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I just wasted my vote in the 2024 British Columbia provincial general election

Oct 13th, 2024
by Craig.
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Vote with an x.

Vote (cropped, Alan Cleaver CC BY 2.0).

Yesterday I went to the District Electoral Office in my area and voted in an advance poll. I did it there and early because I expected an issue with my ID, but thankfully I didn’t have one. (At least that part of the provincial government was working properly, as opposed to the part responsible for my ID.) Anyway, since we’re still using the FPTP voting system inherited from middle ages England, I knew that my vote would be wasted because I voted for the Green Party headed by Sonia Furstenau instead of one of the two main parties, one of which is headed by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist.

But oh well. I’ll just consider myself on the vanguard of proportional representation in a province that has its head buried firmly in its ass, having rejected PR in two referenda!

Posted in: Opinion.
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London Drugs have lost all credibility … and my business

Sep 26th, 2024
by Craig.
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London Drugs logo.It is ironic, and coincidental, that my last post — six months ago — was about London Drugs, and now it is again!

Anyone who lives in this area knows London Drugs. They’ve been around for decades, almost a century actually. They were a great place to get all sorts of stuff except your meat and vegetables, but especially electronics, foreign (especially British) chocolate bars and candies and (in the old days) get your film developed and photographs printed. But like I said in my last post, NO MORE! I considered my issue with their sub-par passport photos to be a one-off, niche problem that could easily be avoided, and I still planned to (and did) patronise them for other goods. Until yesterday.

Until 2019 I had my drug prescriptions with London Drugs, since they were almost right next door to me, but in that year I moved and there wasn’t a London Drugs near me so I transferred my prescriptions to a nearby Shoppers Drug Mart. Then I moved again, and the situation with the proximity of LD and Shoppers was the same.

Then this year it turned out that Shoppers and Loblaws were mistreating their pharmacists and over-billing the Ontario government. I’m not a big fan of dishonesty, theft and slavery, so I decided that I’d move back to London Drugs, despite the extra drive. Yesterday I went to LD to do just that, and fill a new prescription. After several minutes of the LD employee typing out my biography on her computer, she then informed me that my prescription would be ready in an hour and a half! Excuse me?! Did you say an hour and a half?! At Shoppers I generally have to wait ten minutes, if that, and in that time I usually wander around the store and pick up a chocolate bar or two, so their making me wait for just a few minutes is actually good (ironically) for their business! I don’t expect instant service, but come on, ten minutes isn’t a big deal but ninety minutes is!

So I told this LD employee all of that, and she claimed that the pharmacist was busy and that the best they could do was an hour. So I took back my prescription and said I would return to Shoppers and get it filled there. Which I did, only to have Shoppers — the same Shoppers I’ve been using for the last year and which previously filled prescriptions in ten minutes — tell me it would take half an hour! By this time, of course, I’m done fighting The System for the day, so I said, “Whatever. I’ll probably be back tomorrow, or next week.” I then left.

So I’m still unhappy with SDM, but I’ll look into other alternatives for my next prescription. (I think there’s a Pharmasave in the area.) But now I’m done with London Drugs completely. I even gave away an LD gift card I had until a few minutes ago. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t like to make two trips to accomplish one activity, especially when I’m burning fuel to do so! If all their fucking surveys and consumer focus groups don’t tell them that, then they deserve to go out of business!

This is the problem with reading/watching/listening to the news. If I didn’t, I’d have never known about the Shoppers/Loblaws dishonesty and I’d still be dealing with them.

Here’s more information about the way Loblaws/Shoppers are treating pharmacists and scamming taxpayers, from Wikipedia as of today:

In 2024, Shoppers Drug Mart was criticized for enacting sales quotas on pharmacists for MedsCheck, a government sponsored program in Ontario. MedsCheck reimburses healthcare providers for medication reviews, allowing for a maximum billing of $75 per patient, which led to the profitability of enacting sales targets. CBC News reported that approximately 1.4 million dollars was billed to the province for a week in February 2024. A class action lawsuit was filed against the company in regards to these quotas.

And here’s a full list of Loblaws’ stores — just in case, you know, you thought you should stop doing business with less honest companies — also from Wikipedia:

    • Dominion Stores
    • Extra Foods
    • Fortinos
    • Freshmart
    • Maxi
    • No Frills
    • No Name
    • President’s Choice
    • President’s Choice Financial
    • Provigo
    • Real Atlantic Superstore
    • Real Canadian Liquorstore
    • Real Canadian Superstore
    • Shoppers Drug Mart / Pharmaprix
    • SuperValu
    • T&T Supermarket
    • Valu-mart
    • Your Independent Grocer
    • Zehrs Markets

And here’s information about a May 2024 boycott of Loblaws, and other Loblaw controversies, including taking millions of dollars from the federal government … while, of course, not lowering prices but continuing to pad executive salaries!

