part. No bank breaker.

The good: For about four months (since I received it as a Christmas gift), I’ve been fuming over the fact that a high-powered, high-priced coffee bean grinder we own has been blasting freshly ground coffee all over the place, in addition to actually delivering some from its spout into a container specifically designed for the purpose of catching ground coffee. We’d tried a couple ad hoc solutions, including enveloping about 80 per cent of the discharge spout with a homemade foil deflector. But it was an imperfect solution and I found that I was still spending as much time brushing up widely scattered ground coffee as I was actually grinding the beans and enjoying the freshly brewed product.

I’ll mention the name here – it’s a Kitchen Aid Model A-9. Don’t buy one.

The Kitchen-Aid Model A-9 is quite a beautiful piece of design – it’s deliberately fashioned to be “retro” and looks like a miniature version of the old style gas pumps or bubblegum machines where the slender base is capped with a large glass tank. Unfortunately, Kitchen-Aid sacrificed practicality for design, as I discovered when I started trouble-shooting the problem in search of a solution. The manual was no help at all, so I ventured online. If you Google that brand and model, you will find in very short order no shortage of disgusted comments from owners who are experiencing precisely what we did. Because the discharge chute points straight forward rather than down; and because the grinders whirl at one heck of a velocity, several A-9 owners find they are wasting coffee big time by spraying a measurable amount around the kitchen every time they grind more beans. (And if you’re sufficiently serious about your coffee to buy a high-quality grinder, you’re likely buying premium beans, not your average bag of Chock Full-o-Nuts.)

Added to my issues was the fact that I also want a machine that will produce an espresso grind. And despite what its literature promises, the A-9 simply is not capable of milling the beans to the fine consistency needed for espresso.

But all of this is in this section because, as with the toilets mentioned earlier, in this case too, after hunting for receipted evidence of the purchase, we were unable to produce nothing more than a MasterCard bill showing a payment on a specific date, not an actual store receipt for the product. But unlike the toilet outcome, this time the store – C.A. Paradis in Ottawa – is home to a management team whose spokeswoman, when I spun my story, said, “Just bring it in and we’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy.” So I did and they did. They asked me for more details on what I wanted, and asked if I wanted an exchange for another of the same machines. But as I’ve already noted, my problem with the machine is design-based, and this was their top-of-the-line grinder. So there was nowhere else to go in terms of getting a better machine, and they decided the only solution was to process a full refund. But even more, they actually recommended a nearby (really nearby – they share the same parking lot) specialty espresso shop that sells machines specifically for that grind.

No receipt; no original packaging. They accepted from me – for a full refund – a machine in a plastic bag. (Granted, it was a heavy-duty LCBO bag that had most recently transported four bottles of wine, but still…)

So guess which store is going to continue to receive our business. And guess which one has now been relegated to the "Last-resort-if-we-want-something-specific-and-it’s-just-not-available-anywhere-else" place on our list.

For a $12 flapper.

Meanwhile, our kitchen counter is now home to a (so far, knock on wood again) first-rate Italian grinder that not only grinds espresso, it will fine-grind beans right down to the consistency of Nile River silt that is required for Turkish coffee. And they threw in a free kilo of premium Italian espresso-roast beans!

Oh – did I mention the moral of these stories? Keep your receipts. Not every business is a C.A. Paradis.

= = =

Anyone following the latest nonsense in the Bush White House from the “We are winning the war in Iraq” file of delusion (FOD) will take a masochistic pleasure in the reporting of a recent episode involving US Senator John McCain.

McCain recently went public with a comment to the effect that the proof of this “We are winning” assertion is that there are more and more places in Iraq where anyone can get out and take a stroll. Then to prove his point, he did just that – “strolling” through a popular outdoor Baghdad market…

But only after a few incidental “just another Sunday stroll in a Baghdad market by a US Senator” precautions had been taken:

“The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit. ‘They paralyzed the market when they came,’ Mr. [electrical appliance shop owner Jassim] Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. ‘This was only for the media.’” (Source: New York Times online: “McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants say”, April 2)

That little exercise in making your point should be cross-linked to any dictionary’s citations for “hubris”.

= = =

Signs, signs, everywhere signs…

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the seemingly sudden precipitation of quasi-Chinese Communist style hats into contemporary fashion? (This, for example, for only $55 $US)

On my daily homeward bound commute, I pass through a very busy East-West / North-South transit junction station and occasionally will spot one or two among the teeming throngs. And in the central food / shopping court at my office complex, a couple recent billboard posters have appeared for a youth-oriented clothing line and the models are all sporting them, with the added anti-revolutionary twist that they have them twisted on sideways.

What’s driving that? I can’t imagine there’s an idealistic bent to the sellers’ thinking, unless they assess Communist China solely in terms of its surviving its rather strenuous start-up. But if so, they’re conveniently shelving the historical memory of little episodes like the ChiComms’ rather abrupt collective armed “visit” to Tibet in 1949, from which they have yet to return; their sustained persecution of the Falun Gong, and of course, their signature piece, what the People’s Republic’s own literature officially calls the 1989 Beijing “incident”, and what the rest of the world recalls as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. (Much more here)

Of course, maybe it’s nothing more than the simple graphic fact that a brilliant red glossy star looks great on a forest-green hat and, if that’s the case, I can hardly finger-point. I confess I have some politically incorrect graphics in my own university background and, at the time, I chose to overlook its history in favour of its design. For one entire year of the four I spent in residence, a small corner of my wall was adorned with a full colour WWII German Navy battle flag, simply because I really liked (and still do) the graphic assembly of its red, white and black lines and curves.


(It probably comes from the same set of neurons wherein you’ll find an appreciation for one of my favourite non-Nazi art forms – this genre and especially this artist.

That being the case, what the hell? Go for it, I say! But on the other hand, if our nation’s schools suddenly start stocking up on textbooks that are little, and red… well, I’m going to re-assess my glib dismissal of this most recent form of youth haberdashery.

Until la prochaine.

= = =