TriumphAnt

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.