Where the hell did June go?

I haven't blogged since June 6.

I just haven't felt like it.

So, for anyone who is concerned about my well being, I'm still here. Not much else going on, just here. Here's June in a nutshell:

• Kim is still looking for work

• The city is still on strike, the taxis are still on strike, my oldest graduated from grade school

• Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays all died

• I lost my driver's license due to an unpaid speeding ticket, and got it back within two weeks

• Windsor hosted the Red Bull Air Races (during the strike)

• We had a visit from distant relatives from Texas and showed them our fair town, as well as piled up garbage

• My daughter got taller?

• My nephew celebrated his 19th birthday, and therefore was taken to a bar for the first time by his father and I

• Chrysler minivan workers went back to work after being off since April

• The US military pulled out of Iraqi cities and towns

• We rebuilt our backyard and purged the crap from the house

I'm sure there's more but that's still a lot of blog fodder missed. Maybe I didn't write because there was too much going on. Maybe I was stuck to the TV too much trying to keep up with all going on in the world. Maybe I just didn't want to.

I promise to get back into it, I will start again for all you 12 people who actually read this.

See ya next month.

Windsor in the summer

I'd like to invite all my out of town friends to visit us here in beautiful Windsor this summer. With the gracious assistance of the City administration and CUPE locals, we've redecorated the place for the summer festival season, as well as implemented some new environmental policies.

The first thing you will notice is that city owned lands such as parks and rights of way are now being left to grow. This 'naturalization initiative' served two purposes, first it allows for more natural habitat for wildlife, such as birds and small animals, raccoon, skunks, rats, etc.

Secondly, it reduces the amount of CFCs being let into the atmosphere by scores of gas sucking lawn mowers. The result of this initiative will be cleaner air for all, including the wildlife. In the parks, you can see our children playing in the tall grass, games of hide and seek have never been so fun! The kids are loving it. They can also engage the wildlife in a more natural environment - those on the east side no longer have to drive to the west side to see the Ojibway Nature area. A natural extension of that unique environment is spreading across the city.

A new attraction this year is 'Art in the Meadow', formerly known as Art in the Park. However, some vandelous citizens who don't share the city's vision, cut all the grass last week at Willistead. There are always elements of society who rebel! Sadly, there is only a week of growth today to enjoy this unique natural event.

This new vision has also had side effects that were only dreams - The pesky Corvette show at Dieppe park every year has moved to LaSalle this year. Really, who want to go to a park and see a bunch of old cars sitting on the grass. We can see old cars parked on every street in the city, we don't really need them on our green spaces as well. These guys get the right one day every year to drop their 'prize' cars on the grass, getting in the way of people walking their dogs and playing frisbee.

The city has also decided that the people of Windsor are too dependent. Taxes are being wasted on having dozens of trucks fan out every day to do for the citizens what they should do themselves - clean up their own mess. How often do we tell our children to clean up their own messes, there is no butler to come along behind them. The city has taken this to heart with the citizens. We are now expected to get off our lazy computer loving TV watching lazy asses, and pick up after ourselves. Taxes will be redirected toward other city projects that are much more useful and tourist friendly than garbage and recycling, such as a canal through our downtown core. A worthy project bound to attract tourists and wildlife alike. In the meantime, we will pick up after ourselves, having learned a valuable lesson from the decision. We really are a lazy group! The landfills are benefitting too, not being filled up on a daily basis with trash from over 200,000 people. A lot of people are now going back to basics, composting, recycling, and just simply throwing out less crap. We all win!

This philosophy also extends to our public spaces. The city has redecorated its parks with carefully placed items we no longer want. The intention here is to remind us of the items that can be thrown out, with visual demonstrations of why - do you want your yards looking like this? Then take care of it. Essentially these city owned garbage piles are advertisements to us.

We should all enjoy our new Windsor. Back to basics, back to nature. The City and CUPE have done their parts to change this city, we should all too. So come visit us this summer, with festivals like Summerfest, BluesFest, Red Bull Air Races (which sadly, cut the grass), and others. We can all enjoy nature again without the insescent hum of lawnmowers and garbage trucks. We can hear the geese and the pigeons. We can see small animals that normally wouldn't visit us, we can admire true nature. I would like to take this opportunity to declare this summer in Windsor Naturefest.

Welcome to our beautiful city.

Add this to the garbage pile

The striking Inside and Outside workers in Windsor have now kept us piling our own trash for seven weeks. Garbage piles abound, the grass isn't cut anywhere on any city property, no city services except the essentials are being provided, and right around the corner is our festival season. Yeah.

Art in the Park, The Red Bull Air Races, Summerfest, Blues Fest, and countless other events that always bring the promise of a boost to our economy. And with the current recession, man do we need the boost. But the question now begs itself, what will this strike do to the events? Will CUPE allow them to happen? So far during this strike there have been several incidents of assaults against contractors, strikers actually showing up at the mayor's house to picket, alleged attempts at sabotaging contractors, and more. It's getting nasty. Neither side is budging on the issues, and neither side is making any allies. They are ridiculously far apart on the issue of post retirement benefits. In a nutshell, the city wants to end benefits to new hires in order to save money. Benefits that would only affect people hired from ratification onwards. Hey, I don't have benefits, neither do thousands of others. While I applaud the union's efforts to protect the future of their members (or future members), come on now. This is not exactly an issue that will affect anything now, let's get back to work and figure that one out after the trash is picked up. We're talking about something that won't be an issue for 40 years!

