TriumphAnt

Happy New Year! Let’s get right to the whining.

So I guess I can no longer claim that there’s not a discriminatory bone in my body. Because in two recent supposedly anti-discriminatory judicial rulings in this country, I have to confess I’m kind of leaning away from what might at first glance seem to be the “thing to do” and more towards the highly subjective, “right thing to do”. In both cases.

Case 1:
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal recently issued a new ruling that the federal government has been “discriminating against” a group of federally employed nurses for more than 30 years. The ruling found that these particular nurses, who determine eligibility for Canada Pension Plan disability benefits, perform essentially the same work as doctors who are paid twice as much, a “discriminatory practice” the Tribunal says has existed since 1972.

Me, I tend to side with a follow-on editorial that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen a couple days later (December 21). The writer blasted the Tribunal’s decision, characterizing it as a “mindlessly applied” interpretation of pay equity policy. “Hundreds of nurses worked for 35 years in the belief they were nurses. Turns out they were doctors. Who knew?” In effect, the writer argued the Tribunal has built its case on entirely the wrong foundation. Contrary to the Tribunal’s ruling that the nurses were paid less “because most of them were women”, the editorialist argued that “doctors were overqualified for the assessment work in the first place, and shouldn’t have earned the money they did.” “That nursing generally pays less than doctoring makes sense,” added the editorialist.

Hear hear.

Case 2:
The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal recently ruled against an Ottawa company, ADGA Group Consultants Inc, and decided the company had “discriminated” when it fired a man with bipolar disorder. (The company had argued that it fired the man not because of his disability, but rather because he “was not capable of performing the essential functions of the job for which he had been hired”.) The adjudicator, however, ruled that ADGA “did not, as required, make a significant effort to accommodate [the man] or properly assess the situation to determine whether it could accommodate [his] disability without ‘undue hardship’”.

For me the kicker is what the company does. From their own website:

“ADGA is experienced in task-based delivery of services and can easily respond to a wide variety of client needs. ADGA performs system development and maintenance services in a variety of fields: client/server desktops, command and control, communications security, InfoSEC, weapon systems,…”

Weapon systems.

They make software that governs the computer-controlled firing of artillery under a Department of National Defence contract, and the guy that was fired was in part responsible for testing that software.

I looked up “bipolar disorder”. The National Institute of Mental Health’s own website defines it thusly: “depressive disorder in which a person alternates between episodes of major depression and mania (periods of abnormally and persistently elevated mood). Also referred to as manic-depression.”

So with all due respect to the sufferer of bipolar disorder, in this case I for one do not feel that firing you from a job in which you can affect the landing spot of an artillery shell after it leaves the barrel of a very large gun was discriminatory.

It was good sense.

… Must… resist… “fired”… puns…

(Obviously, he just wasn’t the right calibre of employee for that post.)

Sorry.

= =

I think I expect too much.

Ottawa at the moment is in the throes of one of the heaviest-snowfall winters we’ve had for some time. December, in fact, set a record for the most snow since the people who measure snowfall began keeping track of that sort of thing. And our local hardware stores – without exception – ran out of snow shovels.

Now I’m not talking Gus’s General Store and Hammers, here. I’m talking Canadian Tire, Home Depot, Rona… and not just one store – the entire chains in the National Capital Region. It actually made the news. They ran out of snow shovels.

In December.

As for me, I set aside my snow shovel when the snow gets deep enough to justify firing up my snowblower. And that has already happened about five times this year. (By way of contrast, last year, I fired it up once. I barely touched my one gallon gas can. This year, I’m already down to about one or, at best, two clearings way from having to go and refill my gas can.)

One recent day, while both my neighbour and I were clearing our respective driveways, he waved and pointed to the front end of my blower. I cut the engine back to idle, and heard him say, “The right augur isn’t turning.”

Here’s what he meant: Each half of a typical heavy-duty snowblower’s augur is linked to the drive shaft by something called a shear bolt. A shear bolt is actually, despite the minor frustration it can trigger, a wonderfully useful device. It’s a bolt with a nut on the end. But it’s a bolt that has been deliberately machined to snap under severe pressure. On a snowblower, it passes through the augur axle and the drive shaft and is secured by the nut.


But here’s the catch. If you’re happily grinding away through your most recent snowfall and should happen to encounter something that might jam the machine – like, say, a small boulder of rock-solid ice the street plow pushed into your driveway – the shear bolt will fulfill its title, and it will shear. Both its head and its nut will snap off and that half of the augur will simply turn freely on the shaft, no longer being powered by the motor and drive shaft. What this does is stop the obstruction from jamming the augur and tearing the motor apart under the stress – the fixing of which would require an enormous repair bill.

