Jason Cherniak is a Canadian political blogger who not so long ago engaged in a bit of back-and-forth sniping with Warren Kinsella, another Canadian political blogger. In a note about the Dion Liberals’ proposed new tax shift policy that would see a higher “carbon tax” imposed on energy consumption hogs (“but not to worry because other taxes will be reduced so, overall, you won’t feel a thing”), Mr Cherniak wrote:
“One new disagreement seems to be that I support Stéphane Dion's tax shit initiative while Mr. Kinsella pans it without even considering the positive arguments, such as the decrease in other taxes.”
(Hmmm… On second thought, I wonder if Mr Cherniak’s two-word descriptor of Mr Dion’s initiative is an error after all.)
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Fun with the wallowing bureaucracy (Number 4,316 in a never-ending story):
Just when I was thinking that Government of Canada bafflegab cannot possibly get any thicker on the hip-boots-and-a-shovel scale, along comes an office e-mail message to remind me that it's an Olympic year and even the masters of administrivia are making special efforts to set a gold medal standard.
As a government communications worker, I have actually taken various courses from two hours to three days in length offering lessons in how to write effective messages that actually carry meaning. And this one, frankly, could be a seminar all by itself entitled “How NOT to…”
Ask yourself when you hit the end: What in heaven’s name did I just read? Now I don’t consider myself to be a stupid person, but this message is so badly muddled that I could not answer that even IMMEDIATELY after reaching the end when it was theoretically fresh in my mind. Of course, that might just be me, because I honestly begin to mentally glaze right over when I start to encounter phrases like “generate engagement and buy-in” and “enhance our organizational performance through… a culture of sharing”.
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Subject: Creation of a departmental Knowledge Management Community
Importance: High
Following the Executive Management Committee’s endorsement last week of the Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy, we are moving forward with the creation of the departmental KM Community. To that end, we kindly ask that you nominate representatives from your branch to participate in this network.
KM consists of a spectrum of activities. It is about:
* enabling the creation, storage and use of knowledge relevant to our policies and programs through adequate tools and venues;
* managing talent and supporting our people in learning, and in acquiring and transferring knowledge;
* developing mechanisms or processes that enhance our organizational performance through planning, engagement and a culture of sharing.
The KM Community will be key to advance the Department’s KM Strategy. It provides a forum to transfer knowledge, share best practices, identify needs and potential solutions for managing knowledge as well as to mobilize others and generate engagement and buy-in among employees at all levels.
Specifically, the members of the community will be called upon to:
* provide feedback on the overall strategy and its key deliverables (e.g., our Knowledge Portal) at various stages of their development and implementation;
* reflect branch perspectives in ensuring the relevance of the strategy to policy, program and corporate needs and in highlighting what is working, as well as ongoing challenges and emerging pressures;
* champion the KM Strategy among their branch colleagues;
* promote successful implementation and ongoing management of departmental KM initiatives;
* formulate collective recommendations and advice for ADM PCC as the steering committee for the KM strategy; and
* facilitate the coordination and development of synergies among branch activities related to the management of knowledge.
Providing the community with full representation from across the department will be fundamental to its success. In addition, representatives would generally span the spectrum of KM activities, and draw from working levels, support functions, and management.
The network will meet on average on a monthly basis.
Thank you for your support and assistance.
(Signed)
[Name] Senior Assistant Deputy Minister
[and Name] Associate Assistant Deputy Minister
A PS... My sending this to a few equally flummoxed e-mail contacts prompted a reply from another publicly serving friend that it is now a personal career goal to have, one day, a business card identifying him as an "Acting Associate Assistant Deputy Minister".
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And a propos the same topic, my note a couple posts ago about our department’s ridiculously cumbersome and bureaucratic process for assigning spaces in its parking garage drew a response from a regular BD reader (and a relative. Come to think of it, if it weren’t for relatives, the half dozen people left on the ol’ mailing list would be a pretty darned exclusive subscriber list!) It makes it all too clear that 1. the Government of Canada doesn’t have a monopoly on bureaucratic stupidity (In this case, the same stupidity plainly resides in a US state government office.); and 2. misery loves company.
Here, in toto, is the reply I got, with a minor bit of censoring for sensitive eyes:
“Your earlier piece about the parking garage lottery reminded me of one of the funnier displays of bureaucratic, umm, logic at our office. There are about 7 or 8 printers on our floor at work, including two colour printers, a handful of b/w printers, and the MFD, the Multi Function Device, an enormous machine that can copy, print, scan and fax, sometimes at the same time... also physically mixing up pages from a print job with pages from a copy job, which means for each print job, we have to flip through our copies to see if someone else's job is hiding in the pile of paper and coincidentally causes some of us to refer under our breaths to it as the Mother-F***ing Dickhead. It also, of course, staples, punches several choices of hole arrangements, prints one or two sides of the page, collates, reads your fortune, solves the world's energy problems, and makes a damn fine omelet, etc. Anyway, way off in one corner of the floor, there is a much smaller printer/copier that gets heavy use by the people near it. They use it for as much as possible because it's a long walk to the MFD for them. There is a stapling function on that machine, but it was disabled. Our Budget Director asked Management Services (note the word ‘service’ in there) to enable the stapling function. They were loath to do that. Budget Director spent weeks trying to find out why they were loath to do that. Eventually, she got a Management Services person to actually visit our floor so she could physically demonstrate the reasons that the stapler was needed. Management Services person says, ‘But... if we enable the stapler, people will use it.’ Umm, speechless wide-eyed look. Smash forehead to desk.”
(Thanks, Min!)
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And last but by no means least in this thread, the following is a shining example of what, to me, sums up absolutely everything that is wrong with Government of Canada communications products. The name has been included to convict the guilty:
This little block of text appeared in a Letter to the Editor of the May 22 Toronto Star over the signature of Chuck Strahl, Canada’s Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs. In a brief introduction, readers were told the letter was in response to an earlier (May 20) editorial entitled, “Protest message should be heard”:
“Contrary to your assertion, the Conservative government has made significant and tangible progress since February 2006, on all of the issues articulated in the Kelowna Accord. Our strategy is not only credible, but it is practical and focused on results. We are addressing systemic problems so that investments result in measurable improvements in the lives of aboriginal people. We recognize that real change occurs when aboriginal people become active partners in finding solutions."
You can re-read that burst as often as you want, until its weasel words like “tangible progress”, “focused on results”, “active partners” make your ears bleed, but I can pretty well guarantee that no matter how often you do, you will never make it say anything more than, “We show up for work each morning”, because that indeed is what it says.
Problem is, that's all it says.
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Hmmm… I had heard that Apple’s music-by-internet service was good, but…
In addition to having ordered (and actually paid for, which I understand puts me in a statistical minority) a few albums by way of Apple’s mighty iTunes program, I have also used the service to subscribe to several different regularly-updated – and (so far) free – podcasts. One of them is a CBC radio show that I enjoy whenever I get the chance to listen to it – Definitely Not the Opera (DNTO). But since it airs on Saturday afternoon, I am almost always somewhere removed from a radio when it’s on, or running errands so that my contact with a radio – typically in the car – is sporadic at best. So I subscribe to a podcast that weekly plants the most recent edition in my computer’s hard drive.
Apple’s iTunes also has a synch feature that matches my computer’s most recent music / podcast files to my portable iPod. With its “synch” command, I only have to add or delete material from one device – my computer or my iPod – and the “synch” feature automatically reconstitutes one as a mirror of the other, based on the most recent changes.
That being said, the iTunes program is still annoyingly – if not downright scarily – Big Brother-ish. A few days ago, I clicked into my podcast folder and the DNTO file in particular. At about the same moment as I noticed it had not been updated for the past couple weeks, I got an onscreen box informing me that iTunes had cancelled that particular subscription because I had not yet listened to any of the previous half dozen it had sent me!
To its credit, it asked me at the same time if I wanted to resume that particular podcast subscription. But it was a little unsettling to discover that iTunes is monitoring my listening habits that closely. (They do many similar things with the music. Whether I play a song directly from my hard drive or from the iPod, iTunes logs the fact of its being played and stores it on a “Recently played” list. It can also tell me how many times I’ve EVER played a tune.)
The sinister purpose behind all this, of course, is that iTunes is slowly building a musical profile of me. And like Amazon or Chapters do with book titles, whenever I go to the virtual iTunes store, based on the play patterns and music genres I’ve been playing or buying they will actually suggest albums to me for purchase.
If you really want to explore the implications of surveillance – and the above does indeed describe surveillance – more thoroughly, I highly recommend you read this article from Walrus magazine a couple months back. The writer clearly has an agenda – sort of “Would you people please get it into your heads that tacitly accepting this much surveillance in your lives IS NOT A GOOD THING – DAMMIT!” but that aside, it does get you to think of things that you might not previously have considered that represent the ever-increasing encroachment of corporate and government entities into our ever-decreasing privacy.
So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking that it might be a good idea with services like iTunes to search (they also track previous searches), buy or play something so completely out of synch with what I like that it’ll skew their profile statistics. Chapters, to take another example, through their online bookselling juggernaut does the same thing. So they now have a search archive on me that includes my having searched for “Mein Kampf” and “How to Make Teddy Bears at Home”. As for iTunes – well I still haven’t played with their cyber-minds yet but I’m thinking maybe a browse through their inventory of “Gregorian Chant” or “Mime’s Greatest Hits – The CD” might, at the very least, make the cheery onscreen “Hello… we have these albums to suggest to you!” a whole lot more interesting. (I wonder. Could a book about the struggle to make a living as a white-faced street performer in Munich be called “Mime Kampf”?)
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I’m liking my boss more and more these days. Over the past few months, we both have noted an almost alarming increase in the frequency with which we receive requests to do ill-defined, broad topic searches covering many months, if not years, of media coverage, And inevitably, the deadline for delivering a finished report is within, literally, hours. (As a case in point, we were asked, not long ago, to search out any reported comments on the generic topic of “poverty” – from all 300 of the present roster of Members of Parliament, since the present government was first elected – a time frame that now runs to about two years. After some grumping, we managed to get that rather idiotic request narrowed to just the members of an all-Party House of Commons Committee on Poverty.)
In an even more recent example, we were assigned the topic of “non-smokers legislation” and asked to return a report later the same day. My boss pulled me into his office; and there we spent about 15 minutes batting back and forth the main related topics we both recalled as having made it into the media over the past several months. And to my astonishment, as we chatted – tossing up stories like banning smoking in truckers’ cabs; banning smoking in federal prisons, enforcing no-smoking zones at the entrances to federal workplaces, etc, etc – he was writing our recollections into his report. And those notes of his turned out to be our report – no searching whatsoever because there had been no viable amount of search time provided for in the original request.
So we made it up! And it felt GREAT!
(Now to be fair, we were recalling honest-to-goodness themes that we both knew had been covered but typically in such a roll-up we are expected to cite chapter and verse when citing instances of media coverage. So it wasn’t entirely fabricated. But his message, and our report, was: if you don’t give us search time, you don’t get a search. You get a collected memory.)
Last I heard, the report had been gratefully rolled into the broader communications proposal being prepared for the Minister. I don’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed by the parallel revelations that my boss is plainly getting sick and tired of unreasonable requests and that he is willing to give back exactly what it is reasonable to expect in response to just such a request. Even if our citation-free report, to be completely honest, should really have begun with, “Once upon a time…”
Oh… here’s a note in the event the preceding passage is ever stumbled upon by someone in the upper echelons of the federal bureaucracy, especially in (*cough*) my department, who occasionally requests an analysis product to a ridiculously short deadline. The preceding story was told to me by a friend and I’m only repeating it here. I just forgot to add the appropriate quote marks.
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School days, school days…
Facebook has a group of those who attended the same high school I did. On one of its “walls” (message boards), people are invited to reminisce about the good old days… which I guess means different things to different people if these random recollections (a testament to the value of an Ontario high school education, too!) are anything to go by... warts and all, here they are:
“My favorite memory about PDCI was when I got taken out of the school in handcuffs just as the final bell rang so i had most of the school staring at me, but that was what made this a favorite it was the rumors about why I got taken out of the school in handcuffs. Rumors like I punch the princable in the face, I rolled a joint in class and there was many other I just can't remeber them all but I remeber from that day on I was know as the guy the punch the princable and what made it great was that the name stuck for years”
“people bringing dead animals to the parking lot and throwing them on other cars was always a good laugh”
“50 foot penis on the football field”
“OMG! I TOTALLY Remember that! And Mr. Coldrey's crazy eyebrows that stuck out.. And his breath stank. Aha.. And he always tried te seperate us. And it never worked.. OMG! And he gave me an in-schol for being late so many times. Lol.. I'm sure it was probably never my fault. Lol.. But still.. A-hole.. :P It's sad to say that he was one of my favorite teachers.. Only cuz he was a pushover.. And he wasn't even in the yearbook.. I was kinda pissed.. Meh.. Whatever..”
Apparently, these are some of the people whose employment income deductions eventually are going to help pay for my retirement. I need to think about that for a while.
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And finally, just in case you’ve been thinking that things are getting pretty boring around here, well brace yourself. Because over the summer I’m going to be gearing up (literally – by which I mean “acquiring gear”) in preparation for learning how to do something I have never done before – ride this:
I confess it’s something that has been recently shifting from the back of my mind to my frontal lobes, and frankly I think Leslie must just have got tired of hearing me mumble in a “What if...?” kind of way because she finally called my bluff as this year’s birthday rolled around. What I got to unwrap this year was a miniature Harley Davidson, which came with the promise that she and offspring’ll front most of the cost of a real set of motorized wheels (not a Harley, but a pretty damned fine machine nonetheless) if I get the training and make room for it in the garage. (Now I’m not entirely sure whether her motive is not simply to get me to clean the garage, but neither am I going to press the issue too hard. What I’m going to press is a push broom.)
I’m already signed up for the Ottawa Safety Council’s novice rider’s course the first week of September. I have a good friend who’s the current head of the Ottawa Triumph Riders Club and who has given me all sorts of great advice – including the key one that steered me to this particular machine. And I’m presently shaking hands with the Ministry of Transport road rules for motorcycles. Step 1 is passing the written exam.
Meanwhile, I’m moving Meat Loaf’s song, “Bat Out of Hell”, a little farther down the ol’ iPod playlist:
“I can see myself
Tearing up the road
Faster than any other boy has ever gone
And my skin is rough but my soul is ripe
And no one’s gonna stop me now
I gotta make my escape
But I can’t stop thinking of you
And I never see the sudden curve until its way too late
I never see the sudden curve until its way too late
Then I’m dying on the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun
Torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike
And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell
And the last thing I see is my heart
Still beating
Breaking out of my body
And flying away
Like a bat out of hell.”
...and I’m moving oh... maybe someone who covers The Beach Boys up to the top:
“It’s not a big motorcycle
Just a groovy little motorbike
It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys
That two-wheeled bike
We’ll ride on out of the town
To any place I know you like
First gear (Honda Honda) it’s alright (faster faster)
Second gear (little Honda Honda) I lean right (faster faster)
Third gear (Honda Honda) hang on tight (faster faster)
Faster... it’s alright
It climbs the hills like a matchless
Cause my Honda’s built really light
When I go into the turns
Lean with me and hang on tight
I better turn on the lights
So we can ride my Honda tonight.”
I’ll keep you posted.
A la next time.
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