McDonald's drive-thru a total disaster (Oct. 16)

Ten seconds in a line - an eternity? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

 

            This morning as I was sipping a double latte (whatever that is) on the porch, my dog Kezman asked me what is the main difference between now and when I was a kid. “Well, old faithful dog,” I said, “the main difference between 2013 and 1980 – we’ll say – is in the area of communication.”

“You’re talking about email, text messaging, and stuff like that, aren’t you?” he said, between bites of Gaines Gravy Train. (Really No-Name dogfood I had bought at the discount store, but I told him it was Gravy Train.)

“No, I’m talking about people actually talking to each other,” I explained, “and please don’t drool on your blanket. Today people communicate in 5-second sound bites, or if they’re really eager for a chat, in 15-second sound bites.” To prove my point, I walked away.

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This is 2013 all right. Listen to this radio news item. I did use the word ‘news’?

“A study done at fast food restaurants in Canada and the U.S. has reported that drive-thru window times have increased over the past year,” the announcer droned. “The average time that McDonalds’ drive-thru customers spend, well, driving through, has increased by ten seconds from last year.”

I tried to get my head around the fact that someone had actually used up money to hire people who would spend their days timing people at drive-thrus. This is important I suppose. Anyway, the final finish – as my wife’s Aunt Ruby Phillips used to say – is that these hirelings ascertained that the average time a car spends in a McDonalds drive-thru is three minutes and nine seconds, whereas last year it was two minutes 59 seconds. Is there anyone in North America to whom this makes a difference?

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            Amazingly, I am still on the same subject – food – and I can’t take long writing about this because I’m going with Flug to bail his nephew Gerund out of jail. Gerund passed a 10-dollar counterfeit bill at a restaurant over in Caribou, Maine, and the owner was not impressed. Neither were the Caribou police, the State police, or the Secret Service, that branch of the Treasury Department that not only protects the president but deals with those who deal with counterfeit money. From the phone conversation I overheard between Flug and Gerund, it seems that the latter has already hired a lawyer who will fight the case on the legal basis of ‘quid pro quo’. “Whatever you do to me I can do back to you.”

Gerund said on the phone: “I asked for a coffee and he gave me a mixture of chicory and instant decaffeinated coffee; they put a non-dairy creamer in front of me, and when I wanted to sweeten the mess, the waiter gave me some sort of aspartame-filled artificial sweetener. If they can serve counterfeit coffee, cream and sugar, why can’t I give them a counterfeit bill?”

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            Canadian teenage boys have received a lot of criticism over the years for wearing their baseball caps backward. Just about every comedian has some kind of a routine where he or she makes a joke about that. “What are they trying to do, keep their neck from getting sunburned? Ha-ha-ha!!!”

            Today, the laughter stopped, because I found out there’s a valid scientific reason for wearing one’s baseball cap with the visor down one’s neck. Wind. I’m not referring to the aftermath of a large bean and salad supper, but to the air currents blowing across the parking lot where I was walking and wearing my cap with the letters ‘Victoria Star’. My cap is probably in the St. Lawrence River by this time. It occurred to me as I watched it fly away like a paycheque that, had I been wearing it backward, that never would have happened. I hereby apologize to all male teenagers for any time I ever thought you were crazy for wearing your cap backward.

            Early in this column I mentioned how people now talk in sound bites. This is not to be confused with the bytes on a computer, although that instrument – a blessing and a curse – has contributed to the changes in communication. I started on that trail exactly 19 years ago this month when I was talking to the late Bob Inman and asking him to advise me on buying a new computer. We went to the nerd store and he picked out everything I would need. When we had finished bringing all those boxes in my house here, he started to go and said: “Okay, it’s just a matter of putting it all together and you’re on your way.”

            I pulled a gun. “Bob,” I said, “sit down and get ready to stay a while.” It took the two of us (and the Luger) an hour and a half to set up my new computer that cost $4300 and had an operating system called Windows 3.1. Each time he made a move, I recorded it, and even then it was weeks before I had things under control. It actually worked, no viruses, no spam. I don’t want to talk about how things have gone skittering away since then. I’ve already exceeded my sound bite quota.