On that note, here's how one union member has earned her place in this dispute. Draw your own conclusions:

I'm not making any comments on this. It speaks for itself. I do however, feel that everyone needs to see this.

This needs to end now, before someone gets hurt. We are all residents of Windsor, regardless of what side you're on. I believe this is the straw that will break the camel's back on this strike. Maybe it's the impetous to get back to the table and resolve it. Neither side is going to like seeing this crap, and if this gets swept under the rug, more is bound to come.

This just had to be done

I decided tonight to relax with one of my favourite sites - The Onion's Our Dumb World.
While flying around India I found this...


















Given my previous post from this morning, I couldn't resist.

Absolutely brilliant.

While you're there, check out Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Smiles all round, thanks Onion.

Cheers.

This will piss people off

There was a study conducted recently that found that employers in Canada are bias against people with Canadian names than foreign names. The study found that when two people with identical resumes compete for a job, in the majority of cases the one with the English names will win out over the person with the foreign name. I saw the study on the news somewhere, a quick tidbit and now I can't find it to reference it, so you'll just have to trust me.

Essentially this says that employers are turning inwards to hire people. Do foreign names reduce the person's ability to do the job? Absolutely not. The skills are what matters, not the origin of the person. BUT...

I completely agree with the results. There, I said it, now you're pissed off because I now sound like a racist, but really I'm not. I think anyone should be eligible for a position if you meet the following criteria:

1 - You qualify based on education and experience

2 - You have the personality and disposition to perform the task at hand

3 - YOU SPEAK ENGLISH

The third one is the reason employers are turning away from foreign names. People that work in this country need to be able to communicate with others in this country. Does that sound weird or racist? Is that a concept that is new?

This past week at work, our trist with Bell Canada continued. It's well known now that Bell contracts their service and support departments to India. The call centre for tech support and sales in in Mumbai. The first thing that should worry you when you call a place like this is that they ask you if you have a problem understanding them.

What?

I speak english, I live in Canada, I'm calling a Canadian company in reference to a local issue, on a street in a small Canadian town where everyone walking down it speaks english or french. This idiot on the phone wants me to let him know if I have a problem with his Indian accent. Well, yes; I say, I have a problem because like so many times before, you WILL mess something up due to the language barrier. You will do something stupid that will cost our small company money.

They didn't disappoint.

This past Tuesday, production deadline for three of our publications, Bell Canada shut off our service. They had a cancellation order for our new building. Here's the funny thing - the order was dated April 1, 2009. We moved into the building on April 23, 2009. So this idiot in India had our service shut off three weeks before we had it turned on.

Pause for a second while you digest that.

When we blew up at them they calmly and with a heavy accent informed us that it would be two days before it's turned back on. Did I mention it was deadline day for three pubs? They didn't care that their incompetent error is about to cause us thousands in lost revenue. I had my boss call them, I was getting nowhere. For the next two hours he was passed from one service idiot to the next service idiot. All of them telling my boss they sympathize with our plight but there is nothing they can do. Now, after dealing with Bell for all this time I can tell you that they never vary from the script. If they are thrown a curve ball they simply apologize and hand it off to someone else. They have no language skills beyond that stupid script. They didn't care about us, they only care about the Bell overlords standing behind them telling them what to say.

The boss managed to get us turned back on two hours later. We were back to work with yet another episode from this moronic company behind us. We then made the call to a local provider, who's employees live and work in Windsor, and who speak english. Hopefully they will take over in the coming weeks and we can finally ditch Bell Canada.

I don't care where you're from. I don't care what colour your skin is, or who you pray to. I don't care about your local customs or what kind of weird food you grew up eating. But I do care that if you live in Canada, a country who's official languages are English and French (or vice versa in Quebec), you should either speak the damn language in the workforce, or hire people who do. Bell Canada should be hiring Canadians to do these jobs instead of turning to a third world country where the call centre employees can be paid a dollar a day for doing nothing but fucking up people's businesses. Those jobs should be here, putting Canadians to work. There should be a protest about this - everyone should protest Bell. They have a monopoly, so they can literally do whatever they want. There is no recourse. Nadda.

So you wonder why that study found that people with foreign names are not hired as often? How about fear. How about the fact that this call centre fiasco is so commonplace with most companies anymore, how about the fact that everyone who reads this will have a some point experienced the same issue. I feel sorry for people with perfect english and a good skill set, will get screwed because of their name. Sorry. But blame big business. Blame bean counters.

Quite frankly, if you go see a doctor wouldn't you want him or her to speak your language? You wouldn't want the diagnosis mistranslated would you?

In case you're curious, here's what Bell fucked up - When we moved our three offices into one main location, we discontinued our internet service in the two that were being shut down, and we created new service in our new building. Nothing was moved, the service was cancelled and restarted. The service is now still on in one empty building. Bell mis-read the order number and shut off the wrong building. With all the hell this company has put us through this really isn't a surprise. Read this or this, if you want to remind yourself why you should boycott Bell. These are just the recent problems. There are more posts back a year ago, same shit, it just doesn't stop.

Bell sucks.

People that won't communicate suck.

We are indeed a multicultural society and a world economy, but come on now, let's get real. None of this shit would have happened if the language barrier was not an issue. You live in this country, work in the language.

Cheers.