This story needs a headline like, “If you set out to write a satire about how stupid Canada Post can be, you couldn’t create a funnier sketch than this item”. It was on the Ottawa CBC-TV local newscasts on January 19.


A Gatineau couple finally noticed that for several weeks, they had received no mail delivery at their home. The family missuz walked down to the nearest postal station and asked if there had been some error about their address. The counter person they spoke to checked and said, nope, no error. He told them that because their entire driveway was covered over with a “Tempo” – a temporary plastic car shelter built on a tubular aluminum frame – the letter carrier refused to walk through it to their mailbox.


(PHOTO: CBC Ottawa) Now to be a little fair to Canada Post, in 2007 a local woman had made the Wile E Coyote-like decision to remove a huge build-up of snow from her Tempo – by standing inside it and trying to force the roof upwards to cause the snow to slide off. Sadly, she succeeded only in bursting the plastic, instantly weakening the entire structure. She died when it collapsed on her.

But that’s where fairness to Canada Post ends with this story. As the reporter demonstrated, this particular Tempo was actually on one half of a driveway shared with a neighbour and by the simple expedient of walking up the neighbour’s side, the reporter arrived midway between both homes’ doorways – with both mailboxes equally reachable.

Canada Post, however, stood their policy ground and the couple with the Tempo decided it wasn’t worth a fight. So they added a sidewall board at the front end of its frame and simply bolted their mailbox to the board. Mail delivery problem solved.

The “too funny to be true” part of this story comes from two add-ons. First, the neighbour with whom they shared the driveway just happened to be a Canada Post letter carrier and he said he’d never heard of the policy barring his unionized brothers and sisters from walking through a Tempo to get to a mailbox – a policy that the reporter said Canada Post was vigorously citing in this case. Then, probably realizing he was about to be quoted contravening something his employer was saying, he backpedalled a bit and said, “Maybe it's different because I work on the Ontario side, but that's new to me.”

Uh huh – different provincial delivery policies for a national corporation’s letter carriers? I don’t think so.

But my amusement turned into hilarity when the husband told the reporter that his wife asked the counter person just when Canada Post was planning to tell them that their residential mail delivery had been stopped. With a weary look of stupefied resignation, the husband looked at the reporter, “And do you know what he said to her? He said, ‘We did tell you. Didn’t you get our letter?’”

= = =

Wanna know why public servants are depressed?

The Ottawa Citizen recently ran an article documenting a soaring number of cases of clinical depression and prolonged stress-related sick leaves in the federal public service. In the wake of the January 19th cabinet shuffle that saw Lisa Raitt given a new portfolio – Labour Minister – news watchers were told by almost everyone that the appointment was, for her, a huge step backwards.

Just imagine yourself as a public servant toiling away in the bowels of Phase II, Place du Portage, Gatineau, Quebec (where the Labour Department’s bureaucracy resides), and here’s what you read about the importance of your Department in the federal hierarchy:

“Shuffle demotes high-flyer who catapulted right into cabinet in 2008” (Canadian Press headline, January 19)

And this, in the following day’s Toronto Star: “Did one goof too many cost Lisa Raitt senior post?”

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper pushed the pause button on Lisa Raitt's once-soaring political career after the rookie GTA politician proved a magnet for controversy as natural resources minister... In Tuesday's cabinet shuffle, Raitt was moved out of natural resources – a post she got just weeks after winning a seat in Halton in October 2008 – and handed the low-profile job of labour minister. Harper denied Raitt was being demoted and suggested the cabinet move was not a fatal career blow – just a timeout. ‘Lisa Raitt is a minister who has shown a remarkable grasp of complex files,’ Harper said. ‘I think she has a great future. I think this move will give her a little more varied experience in government.’”

In other words, the generally-expressed analysis has your brand new Minister being given this job essentially because she needed to be consigned to a stool in the corner of the classroom with a dunce cap on. At least for a while. (Harper, by the way, was pretty much the only person around who had anything positive to say about Ms Raitt’s new job. Of course, he had to. He gave it to her!)

But as a Labour bureaucrat, how would you feel about even bothering to get up and going to work the next morning? Good luck whipping up any enthusiasm when you’ve just been told that you’re working in the Government of Canada’s version of Botany Bay in the 18th century – a penal colony as far removed from “civilization” as you could possibly find yourself at the time without actually leaving the planet. Good bye to any desire to do your job well. Why even bother when the government doesn’t give a flying fig about what you’re doing? Good bye to loyalty. Why hitch yourself to a leader who’s had her life jacket taken away and replaced with an anchor?