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Dark for 146 days - but who's counting? (Oct.9)

That’s the last of the sun until March 4th

                                                           by Robert LaFrance

 

            Every year at this time I send a big hello on to the people who are living and working in Alert, Nunavut, which was Alert, Northwest Territories, when I lived there for 54 weeks in the 1970s. Today the sun goes away for the winter and doesn’t return until March 4^th. Right around Christmas time it is the darkest place on earth, or so it seemed to me, but we got through it.

I arrived there in early May of 1974 and left in mid-May the next year. When I arrived the ‘met techs’ (meteorological technicians) and the army guys from the 110-person military base there were out on the runway and playing softball. They were in their shorts and some of them, I noticed when I emerged from the belly of the C-130 Hercules, were sweating.

            It was 42ºF, about 4ºC.

            “What kind of a looney bin have I arrived at?” I asked myself, but since I had been on the road (as it were) from Trenton, Ontario for 30+ hours, including overnight in Thule, Greenland, my brain wasn’t able to process enough information to answer that question. It – my brain – at that point was temporarily in the same shape it is as we speak.

You know how people complain today when they take a plane trip? The seats are too narrow, there’s not enough leg room, the food is terrible? During the 8-hour flight from Trenton to Thule I sat along the side of that huge cargo plane; my easy chair was four metal rods with a little canvass over them. My food was two sandwiches I had scrounged from the mess hall at Trenton’s armed forces base, and my drink was two cans of lukewarm Pepsi.

Thule was another story though. It was a US Air Force base and you know how those guys are taken care of. I had a room all to myself in the officers’ quarters. Not long after we landed in Greenland the C-130 crew, several scientists who were also travelling in luxury on the plane, and I were called to a dinner at the USAF Officers’ mess. The choice of thick steaks, roast chicken, or pork roast. I remember it well. I think I had all three and some mighty fine wine just like Jeramiah the Bullfrog.

One of the guests at the dinner was the American Ambassador to Denmark, which owned Greenland at the time, and I got to meet him. I shook hands and went back to my plate. First things first. I didn’t know what kind of food they would be serving at the Alert weather station.

It was just before noon local time (Atlantic, same as us) when the plane touched down on Alert’s long runway. A Hercules needs LOTS of runway. As we circled to land we could see the wreckage of a Lancaster bomber that crashed there in 1953. I mentioned the softball players; they were back at the game before the turboprops stopped turning. One of the army guys pointed to a red vehicle: “There’s your crowd with a bomb.”

He didn’t seem too nervous about the whole thing, and I was too tired (late night with some Pabst Blue Ribbon and some guys from Arizona) to worry. It turned out that the ‘bomb’ was a Bombardier snowmobile, a large one with a cab big enough to hold six people. We made it the 800 yards to the weather station with no problem. So there I was, 26 years old with a fabulous salary and a view of Greenland out my bedroom window. And the meals! I had arrived just as the cook, Ray Cameron from Calgary, was starting to serve Chicken a la King etc. followed by a wonderful apple pie.

Alert took a while getting used to, especially the 24-hour days. When the boss showed me my room, there was aluminum foil over the window. He said I’d need that if I ever wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Knowing better and tired out, I took off the foil.

At 3:00 am, with the sun blazing in my window, I put back the foil. First of many lessons. The boss, Jim Patterson from Saskatchewan, knocked on my door next morning, noticed the foil back up, but didn’t say anything. Jim was what we called ‘An Arctic Zero’, as opposed to hero. He’d been up there eight years and was scraping the edge of the rational world. While I was in Alert, Jim received several big packages from Toronto. It was a kit to built an airplane. We all laughed, but two years later, he flew out of Alert and eventually landed at  Saskatoon airport.

