TriumphAnt

I'm not ignoring y'all. In my job, whenever government does something major -- such as a Speech From the Throne (SFT) or a budget, my work-related bustle increases for a while. Well, for anyone inside the fishbowl that is the National Capital Region, this won't be news, but the rest of the country probably missed the press-stopping headlines announcing that we recently suffered exactly that -- those, in fact -- an SFT followed just days later by an "Economic Fiscal Update" that was, for all intents and purposes (or as played on my desk... "for all intensive purposes"), a mini-budget.

Which is why the Duck got bumped.

Just in case you were wondering.

We now return you to our regular stuff 'n' nonsense.

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Things I’m starting to realize I don’t want to make time for any more…

- Continuing to read a book I am not enjoying, or at best coming to a compromise with myself and “bleeping” over the unenjoyable parts if I’m far enough into it that I just want to know how the story comes out. Recently I started a new book by an author with whom my previous experience was, quite literally, a “couldn’t put it down” page turner by the time I reached its last 150 pages. But in the next of his books that I started, he embarked early on into some horribly graphic “flashback” descriptions of Nazi concentration camp atrocities (Actually, I think that might be a triple redundancy) that simply didn’t suit the experience I want from “recreational reading”, no matter how exciting the eventual storyline was going to turn out to be.

Now it wasn’t that long ago that with a book I bought (rather than borrowed), for whatever reason it was bad – its writing or its subject matter – I felt an obligation to read it through to its end.

Well no more, and it seems I have a mighty kindred spirit. And wow, does she have clout in the world o’ reading! Nancy Pearl is a woman who is not only a librarian, she is so good at it she has actually been rendered as an action figure (“with amazing push-button shushing action!”).

Here’s what she has to say about unpleasant reading experiences. (Both quotes were pulled from the web. Google her if you’re using Baby Duck as a reference for an essay and you need the authoritative citations.):

"’A bad book,’ she explains, ‘is any book you don't like. A good book is any book you like. Time is short and the world of books is very large,’ she says. ‘To slog through a book you're not loving is a waste of your time. If you don't like a book, no matter how old you are, you should stop reading it.’"

I especially like the fact that she at least advocates giving a bad book a slight chance. It gives people like me a happy compromise between never buying a particular book in fear of not liking it, vs trudging all the way through it long after you’ve clearly decided you don’t like it. She calls it the Rule of 50:

“To answer the question ‘How long should I read a book before I give up?’ Nancy developed the Rule of 50: ‘If you are 50 years of age and younger, you should read the first 50 pages of the book then ask ‘Do I really love this book?’ If at the bottom of page 50 all you really care about is who the murderer is, read the end and put the book away. If you’re over 50, subtract your age from 100 and the resulting number is the number of pages you should read before giving up.’ Nancy says it’s one of the few rules that rewards people for getting older.”

Bad news for high schoolers and book club members, though. She makes it quite clear that her Rule of 50 doesn’t count for a book group’s assigned works, or for homework.

So suffice to say that I simply closed this book at that point in my early morning bus commute where I ran first into the unpleasantly rendered atrocities; and at lunch hour I re-embarked among the novel’s pages with my “new eyes” -- skipping those parts while still deriving considerable enjoyment from its suspense-laden balance.

Thank you, Ms Pearl. Guilt-free book and/or chapter abandonment. (I just have to tell myself not to dwell on how much more widely read I’d be today had I only started doing this years ago.)

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Had a hearty laugh recently at some poor nameless Wal-Mart employee’s expense. There’s a colour photo making the rounds of the Internet that shows a custom-decorated cake that someone ordered from a Wal-Mart bakery on which the orderer directed (obviously over the phone) that what should appear on the cake was the message:

“'Best Wishes Suzanne', and underneath that, 'We will miss you'”.

Here’s what came back from Wal-Mart (the photo is a thing of beauty, so try the link first. But Neatorama is an extremely active blog and I don’t know how long the link will live… so the text of the actual icing-rendered message follows immediately below this link.

"Best Wishes Suzanne
Under Neat that
We will Miss you"

I’m really going to validate my gray hair here, but this reminded me of an episode that dates from one of my early office jobs obtained when the ink was still wet on my Carleton University Bachelor of Journalism.

True story.

I was in a communications unit where we all had dictaphone microphones on our desks. You dictated the letter into a microphone; it went to a central word processing unit, and a half day or so later, you received a paper copy on your desk to proofread before sending it out.

Everyone had their little dictating conventions for clarifying what they were saying (because, on a tape, things like “e”, "d", "b" "t", “p”, “v” can all sound very similar, especially to someone not used to your pronunciation).

My boss at the time showed me a letter he received for proofreading.

What he had dictated was:

"This is a letter to B – B for 'Bob' – Wilson..." and then he went on to dictate the letter.

When it came back, Word Processing had typed the first line of the address as:

"B Beaver Bob Wilson..."