If it were up to me, I would sack a Minister whom I deemed no longer worthy of holding an important profile. You’d like to think that a Prime Minister’s responsibility is not to cheapen the work of any sphere of responsibility sufficiently important to be a Ministry. But not this Prime Minister. And I would bring in someone new – even try to cajole someone to cross the floor. (It’s not like that hasn’t happened before and I’m looking at you, Belinda Stronach.)

When you’ve effectively hamstrung a cabinet minister as “damaged goods”, it’s a slap in the face to any department’s bureaucracy to shunt that minister into any other such job for what the whole Canadian political world says is a “time out”.

= = =

Haiti.


(PHOTO: ABC-TV, Australia) As I write this, the earthquake is nine days ago; and the most heavily damaged areas of the country are beginning to suffer isolated but fierce outbreaks of the anarchy of the desperate. If you’ve seen the Cecil B DeMille movie, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, you might recall that one of its most famous scenes is the catastrophic train wreck that happens when one circus train rams into the back of another, which had stopped unexpectedly on the same track.

The collision is awesome in its staging and seems almost to be occurring in slow motion as rail cars are ploughed off the track and driven into an adjoining field, enormous steel beams spear through a passenger compartment and the wildlife cages are exploded into kindling, freeing many of the animals, including the big cats. The unstoppable momentum of the following locomotive reduces much of the circus’s material structure to rubble, badly injuring many of its performers in the process. (If your computer's video card lets you play You Tube clips, it's here. But I digress.)

I have thought of that collision often in the past few days as the coverage of the earthquake’s aftermath gets harder and harder to watch. Yesterday’s CBC-TV coverage, for example, included a report from Paul Hunter in Port-au-Prince and Mr Hunter was clearly on the verge of being emotionally overwhelmed by what was happening around him. He focused on an emergency hospital that was simply out of supplies, yet crowded with badly injured victims who had received no treatment whatsoever in eight days. “There are people dying in front of me!” he cried. He pointed out that this field hospital was no more than 200 metres from an airport jammed with planeloads of relief supplies and interjected a demand into his own report to the authorities to please get the aid flowing.

Much of Haiti’s western region today is like De Mille’s ruined circus trains. But that’s where fiction and reality part ways. De Mille’s plucky troupe of wounded performers manage to cobble together a show, and parade into town with makeshift animal cages, patched up costumes and, in some cases, performers, and-oh-by-gosh-golly they put on a show!


(PHOTO: Not Haiti. Following The Greatest Show on Earth’s train wreck, as injured circus boss Charlton Heston is being treated amidst the rubble of two wrecked trains, he and several of the troupe’s performers agree that the three-rings’ sawdust coursing through their veins demands that the show must go on.)

Sadly, Haiti’s wounds are not Hollywood staging; and its desolate victims are not driven by any such “show must go on” mentality. They are driven – and driven more desperately with each passing day – by the most basic of instincts: simply to stay alive. And in more and more cases, the foreign aid delivery system is ramping up too slowly – so many injured or starving Haitians are no longer capable of managing even that. Today’s news finally tells us that the port in Port-au-Prince has been sufficiently cleared to allow ships to dock, so aid is beginning to arrive by the shipload in addition to the 130 or so daily flights the airport is capable of handling. But getting it off the docks and out to the population is happening too slowly. Too slowly. Too slow.

I don’t have a solution. But there are good and well-intentioned people in-country as I write this. Agencies like the Red Cross are doing what agencies like the Red Cross do best – providing basic emergency shelter, first-aid, water and food needs to as many people as they can reach. Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders has teams that are operating literally under canvas in the street – a fictitious M*A*S*H episode recreated in the fearsome reality of a world crumbled into ruin. Amputations of crushed limbs, the news reports grimly tell us, are far and away the most frequently repeated procedures.

Pick your cause, but please pick a cause. I mentioned the two above because it’s my blog and those are two to whom have I sent money. There are many other good agencies out there. I would ignore the Billy Graham Crusade and other like-minded churches who see the quake as an opportunity to flood the country with missionaries. You can’t eat bibles and despite the power of that book’s message (at least in the right hands), bibles make lousy building materials.

Oh, and send money. Not shoes or clothing you’re done with. Not canned food that’s been sitting in your pantry for a few weeks. The most effective help right now is people with specific emergency skills, and the equipment and supplies they need to do their jobs. Getting them there is expensive but collectively, they are what Haiti needs at the moment. So send money to one or two. Every little bit helps and some agencies have already collected an astonishingly large number of “little bits”. It’s not such a big planet and one of our neighbours is hurting badly.

Thanks a bunch.

À la next time.

PS... I just did a quick roll back through the most recent entries and saw that in the post before I said good bye to my father-in-law, I promised some notes about a long weekend spent in Chicago. That’s what I’ll do next time.

I suppose since we’re still under a month into 2010, a Duck-wide “Happy New Year!” wish is still apropos. Consider it wished. Heartily.

Some random bits to enter the last year of the new millennium’s first decade. (And don’t let anyone tell you different. Count the first ten numbers – beginning with “one” -- out loud. Is the last number you say nine or ten? Same thing with the first decade of the 2000s. It ends one second after December 31, 2010 at 23:59:59. The second decade begins one second later when the Times Square ball is still rattling into its settled position at the base of the pole after having launched 2011. OK? But I digress.)

--

Mike and Leslie’s rules for being Canadian. Begun after several days of minorly depressing news stories and some head-shakingly obvious sentences on evening neighbourhood walkabouts. (And to all the hordes of BD readers – please feel free to augment these with any you feel appropriate.)

-- Don’t snowmobile across a surface that, in summer, spring and fall, is open water. Canada has enough land you can use without having to become a statistic in a news story that always seems to include a line like, “Searchers followed the snowmobile tracks across the surface of a lake on often dangerously thin ice until they ended at a large hole. The search has now become a recovery.”

Corollary. Don’t snowmobile at night. The related news story usually ends similarly, but inevitably includes more grisly descriptions like “was decapitated by a barbed wire fence”, or “was crushed when he rocketed out onto a lumber road directly into the path of a logging truck”.


-- Don’t ski off the marked trails in avalanche country. For that matter, don’t ski in avalanche country. Period. In fact, for that matter, don’t ski, snowmobile, snowboard and probably don’t even snowshoe in avalanche country.

-- To quote a Facebook friend, you’re courting trouble when a description of your hobbies and interests uses the words “tiger” and “pet” in the same sentence. So don’t keep a tiger as a pet. Especially when they’ve fully grown and lost all the cute kitten-ness. Keep in mind that some particulars about tigers include: adult weight can be as much as 600 pounds; their claws can reach five inches in length; their canine teeth can run two-and-a-half to three inches long; they eat raw meat and they use the aforementioned teeth and claws not only to kill the sources of their raw meat, but also to rip it into bite-sized chunks. As an aside, searching for information about tiger’s teeth led me to one of the all-time stupidest answers I’ve ever seen in answer to someone’s having asked, “How long are a tiger’s teeth?” Here’s what a website called WikiAnswers responded: “Well since the tiger is an animal that would depend on the size of the tiger, but if it were a rodent (such as rats, mice, hampsters [sic], squirrels) the teeth would never stop growing.”

That’ll do for starters. Like I said, feel free to send me other good Canadian rules that seem appallingly sensible but always seem to need re-issuing at least annually.

--

In the long gap since my last post here, I’ve been dabbling about on Facebook, which is going to receive no further “What is it?” explanation here. If you don’t know what it is by now, you’re probably not reading blogs either.

But lately I’ve also wondered about the merits of the micro-bloggery that is Twitter and have come to the conclusion that “tweeting” is one social medium I can do without – for now anyway – as a receiver / reader, and as a sender / writer will not be inflicting my “tweets” on others any time soon.

I honestly have not yet been able to find much good said about the brave new medium that lets you communicate 140 characters at a time. So far in my reading, it has garnered far more publicity for its lavishly shallow misuse by vacuous celebrities who seem to have assumed people genuinely care when they’re about to soap their groins in the shower or mix a high fibre cereal with granola for breakfast. (Of course, this cranking on my part could also all just be attributable to my wondering how in hell anyone can say anything useful in 140 characters or less!)

But the swiftness with which Facebook exchanges get relegated to the site’s deep archives even leaves me wondering how well spent is Facebook time. Bottom line? It’s mostly fun. As for being a medium of social good, at this writing I’m genuinely interested in seeing how much of a force for change “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” will become – at the moment it's over 200,000 and still growing. If it serves only to give pause for thought to the moronic brains trust advising the Prime Minister before they unveil their next “position him as a decisive leader” stratagem, then it will have done a good thing.

--

Leslie and I both think we’re getting to the point – well short of curmudgeonly, but well past “Oh well, that’s alright then” – when we won’t just tolerate it when the quality of a service (or the lack of same) falls short of what we both agree are perfectly reasonable expectations. At least when we talk about them, they don’t seem the least bit unreasonable.

Here’s a recent example of an experience of hers that prompted its addition to our growing list of related examples.

At the car dealership where we get our car serviced, they have a not-too-badly-appointed cafeteria where, customers are told, they will find complimentary coffee while they are waiting either for the free shuttle van to take them to work, or if it’s a fairly short-term repair job, while waiting for the work to be finished. Leslie was waiting for the shuttle when she decided to take advantage of the offer. But when she arrived in the cafeteria, there was no one at the counter to serve the beverage happily giving off steam from the carafe into which it had just been brewed.