One thing I must mention. I was scheduled to leave on the weekly Hercules on May 11, 1975, but due to a mixup, my name wasn’t on the flight manifest when I, all packed, went to the runway. Because I’d been taken off the work schedule, I spent most of the next week in the Junior Ranks bar at the base. I would need that expertise when I got back to Tilley.
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It's all academic (Oct. 2/13 column)

'Currency' and 'current' are not the same thing

                                                             by Robert LaFrance

           

            Sometimes two words are much too much alike for comfort.

            Take the word ‘breadpan’ – I do make bread occasionally – and the word ‘bedpan’. I was seriously thinking of relating the story of what happened to Flug’s nephew Allie, but I think we’ll just leave that story until another day. It’s almost dinner time.

            And that’s another thing (as I segue as smooth as silk to another subject): What do we call the meals that we have at noon and in the early evening? I usually call the noon meal dinner and the evening meal supper, but some people, much classier than I, say the evening meal is dinner. Then what do they call my dinner? Lunch?

            In any case, it’s all academic (as academics say) because my noon meal is not dinner in the first place; the proper name for it is ‘late’ because certain retired persons have not cooked it. Furthermore, she will not show me where the electric stove is kept or I would be glad to cook it myself.

            Speaking of electricity, I just thought of another example of a pair of words that are uncomfortably close together in sound if not in meaning. A convicted murderer in Texas was told by the prison warden that he would be receiving ‘currency’ the next day. The murderer, for some reason, thought the warden meant money, but the warden, not an educated man, meant to say ‘current’. Texas still has the electric chair. At dawn the next day the convicted murderer was shocked to find out that ‘currency’ had been a bit of a stretch, a malapropism as they say.

            Perhaps the Texas chap was expecting paper money, a load of $100 bills. We have all heard the fairy tale about ‘the paperless society’ and by now we all know that it really is a fairy tale. In the late 1980s, when computers had begun taking over everything, we kept hearing that within a few years, perhaps even a decade, we would no longer use or need paper to store correspondence and records.

            Well, guess what? We use just as much paper as we ever did, but now we keep 10,000 times more records, all digitized – if that’s even a word. It is true I now email Aunt Martha instead of using a stamp and envelope and sending it over time and space to her cottage in Lake Huron country, but here’s the rub: I never did write her anyway, and now we correspond every month. So I don’t use any less paper, but I now have an electronic file of letters to and from her. Every few months, when I do a total backup of my computer, I put all the information including her letters onto a CD or DvD and store it in a safe place. So now I buy CDs or DvDs when before I didn’t know either one existed. This is society’s new paper – those media including travel drives, mobile hard drives, and all that stuff.

            I don’t watch a whole lot of TV news or listen to a lot of radio news, but one story I did hear recently was about the world smallest pony, a 2-foot tall one, being stolen in Umbria, Italy. A news reporter asked the pony’s owner who he thought had stolen the pony and demanded a ransom for it. Now listen carefully to his answer: “Criminals.” Well, Giovanni, thanks for clearing that up.

            The Parti Quebecois minority government in our neighbouring province appears to have shot themselves in the foot when they proposed a new Charter of Values. Of course it was aimed at Muslims, who don’t tend to be separatists, but it also hit another minority whose feelings have been hurt. What about the atheists? Their feelings were not considered at all when the PQ came up with their charter to fix a problem that didn’t exist in the first place.

            This news just in: About two months ago Flug’s nephew Jerry G. joined the police force of a small town in PEI and soon afterward got himself into trouble, as usual. Already famous for his lack of judgment, Jerry forgot to do his homework and also forgot to think. On August 7 a fire started in an apartment building just on the outskirts of that small town of Murchieville and Flug, whose radio had not been turned on because he was sleeping outside Tim Horton’s, saw a red truck zooming by and quickly moved to arrest the driver. That driver was not only the mayor, but also the fire chief on his way to the fire. Jerry’s job security took quite a hit that day. He’s now settled into his new career as a ‘greeter’, if you know what I mean.
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