Just like that old dog I used to have
by
Robert LaFrance
Exasperating though the New
Brunswick weather has been (blow hot, blow cold) we’ll leave that off the list
of subjects for this week. The one comment I want to make is to say hi to the folks
stationed at Alert, Nunavut, and give them my deepest sympathy because they are in the in the
coldest part of winter.
I spent 381 days there in 1974-5 working at the weather
station that’s 450 nautical miles from the north pole. By the way, it was in
the Northwest Territories then; I hope Nunavut is warmer.
My second comment will be directed
at people who live in a slightly warmer area of the world – the folks of Hamas,
the political party that runs the Gaza Strip, just across the road from Israel.
Late last year they started send explosive rockets over into Israel and – this
is going to astonish you – Israel answered them with bombs from their air force
jets. After a few dozen buildings went from being Hamas offices to rubble, the
two sides signed a ‘peace accord’ which is like calling a cat a catamaran.
(There is no peace in that area, just no bombing on a particular day.)
Hamas said they won this mini-war
and that reminds me of a U.S. general’s suggestion during the Vietnam War:
“Let’s just declare victory and go home”. Hamas also reminds me of a dog I used
to own, if one can own a dog. He would chase cars and get knocked down and run
over regularly, but he was still too stupid to quit chasing cars. So it is with
Hamas; they send rockets into Israel and then get flattened, then quit for a
while so they can recover. Hamas dealing with Israel is like Rover dealing with
the 1959 Impala that finally got him for good.
I awoke early yesterday morning to a
weird sound, one that sounded like a combination of a dog howling (such as when
he gets knocked down by a grey 1950 Meteor), a cat screeching, and a Jean
Chretien speech. It was quite windy outside and every time there was a gust of
wind, there was that sound again. After a while (not to be vague or anything) I
narrowed it down to an area where the carpenter (Sid Goostep) had caulked
around a window two days earlier. Apparently the wind was making that sound
that now sounded like a crowing rooster, but there was no hole I could see. It
was now a few minutes after eight in the morning and the sun was coming over
the hill to the east, so I called Sid who insisted I hadn’t awakened him
because he had to get up and answer the phone anyway. “I told you about that
type of material,” he protested with a sleep-filled voice. “Don’t you remember?
I said that for a week or more, when the wind is blowing, the caulk crows at
dawn.”
I would say that was the worst pun I
have ever delivered.
We had quite the time at the club
last evening – and night. Jordan Demays was the toast of the club and the town
and we all toasted him – not with a toaster, but with lemonade. He was our
latest hero because of what he had accomplished three days earlier. The reason
it took three days to celebrate him was because Grimy Gus the barkeep needed to
stock up on lemonade; he knew it was going to be a blowout that Australians
would envy.
The reason for Jordan’s celebrity?
He had succeeded, in less than half an hour, in getting through a maze of
government voicemail and actually reaching a real live person – or civil
servant at least – on the telephone.
Those citizens under the age of
twenty or so didn’t quite understand what the fuss was all about, because they
only know the world as it is today, one in which it was (until last week)
routine to go through 17 levels of voicemail and come back to the same place.
Governments have invested ‘multi dinero’ as they say in Croatia to making sure
that no one – NO ONE – is able to actually speak to a human being. That is the
whole reason for voicemail. Let them say it is for our convenience, but we know
better, don’t we? It’s for theirs.
The bottom line of all this,
unfortunately, is that the civil servant that Jordan actually spoke to against
all odds has been fired. His boss, contacted by cellphone while he was on a
fact-finding mission in Jamaica, made an awful fuss when he learned that one of
his employees had been guilty of speaking to a member of the public. The
criminal’s job was toast, which is exactly what we at the club had prepared for
Jordan. All were welcome except whoever invented voicemail. We had a firing
squad all ready for him, her, it, or them but they didn’t show.
-END-
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