(PHOTO: www.happyworker.com) So she helped herself and just as she was finishing, sure enough, the counter attendant returned. Sensing that he was waiting for her to offer payment, she smiled and said she was waiting for the shuttle and had decided to accept one of the dealer’s free coffees. The attendant looked at the styrofoam cup she was holding and said, “It’s only small coffees that are free.” (Leslie apparently had poured herself a “medium”.)

Without missing a beat, Leslie said, “OK, I’ll just pour it into this,” as she reached for an officially “small” cup.

The attendant opted for the better part of valour and, after thinking about it, “generously” told her she could keep the cup she had, adding by way of explanation, “Oh that’s OK; after all, I wasn’t here to serve you when you wanted your coffee so don’t worry about it.”

From such small events are great discussions born and, when she described this, it launched us into a conversation about the nature of that particular service, and how few options were obviously within the decision-making authority range of the attendant that made it necessary for him to admonish her in the first place.

But it’s not just something that happened at our car dealer on this one day.

More and more, it’s damned near everywhere. If you are seeking a service that even slightly deviates from what a staff person has been told is allowable, you’ll get an argument either about why they won’t provide that service, or worse, why you shouldn’t even expect it. And in almost every single encounter, it’s a tiresome variation on “Because we can’t do that”. And of course they can. It’s just that they won’t. If you probe deeper, you may get the staffer to admit that he was told not to.

It’s not the “only small coffee is free” nonsense that I’m ranting about here. This particular dealership has just built a huge new flagship sales and service centre that is much farther removed from the downtown area of Ottawa than its previous home was. But they are selling a popular car and therefore probably are moving hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory out the door in any given month. Add the huge profit intake of their vast new service floor and you tell us that you still have to have some hapless cafeteria attendant enforce a policy that requires you to make sure customers are aware that only the small coffee is free? And to tell them when they are in violation of that policy? That’s not even an issue of nickel-and-diming. It’s pennying!

As a last straw, Leslie noted they have a battered Styrofoam “Tips” cup sitting by the cash. She said she was able to restrain herself from asking the attendant “What’s 15% of free?” I’m not sure I could have held myself back. (Don’t get me going on the “Tips” cup and the astonishing range of locations in which it is turning up. That’s a separate rant for a different day.)

= = =

And what’s a Baby Duck without a “bafflegab” rail?

Here are two of several paragraphs in a message I received recently at work from our senior admin people, introducing our "champions and co-champions". Exactly as received. For best effect, read it out loud.

“Champions and Co-Champions are senior executives who, in addition to carrying out their regular responsibilities, drive progress on cross-cutting departmental objectives. They enhance our capacity to reach out, engage employees, advance our thinking and take action in various areas. They are enablers of an organizational culture founded on renewal and excellence.

Their focus is on horizontal initiatives related to people, communities of practice and other priorities across the three business lines. Fundamentally, they contribute to sustaining and strengthening a high performing organization by facilitating initiatives that cross departmental branches and regions. The list has been integrated to reflect the mandate of the champions across all business lines and to strengthen and broaden the scope of each mandate to be more inclusive of issues important to our Department.”

Now, close your eyes, think about what you just read – hopefully aloud – for a second or two. Hey, take a week. OK, now answer this question: “What in hell does that mean?” If you can come up with an answer (other than “Your department is administered by hopelessly self-absorbed bureaucrats who should have their Dilbert comic collections – because they fail to recognize the strip as humour – forcefully prised from their grubby hands.”), you’re a better person than I.

But I will admit my mind still goes to weird places whenever I read “horizontal initiatives” in any review of management priorities. It sounds... unclean.

And speaking of things that sound dirty, but aren’t, not so long ago I was introduced to a couple kitchen-y terms that harbour the potential for being, in the literary hands of a less scrupulous occasional blogger than I, ripe for misuse. The first, I added to our implement drawer when I saw it used at a coffee shop to pat espresso coffee down into its holder before clicking the espresso holder into the machine. I have a home espresso machine and I try to replicate the flavour of machines costing bazillions of dollars more. The device in question, it turns out, is also mainly designed to press pastry dough into tart trays when you’re home baking. It’s called a tart tamper. To my mind, that could also be a great name for an aphrodisiac.


(PHOTO: www.foxgig.com) And to counter it, well, this one comes from my own mother, no less, who was describing a method of cooking whole chicken that apparently speeds the process up somewhat and helps it cook more evenly, especially on a grille. What you do is remove the bird’s backbone and butterfly it. It’s supposed to be a great alternative to rotisserie cooking. The process of preparing a chicken this way is called spatchcocking.

Which sounds to me like something that might happen to some guy who was attempting to tamper a tart who did not want to be tampered.

And it sounds like it would hurt.

A lot.

Until la prochaine.