Posted in: Opinion.
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IDstation and London Drugs passport photos

Mar 8th, 2024
by Craig.
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IDstation logo.

IDstation logo

I have had passport photos taken at London Drugs for years, but no more.

Turns out they are an agent of IDstation, to whom I was referred by the passport agency of one of the countries of which I am a citizen, who are advanced enough (unlike Canada) to take passport applications online. Great! So off I go to the nearest London Drugs to get my picture taken.

After waiting in line for a while I was finally served. I stated my reason for being there and confirmed that they used the IDstation service/system. They did, and then there was a lot of faffing around while they — three of them! — consulted the passport-photo requirements for my country … because, you know, they’re all so different! (According to the blurb at digitalphotosystems.nl, “Photomatic software is being used on many systems all over the world for passport photos …. Photomatic software automatically processes any image into a perfect passport photo. … The passport photo is checked on all official requirements for passport photos, as specified by the ICAO …. The ICAO check is a very important part of the Photomatic software because it will make sure the passport photo will not be rejected when used in offical [sic] applications for a passport, driving license of Visa. [sic]”) They eventually determined that the passport authorities for a number of countries (including mine) had recently been rejecting their passport photos, so they only agreed to taking my picture if I agreed to waive their guarantee, about which you can read on their website. (No surprise there, considering how bad the photo was!) Being the idiot I am, and with no other reasonable choice given my time constraints that day, I agreed. I mean, how hard can it be to fuck up a passport photo?! The people who had their photos rejected probably did something wrong that I won’t do.

London Drugs passport photo receipt.

London Drugs passport photo receipt

But since they were refusing to give me their guarantee (see scan of London Drugs receipt, across the top of which is handwritten, “Xxxx passport online Not gaurenteed [sic]”), and since they were presumably more adept at taking photos for Canadian passports, I decided to get photos for my Canadian passport taken as well, since it also expires in the near future. Looking back at the two pictures now, they’re like night and day! The Canadian passport photos would almost certainly have been accepted by the other country, but said country doesn’t accept scanned pictures, only the original JPEGs.

Anyway, when I submitted the JPEG to the other country’s passport office they rejected it because the “camera was too close”. With the benefit of hindsight I can now see that, as the requirement on their website is, “The photo must capture your image from head to mid torso.” (The Canadian one does.) The photo that London Drugs took barely took in my neck! If someone who takes passport photos all day can’t detect that error immediately they should be fired!

On the IDstation website they have a “File a complaint” option. I suppose they must get a lot of complaints! The problem is that the free-text field where you are supposed to describe your complaint severely limits how much text you can type (I can assure you that this blog post is far longer than my complaint!), but it doesn’t tell you how many characters you are allowed to submit. So this was what I ended up submitting:

My passport picture was rejected by the Xxxx government because they claimed the camera was too close.

I have more information, but your system says my “description is too long”, so you’ll have to reply by email to get the full description.

How do I have the $25.46 I wasted returned? Hmm, I paid using my credit card, so I suppose charging it back is one option.

They replied thusly:

From: IDstation Online <idstationmail@digitalphotosystems.nl>
Subject: You have a new response to the Complaint number 12906
Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2024 21:28:27 +0000 (UTC)

Request number 12906

Dear customer,

You have a new response to your request from IDstation.Online. The response is as below:

I Suggest going back in store with the rejection letter. London Drugs will retake the photo and work with you on the issue.
Please do not reply to this email, it may not be tracked efficiently. To add any comments/response to your query, please click on the link below:

https://idstation.online/default/Support/AddNewResponse?queryID=12906&token=cNQgXSQ+3EgxMjkwNg==
The above link will be valid for 72 hrs.

Regards,
IDstation.Online
Navigate to FAQs (Sendgrid tracking link removed)

(I love the “Please do not reply to this email, it may not be tracked efficiently.” A complete load of bullshit. Either it will be received [and likely ignored] or it won’t be! Don’t give me this “may” crap.)

So I copied and pasted the link (because it was not a clickable link, as opposed to the tracked “Navigate to FAQs” link in their signature) but their system informed me, “An error occurred while processing your request.” I tried twice, both within about 24 hours. So I filed a new complaint as follows:

I received a response yesterday, but the response link provided failed. So I’m back here with your ridiculously short length limit. This is not going well for you in the public-relations department.

In that vein, I have decided not to bother returning to London Drugs to fight for my money. I will just focus my efforts on publicly discrediting both IDstation and London Drugs.

That’s all the space I have to explain my position! So long! See you in the court of public opinion!

That was 476 characters. My original attempt at this message was rejected as too long again because I had included the text of the error message (48 characters) their website gave me, so it seems their limit must be about 500 characters. Not sure how much useful information you can communicate in fewer than 500 characters, unless you’re just calling for “Help!” (4 characters, not including the exclamation point).

Ironically, in the Third World country where I’ll be travelling to, every bureaucrat wants a passport-style picture of you to attach to paperwork (the locals carry them around with their wads of cash), so I’ll use the four hard copies of my “digital” photo when I’m asked for one.

London Drugs logo.

London Drugs logo

Lesson learned: Take a list of the photo requirements and carefully inspect the photo against those requirements before you accept the photo. Don’t trust a gaggle of poorly trained amateurs/idiots to have a clue about what they are doing.

Posted in: Opinion, Travel.
Tagged: · · · ·

Nice music

Mar 5th, 2024
by Craig.
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Here are a couple of videos of Mitchell Cullen, who does a great job of playing two of my favourite instruments: the twelve-string guitar and the didgeridoo.

Enjoy!

Posted in: Music.
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Some random musings, mostly about morons apparently

Mar 3rd, 2024
by Craig.
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Some bonehead named trump

I’ve had a note for several weeks to address the moronic comment some idiot named donald trump made about NATO members who don’t spend 2% of their GDP on defence spending. He seems to think that NATO members can simply be evicted from the alliance like delinquent tenants in one of his run-down tenement buildings. One of those countries is Canada. I’m not defending Canada’s apparent lack of spending on defence, especially in this day and age of increased Russian aggression, but here’s the thing, don: If Russia attacks and takes over Canada — we’re the country that is largely between you and Russia — as you have explicitly encouraged them to do, your problems on your southern border would look like a walk in the park compared to the problems you will have on your northern border!

Fucking moron.

Twitter/X

I know, I’m the last to note this, but Twitter feeds used to feature regularly in the search results for various things I look up online on a daily basis. But since that no-name idiot — Musk I think he calls himself — took it over, said results are less and less useful. For starters, you only get the one tweet, and Twitter refuses to display any replies. Given how often in the past I’ve spent way more time on reading replies that I should have, in some ways this is a good thing. But I’m sure my buddy Elon wasn’t worried about how much time Craig is wasting on Twitter. I don’t know what Musk is worried about, but maybe it’s his bandwidth bill. Or maybe he’s actually doing what he seemed to be setting out to do, which is kill Twitter. I wish I had so much money that I could literally piss $44 billion down the drain.

I also note now that when you try to load a Twitter feed you are often/usually forced to log in. You can no longer simply go to a Twitter feed (e.g., twitter.com/ninernet) and peruse the posts. If you can, the posts are all in random order rather than chronologically. Yeah, that’s exactly how you generate interest in your service, by restricting people from even viewing it and confusing them!

Dilbert / Scott Adams

Speaking of Twitter and rich people who can piss away their wealth, Dilbert came back up on my radar recently. I used to read Dilbert daily, but one day it disappeared. Turns out it was unceremoniously dumped by its distributor after the author, Scott Adams, made what some people described as racist comments. Whatever. Now he continues his comic but you have to pay him US$7 a month for the privilege of reading it, or you can follow him on Twitter for US$3 a month. (I note that I can load his Twitter feed without being forced to log in! I don’t know why or how Twitter differentiates between one feed and another in that regard.)

But on his Twitter feed I note that he’s re-Tweeting Tucker Carlson and videos of teenagers fighting. Seriously? Teenagers fighting?! If that’s what this idiot considers to be “entertainment”, no thanks. I’ll pocket my hard-earned cash and not support some idiot who supports trump and considers teenagers beating each other up as entertainment.

Charities and their begging calls

I’ve just blocked the fourth number I’ve added to a list of Red Cross numbers that call us constantly. Why do they call us? Because we give them money every month! So we give them hundreds of dollars a year but they still want more! And they’re willing to call us many times a month/year for that purpose, and continue calling even though their calls don’t go through. I don’t get it. Maybe I should answer the next call and get them to cancel our monthly donation.

Android 12

I think I’ve made reference to Android 12 a couple of times on here. Actually, once. But goddammit, the idiots who made it are stupid. I know, I’m probably the only person in the world who plugs their phone in at night when they’re in bed, next to their bed (there are reasons), and I’m the only person in the world who crawls into bed with an already sleeping partner; so forgive me for thinking that I’m so special that developers should think of me. I’ve gone to great lengths to try and turn off just about every stupid, unnecessary bleep and bloop that my fucking phone makes, and yet, occasionally and for no obvious reason (but not every time!), my phone decides to let me, my sleeping partner and the fucking neighbours know that I’ve plugged in my phone! Hooray! Craig has plugged in his phone successfully! I can’t tell you how much my partner loves being woken up by this news. I have “Charging sounds and vibration” turned off, so I don’t know why Android ignores that directive … but only sometimes!

And while I’m on a rant about Android 12, let me give a special shout out to the 3CX app. For years I’ve had that running on this and previous phones and it never once “broke through” the do-not-disturb setting, but now it does. I don’t know whether or not I should blame Android or 3CX, but my money is on Android; after all, it’s the operating system, and that should control the installed apps, not the other way around. So now I have to remember to shut down that app so that it doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night, as it did twice in one night a few nights ago!

RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine worth its weight in gold

In case any of you think that the communist government of Canada pays for all things medical, let me tell you that relatives, pensioners, just plonked down $540 for the two of them to each get the RSV vaccine. Wow! And I’m on the verge of plonking down $350 for the Shingrix shingles vaccine. One thing I can tell you though is that I won’t be getting the Shingrix vaccine at Shoppers Drug Mart. I have not been happy with the fact that they have virtually eliminated staffed check-out cash registers at their stores. I’m not a Luddite (says the guy writing a blog), but society needs to deal with the fact that we still have unemployment to deal with, and you don’t deal with it by bringing in machines to replace humans without a plan. They were also in the news recently for billing the Ontario government for unnecessary medical checks on patients.

In other news in Canada

Turkeys terrorize residents of small Quebec town. Sorry, apparently there was a serious aspect to this, as they were becoming aggressive and that was a danger to children, not to mention adults who don’t like to be scratched by sharp claws. But this video had me cracking up, as well as the woman shooting the video! 🙂

Brian Mulroney

Brian Mulroney died on Thursday, 29 February. As one would expect for a former Prime Minister, this was big news in Canada. It reminded me of the fact that he was the first and last Conservative Prime Minister for whom I voted, in the first election in which I could vote. As many people have said over the last few days, politics have changed since then and the Conservative Party itself has also changed since then. Now they have a leader who used to be known as a pit bull in Stephen Harper’s government, who caters to his “base” of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti everything! Now you couldn’t make me vote for that party even if you put a gun to my head. Sadly, as Canadian politics go, he will be Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre in 2025. 🙁

Updated, 2024-03-08: Added the fact that Twitter/X posts are now all in random order rather than chronological.

Posted in: Opinion, Updated posts.
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Passion

Feb 18th, 2024
by Craig.
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For many years I’ve been told — mostly through reading, but also in person — that passion is the key to advancement and success. If you’re not passionate about something, you’re not going to succeed at it, or at anything else. In fact, if you’re not passionate, you might as well pack up and go home. Just resign yourself to a life of failure.

That advice my be well-meaning, but it’s rather depressing, especially for someone who doesn’t wake up in the morning and jump out of bed passionate about diving into a bowl of cornflakes and washing it down with a glass of orange juice, and heading off to their job … the same job they had yesterday, and the day before that and the year before that too!

It really struck home for me when I was reading an article: “Inside the exclusive world of Supreme Court clerks driving America’s legal controversies“. In that article I see a bunch of passionate people, and I see the root of much of the discord in American society. If I’ve been learning anything over the years it’s that passion may be the key to advancement and success, but it also creates fundamentalists and extremists. If you’re passionate about your belief that people of the same sex having sex with one another are “opprobrious”, guess what? You’re going to stop at nothing, in your passion, to ensure that they be stopped from doing so! And guess what? If you’re going to do that you’re going to run into and make enemies out of passionate people who want to have sex with people of the same gender! And if you’re passionate in your belief that Jews should be eradicated from the face of the planet, guess what? Do I really need to pull out that example of where passion can lead, both in the 1940s and in October last year?!