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And surprise! – I actually have something good (with a qualification) to say about a cellphone service provider.

I don’t use a cellphone often enough to justify entering into one of those “anytime” plans for large amounts of money and right up-to-date hardware. Instead, I have a cellphone that… well, it rings when someone calls me and it lets me call out when I want to do so. My daughter has also discovered it plays rudimentary games. But it does not, for example, take pictures (I have a camera for that), upload / download music (I have a CD player, turntable and a radio for that), download movies (I have a TV and DVD player for that), make coffee (coffeemaker) etc, etc. It is, in other words, a phone. It's just smaller and wireless, by way of marking its difference from previous phones I’ve owned.

The billing plan I have is called PayGo, short for “pay as you go”. It is simplicity itself. Each month, you re-charge its balance, either by phone or by going to the Rogers website to add however much credit you think you’ll need that month. So long as you reload each and every month by the due date, your balance carries over and you’re good for another month.

The catch, however, is that if you forget and let the date slide by, your balance just vanishes. Where? Who the hell knows? But my suspicion is that I can’t be the only idiot in the Rogers PayGo customer list and that Rogers shows a heck of a “Miscellaneous Revenue” line each year solely on the strength of all the forgetful customer balances they absorb as the deadlines pass.

Well recently, and probably for about the fifth time in my life, I let a re-charge deadline go by because I was out of town and frankly just forgot about it. (That’s a refreshing reason to be able to offer, by the way. The previous times it’s happened, the best I can plead is “I forgot”.) The balance in my account at the time was $31. Now I know that $31 in the grand scheme of things is just not a whole heck of a lot. But ask yourself two things: 1. How many times have other $31-ers contributed to the Rogers coffers over the life of their PayGo plan? (Subtract five from your guess, because those would be mine.) And 2. If someone gave you $31 and said take it out in the backyard and set fire to it, how would you feel? Probably a little angrier than the relative value of $31 merits, but that’s an understandable function of your -- and my -- perception of pointless waste.

Not so long ago, my wife embarked on an attractive cellphone package agreement with Virgin Mobile, and at the same time set a separate one up for our daughter. In the process of setting up the payment options, she discovered (in persistent research that was probably on the order of extracting one of your own molars, because initially she was actually told by a Virgin rep that it was not possible) that setting up an automatic monthly deduction was indeed possible.

So to make their long story* short, not only was it possible, both she and my daughter are now on Virgin Mobile’s carefree “Just give us your credit card number and let us worry about topping up your account” plan.

* No such luck, however, about shortening _my_ story. Onward.

So she suggested I look into it with Rogers.

When I had first joined the PayGo plan, I had been given one payment option. Period. And it went like this: Once a month, no later than midnight on the renewal date, let us know that you want to renew and for how much. Forget to let us know and we de-activate your account and the balance resets at zero. Even if you renew the very next day.

Well after my most recent teeth-gnashing let-the-date-slip-by, my wife suggested that maybe Rogers has buried something similar deep among its PayGo options – in the same way as Virgin turned out to have just such a plan – and just like Virgin, they just weren’t going to wave signs around in front of their customers promoting the option because… well, because it’s… you know – a service. And convenient. And less stressful… all of those things that make perfect sense to customers but less revenue to the company.

And sure enough, about four layers deep under the main 1200-question FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) directory, there it was: the PayGo Auto Saver Plan. Automatic monthly renewal with no need to call in or confirm online once you’d set the basic plan in place. And no loss of unused balance as each renewal date passed.

My reason for saying good things – despite the layers-deep hunt to find the option – is this: I had to confirm my identity to an honest-to-goodness real person, rather than the recording that takes you through the first ten minutes or so of the “convenient” automated renewal process. And when that honest-to goodness person (named Mark) heard that I’d lost my previous balance due to my having been out of town when the renewal date slid by, he restored it! Just like that.

Oh -- but my “qualified” re the “good things”? The previous night, when I’d tried to enrol in the Auto Saver plan, after those same ten minutes that it took for me to reach the point where I was transferred to an honest-to-goodness person, I was kicked over instead to a recording informing me that their office was closed and no one was available to take my call and I should call during their regular hours of business.

Why, I wondered, could that message not have been put up front? For example, “Welcome to Rogers automated Customer Service hotline. If you’re calling to change your method of billing, please stop now because eventually you will have to speak to a representative and they are only available during regular business hours.” Not ten ferschlugginer minutes after I’d wasted all the time it took to get through all the recorded options to get there, for heaven’s sake.

So thank you Rogers.

I think.

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And finally, a big welcome to the new kid on the Internet, YouTube Canada, which was officially launched in Toronto on November 6.

(Actually, it doesn’t look a whole lot different from YouTube central. But I do confess a twinge of pride at seeing that teeny Canadian flag in the top right corner of the site’s front page.)

Until la prochaine…