(The same principle is used on a motorboat’s outboard motor propellor if it should be fouled by excessively thick weeds. The shear pin will snap, leaving the propellor to turn freely, or simply stop while the drive shaft whirls happily away – driving nothing, but neither is it burning out the motor.)

At home, we also have shear pins on our tilt windows, oddly enough. A good part of our windows’ tilt mechanisms resides in their frames and damaging one would require tearing out the entire window, frame and all, to repair it. So the shear pin snaps before any significant stress is place on other parts of the mechanism. (Unfortunately, the designers of this particular line of windows have set the “significant stress” bar really low and the pins in our windows seem to shear if you so much as brush them with a Swiffer duster. But I digress.)

So all that background was to tell you (and of course, to whine about) this: I also discovered that Ottawa’s hardware stores, the same ones that ran out of snow shovels in December, had also run out of snowblower shear bolts.

In December.

In a moment of unintended hilarity, I actually had one helpful clerk in a Home Depot store escort me all the way to the “Seasonal” shelves and point out to an empty wall hook. “That’s where they’d be. But we’re out.” Helpful, that. At least I know where to look the next time they’re likely to be in stock. In August.

(Fret not, Ducklings. The manufacturer thoughtfully provided a replacement shear bolt with the snowblower when I bought it. So I didn’t have to go without. But now I want to replace the replacement, so the next time one shears, I won’t be without one. And that’s where their present absence from Ottawa store shelves grates a bit.)

My wife is more tolerant than am I. When I told her this story, she pointed out that the storms we’ve suffered this winter have dropped a completely unexpected amount of snow on us. Last year, in fact, it was mid-January before we got any snow at all. So she reasoned that if they based their Winter 2007-08 orders on the Winter of 2006-07, then it’s no wonder they blew through their snow removal supplies so quickly.

I however, take a different view. Last year was the odd one. While I will grant that this year is atypical in the other direction – more snow than usual – Ottawa / snow / December historically really do go together. And to make it doubly maddening, had I been shopping for barbecue or gardening supplies, I noticed they were stocked to the rafters! In the spaces normally occupied by snow shovels, I guess.

One-offs

* 1. Add me to the list of people who are really, really, really disgusted with the folks who make Tide detergent for co-opting jazzman Vince Guaraldi’s lovely little “Linus and Lucy” theme from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to use as the music in one of their recent commercials. And if there’s no such list, well, then call this its start.

* 2. There is nothing that will make you discover faster just how much of the inside of a city bus is made of metal than to board one and sit down on a day when the wind chill is minus 30 and the bus has a broken heater. And if ever a driver had a legitimate claim about unsafe working conditions, it was the hapless chauffeur of our frozen bus on that especially frigid day. At least the rest of us shivering passengers were dressed for the weather, but I don’t think he left home anticipating having to spend a significant portion of his working day in an “office” quite that cold.

* 3. Santa brought me an Apple iPod for Christmas. I’m in the process of building its music inventory and I am boggled by how much memory capacity resides in such a comparatively small space. But more about that in a future jotting. For the one-off, here’s my point. Apple is the Toyota of the mp3 business.

They have a simple and remarkably effective business plan: “Here’s our product; here’s its price. Wait for a sale? Won’t happen. And if you don’t buy it, well there’s a whole bunch of people a scant few hours behind you, if not actually standing behind you in line while you ponder, who will happily snap it up if you decide to pass. Take it or leave it. And because we are Apple, we will also price our accessories accordingly, putting exactly none of them in the box with the product and making you buy any and all of them separately, and at our prices."

Accessories like a protective, shock-absorbing silicon Apple “skin”, for example. (Here at the electronics store, it’s $35.00. And guess what? The only one we have left is silver with a pretty little snowflake motif. Take it or leave it. The princess behind you in line is already eyeing its perfect match to her hair barrettes.)

Well guess what, Apple? Loblaws photo processing shop has a large wall display of Belkin and Lowepro digital camera bags. They’re made of ballistic nylon, complete with zip pouches, shoulder straps and belt loops. Many adult colours to choose from. And because digital cameras are getting really teeny these days…, well, for a bag perfectly sized to the iPod? $12.99. Ka-ching.

I gotcher "Apple skin" right here.

Until la prochaine.