Bingo! Passionate sides at war with one another for the rest of time.

Something that also struck me in this article was that, apparently, some of the judges on the American Supreme Court in 1978 thought that racism would be a thing of the past twenty-five years hence, by 2003. It’s stunning to me that the apparently highest minds in that land actually thought that millions of years of human nature — and hundreds of years of American history! — would suddenly reverse itself within one generation! But beyond those millions of years of human nature lies “passion”. If you’re a passionate supremacist of any colour — White supremacist, Black Supremacist, etc., both “-ists” — what logic is going to convince you to tone down your passion and stop being a racist? Pretty much exactly none! After all, you’re passionate, and nobody with passion just gives up their passion because some idiot with an “agenda” came by and tried to use logic on you! “I have to show my fellow racists (‘passionatists’?) how passionate and committed to the cause I am by sticking to our mantra!”

So with what do we replace passion? I don’t think it’s really reasonable to suggest that if you’re just moderately interested in something, keep at it, slog through it, you’ll become successful at it. Yup, doesn’t quite ring true. On the other hand, we can’t all become successful billionaires (society’s objective barometer of success) because we’re passionate about something, because there will likely always be someone who is just that tiny bit more passionate than you, and he/she gets the top job, or a higher position on a list of rich people.

We all know passionate people. They’re a hoot at a party, going on and on about their passion. Actually, they’re probably not at parties, unless their passion is parties! But such people don’t fit into general society, which is why they’re (again) not generally at parties. But society needs positively passionate people; I don’t think I really need to pull out any examples, but we can all think of them. As much as I can’t stand the idea of “Swifties”, they exist because of a passionate person named Taylor Swift. (Or is she? To be honest, I don’t really know. Is she passionate about being a good singer? Does anyone know a Swiftie to ask?) But yeah, society would be a black hole if there were no positively passionate people.

The point is that passion isn’t always positive, and people who vaunt passion as the key to advancement and success need to realise that it also creates division in society. So, like many things, it ironically needs to be touted in moderation. Perhaps truly passionate individuals can’t be moderate — and nor should they, if their passion is positive — but people who claim that you cannot succeed in life without passion need to find something else to harp on about and write different books, or their books and mentors in general should counsel passionate people to think things through a little more carefully.

Posted in: Opinion.
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Death of a martyr: Alexei Navalny

Feb 16th, 2024
by Craig.
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Alexei Navalny. (Picture courtesy of <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/aleshru/6268649551/" target="_blank">Mitya Aleshkovsky</a>. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" target="_blank">CC BY 2.0 Deed</a>. Cropped.

Alexei Navalny. (Picture courtesy of Mitya Aleshkovsky. CC BY 2.0 Deed. Cropped.

Speaking of “fools”, I awoke this morning to news that putin has murdered Alexei Navalny. Instantly the word “martyr” sprung to mind but, sadly, that word has been diluted over the years by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. (The “fool” in this case, to be clear, is putin, not Navalny.)

But it immediately occurred to me that a martyr is someone who gave their death AND their life to a cause. Any crazy person can die for something ridiculous; only a real martyr walks back into the jaws of death willingly, knowing that the jaws can and likely will close on him again.

And they have, they did. The State of Russia has murdered someone who actually cared about his country, as opposed to putin who only cares to sacrifice his citizens on the altar of his ego.

Posted in: Opinion.
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Far-right business hacks at the “National Post” / “Financial Post”

Feb 16th, 2024
by Craig.
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The National Post: Who's the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?

The National Post: “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” (No author.)

With respect to my comment on Eby on Tuesday, I noted a piece in the “National Post” (apparently in the “Financial Post” section) by some nameless entity (see screenshot above) — perhaps the Post itself, or perhaps an individual named “Corcoran” (see second screenshot) — but not marked as “opinion” (see first screenshot) even though it clearly is, titled “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” It’s hilarious that anyone who disagrees with the almighty Bell is considered a “fool” or an “ignoramus”. That’s what’s called an ad hominem attack; if you can’t explain why you disagree with someone, call them a name. The words “fool” and “ignoramus” work. And if you run short of names to call people, just pull up a recent campaign speech (or any speech) by a guy named donald trump to get some more words … although not that many, since the guy has a very limited vocabulary.

But hey, I get it, people disagree! So I’ll raise the bar a little and respond intelligently instead of calling the “National Post” (or Corcoran) “fools”.

I don’t believe anybody — Eby, Trudeau or anyone else — is suggesting that BCE should subsidise their subsidiaries until the end of time. But big business(es), and those on the right in general, are big on the fact that people should take responsibility for their own actions. What a concept! But that only applies to poor people on skid row and drug addicts, not big business. It’s completely unreasonable, foolish even, for us idiots that don’t run BCE and other massive companies to think that BCE should take responsibility for their own misguided, stupid and even foolish decision to attempt to buy up the media industry, and their own foolish decision to run said media industry into the ground with their ignorance! It’s foolish for us to believe that BCE should pay back various levels of government the money that they/us — Canadian taxpayers! — will pay in (un)employment insurance to the unemployed journalists, cameramen, teleprompter readers and various other human beings that will become unemployed.

Of course not! It’s their own fault they’re unemployed! The fools! And if it’s not their fault it’s the big bad government’s fault for forcing us to work within the confines of decent, modern, civilised Canadian society!

“Bullshit”, as described by the “Financial Post”, is quite clearly the domain of big business press releases (viz. “moving forward”, at least for the employees that won’t be moving backwards in lifestyle) … and the fools at the “Financial/National Post”. I hereby award the “Harry G. Frankfurt Award for Demagogic Bullshit” jointly to Corcoran, their shitty newspaper and BCE Inc.!

The Financial Post: Who's the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?

The Financial Post: “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” Corcoran?

Updated, 17 February 2024: Made notes about the possible author of the article in the captions of the screenshots.

Posted in: Opinion, Updated posts.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

Encrapification: My vote for word of the year, even though it’s only February

Feb 13th, 2024
by Craig.
1 comment
David Eby

David Eby. (Picture courtesy of BC NDP. CC BY 2.0 Deed. Cropped.)

The frustration of David Eby, premier of British Columbia, was palpable in his “2½-minute tirade” on Thursday (8 February 2024) against BCE Inc., parent company of Bell Media and therefore CTV News and all of its many holdings. But it was his invention of the word “encrapification” that stole the show for me. My web search for the word turned up the above CBC report as the first search result on Friday.

The great thing about the English language is that it is constantly evolving, and that it has building blocks to create words like this. I can’t speak for other languages, of course; I’ve studied several over the years, for which I’m grateful (especially Latin), but besides English there’s only one other (French) that I can say I could speak reasonably well in a pinch, but I don’t know it well enough to invent words in this way.

But Eby is completely right. I used to be all in favour of companies like BCE doing whatever they reasonably could to make more and more money but, as we’ve seen over the years with the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft (remember them?!), Amazon, etc., real people are hurt when companies become too big to care about both the people they employ and the people to whom they sell their products and services. I don’t imagine that the CEO of BCE woke up one day and decided to gut the media landscape in Canada, but he has. Eby’s characterisation of what BCE has done reminds me of what Canada Post did on a much smaller scale years ago: When I left college I expected to be quite movious — another great addition to the English language courtesy of Zambian English meaning to move around a lot — and so I rented a post office box. I rented it at the Vancouver International Airport because, working in the aviation business, I expected to be there often and so it would be convenient to be able to collect my mail there when I happened to be at that airport. It was going to become my “permanent” address.

Canada Post had other ideas, of course. They stopped renting new mail boxes at the “Airport Postal Outlet” (as it was known) and then, in a remarkable turns of events that nobody without an MBA could ever have predicted, they then claimed that there was not enough mail going there to support the existence of said outlet! Despite my attempts to “Save the APO“, it was taken away, and thus began my never-ending quest to set up new “permanent addresses”. What a gong show. I have had no fewer than seven “permanent addresses” in thirty-three years, when really, I should have had ONE!

BCE/Bell logos

A few random logos of the involved entities. Trademarks of the respective corporations.

Anyway, back to BCE. The day after Eby made headlines there was another politician who was evidently jealous of the attention that he wasn’t getting, so Justin Trudeau got on the horn (apologies to those of you for whom that phrase has a more lurid meaning!) and called it a “garbage decision” and said he was “pissed off”. Good effort Justin, but not nearly as cool as Eby! 🙂

At least CTV’s newly unemployed former employees will be able to count on Canadians’ thoughts and prayers for a day each year when Bell does their annual “Let’s Talk Day“. Thoughts and prayers certainly helped Lisa LaFlamme a lot when they fired her for letting her hair go grey, just as they helped me when Bell ripped me off for $11.27 for a one-minute phone call!

Posted in: Opinion.
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