Can
a mouth be both hot and cold?
by
Robert LaFrance
The world is full of contradictions
and I’m not even talking about politicians.
Take the sun. We enjoy lying out in it or walking
outside on a nice sunny day, but the sun can cause diseases – everything from
cataracts to cancer. On the other hand, we need the sun to help put Vitamin D
into our bodies. The same sun that we like to be out in makes solanine in
potatoes and causes them to turn green and poisonous. During humid summer days,
the sun heats up the ground and causes updrafts that cause thunderclouds that
give us lightning. If you leave your sunglasses on the dash of your car, the
hot sun shining through will scratch them and almost melt them.
How about the wind? There’s story from ancient times
in either Rome or Greece – I can never keep them straight. One of the gods of
those days looked down on a cold day
and sees Yerkes blowing on his hands to try and warm them up. A little
while later Yerkes is seen blowing on his soup to cool it off so he can eat it.
I may have gotten this quote a bit wrong, but the god said something like:
“Whoa, I ain’t gonna trust nobody who can blow both hot and cold out of the
same mouth!”
If you are looking for a point to the previous
comments, you look in vain.
************************
I am right on the verge of giving up trying to get
hold of a real person on the telephone when I try to call (1) a government
office or, (2) a business.
My latest attempt was a bank. I spent exactly 24
minutes trying every last trick in the book to get a human voice to talk to me.
It would direct me to an employee’s voicemail so I could leave a message (that
never would have gotten answered) or perhaps to the employee’s email address
that also never would have succeeded in connecting me with him, her or it.
It’s clear, and has been clear for years, that the
reason government office phones are all hooked up to these various voicemail
and other answering machines; it is so the government employee never has to
actually speak to anyone, unless they choose. Can you imagine the cost of
wiring every government office in Canada to these Infinity Machines?
That’s what they are – Infinity Machines that put us
into One Great Loop. The classic story occurred about a dozen years ago to a
young woman in Hillandale. She was having a problem understanding something
about her income tax, or just wanted some information, so she dialled the
toll-free number provided by Revenue Canada as it was called at the time.
The first person (yes, a real person – it WAS a
dozen years ago) directed her to another employee who directed her to #3 who
directed her to #4, etc. etc. After a while, employee #8 directed her on to
another person who turned out to be the first person she had talked to. The One
Great Loop, the Infinity Machine.
Back to my attempt to reach a live banker person by
phone: I finally succeeded. I drove to town, walked in the bank and talked to
one.
*****************************
Still (indirectly) on the subject of banking, last year the U.S. of A. decided
they had the right to demand income taxes from every Canadian who had been born
in the U.S. That took in a lot of people in this area because they had been
born in Fort Fairfield, Maine before we had a hospital in Perth, and all over
the country people were finding they owed money to the American Internal
Revenue Service.
“That’s all well and good,” as Aunt Maud would say
to Uncle Henry, “but what if the tables were turned?”
There are millions of people in the U.S. who were
born in Canada. Movie stars and other celebrities who make zillions over there.
Jim Carrey, Alex Trebek and others should now have to pay Canadian income tax
on money earned in the U.S.A. As Aunt Lara would say to Uncle Freddy: “What’s
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
What the eating habits of large
nesting birds has to do with anything I don’t know, but I thought I’d throw
that in there anyway. Although the Americans have forced Canadian banks to
release financial information, can you picture the outrage if Canada demanded
to have the same information from American banks whose clients include many
millionaires born in Canada?
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment