The Penalty Box

• Do not leave a mess when you are done. I understand that you have to cut pipe and that it is a bit of a messy job. Just clean it up afterwards. Do not leave pipe shavings and sawdust in my kitchen.
• I am not here to entertain you. If I am watching playoff hockey, that does not give you the cue to talk over the announcer to make small talk. I don’t care that your new truck is broken. I don’t care that you hate your landlord. Fix my sink, that’s your job.
• If you don’t have a part to finish the job, get it. If the hardware store is closed, get it the next day. Home Depot/Rona does not close on a Sunday. You have not finished a job, so you better make it a priority to finish it. I don’t care if you’ve had a bad day, you’ve made my weekend bad by leaving a leaky sink.
• If you are too busy to finish this job, you should not have accepted it in the first place. Learn to manage your time better.
• There’s more to being a plumber than pipes. There’s customer relations too. Not answering your phone when you have an unfinished job is unprofessional. If you do not wish to deal with customers, hire someone to do that for you. If you cannot afford that, then deal with it and stop acting like a thirteen year old pissant.
• Don’t get all Mike Holmes on me saying the builders did a crappy job with the pipes when you can’t even make a sink stop leaking. There are no specialty parts that you need to order. Stop making excuses.
• Don’t complain that jobs are always more complicated than you expected. It just means you’re unprepared.
• FINISH. THE. JOB.

It’s now been the better part of a week that the kitchen sink is leaking due to old pipes. Once I get the name of the company (he’s self-employed) from my landlord, I will edit this post to inform everyone to never contract the services of this plumber.

Edit: The name of the company is Precision Plumbing.  Tack BC on the end of that, add a .ca extension and you have his website.  I’m not linking it because he doesn’t deserve any help on his Google ranking. For extra lulz, here’s some quotes from his “guarantee” section of his site:

We guarantee your home or business with be treated with the utmost care and respect while completing your project.
We guarantee all excess material or left over parts will be removed from site with minimal or no cost to the home or business owner.
We guarantee all our work will be done right the first time and strive to maintain our name in quality.

Oh yeah, he ended up leaving the dirty pipes behind too. He just said to throw them into the garbage can. So yeah, don’t use this guy. Ever. Tell your friends.

It saddens me every time I see a parent take the lazy way out and, in essence, hand power over to the child.  I was on the bus and observed a particularly whiny brat refusing to sit down.  The mother attempted to threaten the child with a typical “If you don’t sit down right now, we’re getting off and going home.” Result? Child begins screaming. Flustered, the mother then says, “if you sit down, I’ll give you a lollipop.” Wait, what? Did she just positively reinforce bratty behaviour? Here’s what’s wrong with this picture:

• If your kid begins screaming in public and you get embarrassed, you shouldn’t be having kids to begin with.  The people on the bus don’t know you and almost assuredly will never see you again. Why do you care what they think if your kid is screaming? Go yank out your balls/uterus right now. Please avoid further polluting the gene pool.
• Bailing out on a threat teaches your kid that whatever you say you’ll do, you’ll never actually do. If you don’t actually get off the damn bus, he knows he just has to carry on screaming just a little bit longer and he’ll get away with it.
• Bribing him to sit down teaches him one thing: if he screams enough, he gets candy. You’re rewarding him for being an asshole.

Kids are, in general, assholes. That’s because they don’t know any better. It’s the job of parents to tell them when they’re being assholes and then teach them how NOT to be assholes. I liken it to training a dog not to pee in the house or chew on the slippers. Yuppie parents will complain that their children are special, not some kind of animal. Well, last I checked, homo sapien was part of Kingdom Animalia (see, here’s my grade school biology being useful here, who needs Wikipedia?), and, just like your pet dog, kids need to be taught right from wrong.

When you threaten your child when he’s acting up, you bloody well better follow through on it. The best example of this I’ve seen recently was during a Canucks game I attended.  Some little twerp a couple rows up from my seat was kicking the back of the seat in front of him. His father twice told him to stop kicking, and on the third time threatened to take him home if he didn’t stop. Defiant to the last, the kid decided to kick the seat again. The father picked up his son in one arm, jackets in the other and left the game. In the first period. So let’s see, the dad was out something like $130 ($65 a ticket roughly, given the seating area), plus the parking, and he missed getting to see the game live in the arena. Worth it to teach his son a lesson? Absolutely. I don’t think that kid will be such a jackass at a hockey game again. That kid on the bus? He’ll pull the exact same stunt again because his mother would rather cave than to put up with a few strange looks.

Childhood is all about trying things out and learning how the world works.  If throwing a tantrum results in getting candy, further tantrums will result with the end goal of getting candy. If a parent stands unyielding through a tantrum, the lesson is tantrums are ineffective at achieving any goal, so they stop happening (or at the very least, they cut short fairly quickly). Know what happens if tantrums are rewarded? You get that jackass who is throwing a fit in Starbucks because that $6 latte was made with 2 pumps of foam instead of 3 and I’ll have you fired for this you dumb minimum wage monkey DON’T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH MORE I MAKE THAN YOU??!!

This just makes me feel like the Grumpy Old Man switch in me has been flipped a little too early. I need to go laugh at everyone older than me and prank one of my co-workers. This maturity crap ought to be handled by someone with real responsibilities.

You know, like a parent.

Not that it makes any sense either. You can always count on politicians to make asses of themselves in some sort of misguided attempt to appear more righteous to the people they supposedly represent. Take Stephen Harper for example. He has pretty much called his opposition unpatriotic and treasonous for forming a coalition and cooperating with the Bloc.

Excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister, but your party has attempted this twice before in the last decade (I like how Stockwell Day denies it all when it’s his name on the bottom of one of those letters). You weren’t so quick to paint the separatists in a dark light then, were you? Nope, not when they were willing to help you topple the then-Liberal government. The NDP wasn’t so evilly socialist when they agreed with you, were they?

Despite the Conservative PR machine wants everyone to believe, what the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are doing is not illegal, it is not overturning an election and it is not treasonous. The purpose of them being able to do this is to be a check against a minority government. You don’t get along? Too bad, you have to, because you don’t have enough seats to have a majority to push through whatever you want. We elect Members of Parliament in Canada, not a Prime Minister. Whoever has the most seats gets to be in charge, whether that be a single party or a coalition.

Frankly, if the Conservatives were dumb enough to think they could get away with removing federal subsidies for political parties (which amounted to a measly $26 million, not much help when there are forcasted deficits of $8 freaking billion) and the right to strike from civic workers, they deserve to be kicked out. Tack on the pathetic lies to make the opposition look bad (yes they did have not one, but two Canadian flags, not none, when they signed the coalition agreement) and Jim Flaherty saying they made a “deal with the devil” (read: Hey Quebec, Gilles Duceppe is Satan! We don’t need your stinkin’ votes!), and it’s a wonder how they thought they could ever govern effectively. You can only be assholes to the other parties when you have majority. Ask the BC Liberals when they had a 77 to 2 advantage.

Harper’s attempt to destroy the opposition rather than focusing on stimulating the economy backfired, so now he’s doing everything to hold onto power. He’s got about as much chance of that as the Leafs winning the Cup this year. His only silver lining is that the forces opposing him have no hope of actually working together, coalition agreement notwithstanding, so he can stand up afterwards and smugly say, “I told you so.” The NDP is in bed with the unions while the Liberals are in bed with big business: not exactly two entities that work well together. Tack on a bunch of whiners who don’t have a bloody clue in the Bloc and you’ve got a recipe to make Parliament look as competent as the Bush administration. Not that the Conservatives were doing such a bangup job in the first place.
Either way, Canadians lose. They either get a bully who wants to rule govern with impunity or a lame duck who completely dropped the ball at the opportunity to seize more seats in an election and is dependent on the support of a single issue party. There is no easy solution nor is there a good solution. It’s gone too far for anything to work out, so here’s an idea: every tax paying Canadian gets to kick Dion and Harper in the balls. It won’t actually fix anything, but I’ll be damned if it wouldn’t make me feel just a little bit better.

PS: Kudos to Bishnu for giving me the photo.

In my riding, James Moore is the MP.  He’s a douchebag.  He hasn’t done anything worthwhile, and tries to take credit for bringing forth issues brought forward by other organizations.  Even though Moore has brushed off anyone who does not drink the Conservative Party’s Kool-Aid, I felt it necessary to write him an e-mail criticizing his stance on the much ballyhooed Bill C-61, Canada’s version of the American DMCA (which they somehow made worse).  I received the typical, “Thank you for your e-mail, we will take it under consideration when going to Parliament blah blah blah.”  In other words, he probably ignored it.  Not surprising, but it’s the principle of the matter, right?

So what do I find in my inbox today? A mass mailout from a marketing company working for the Conservatives telling me about Harper’s plan for first time home buyers and his leadership.  This is what I get for voicing my concern as a citizen? Being placed on a spam list for political propaganda? Screw you, James Moore.  You can take your electronic flyer and shove it.

If you are one of many gum chewers who chew with your mouth open, SHUT YOUR DAMN PIE HOLE. I do not need to hear you smacking your gum. I don’t care if it’s fruity or if you need it because you inhaled that garlic infused Limburger cheese onion cake for lunch, I don’t want to hear or see it.  Close your mouth and breathe through your nose instead of acting like a 14 year old ADD Halo player on X-Box Live.

Thank you.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Why? Because they pull crap like this.  It means if you get spammed with text messages because your number ends up on some calling list, you’re footing the bill.  It’s like if Canada Post suddenly said, “Hey you know, this spam mail you’re getting, it’s costing us money to send to you.  Doesn’t matter that you can’t control it, we’re going to charge you for it anyways.”  When my Bell contract is up, I am GONE.  Of course, this assumes Rogers/Fido won’t be just as douchey.  It’s 160 bytes of data, if this causes problems you’re doing it wrong.  Ask Southeast Asia how they do it.  You can get a plan there that costs $40 a month for $5 a month, regular stuff like call display, voice mail included.  In Hong Kong, everyone has a cell phone, even the janitor making minimum wage because it’s really that cheap.  People are complaining to the CRTC, but considering the system access fee campaign has amounted to basically nothing, I have no hope that this new fee will get reversed.

On another note, I came across this new fangled hockey table.  This would be so much cooler than an air hockey table.

Jim Prentice, the Minister of Industry, has decided to become a lapdog of the recording industry by proposing a new DMCA bill, worse than the American one if you can believe it.  This would make copying a song from a CD you bought onto your MP3 player to listen to completely illegal.  You can’t even make a backup of it.  It pretty much throws fair use straight out of the window.  I’m not entirely sure how Prentice expects this to pass in a minority government with so much public outcry over it.  He’s already tried to pass this through before and failed, trying to bypass public consultation then too.  Michael Geist is a law professor that explained all the fancy legalese into plain English.
To end on a less negative note, I wish could happen at my office.  It would be all kinds of awesome.

Previously, I mentioned how the CBC was showing how its managers are competing with cat turd on levels of intelligence.  Today, they cemented their place in turd smarts history by not only losing the rights to the HNIC theme song to CTV for perpetuity, but they also are launching a campaign to let any knucklehead with access to a synthesizer and a drum machine come up with the next theme for HNIC.  Oh yeah, and it’ll be decided by the fans.  Because we all know how well fan balloting works.
In the last 3 years, the CBC has lost or gotten rid of the following:

• Grey Cup final
• Curling
• Olympics
• Chris Cuthbert
• Theme to HNIC

In the last 3 years, CTV (and subsidiary TSN) has picked up the following:

• All of the above

The CBC. Your public tax dollars, hard at work.

The following recounts a tale, a tale of annoyance, rage, hatred, stupidity and incompetence. Join me now as I tell you the story of how DHL managed to completely fail at “definitely delivering” and “proven reliability.”

We begin our story with our hero, me, ordering a colourful assortment of items from the land of awesome geektitude. On December 4th, the order was placed. The price to ship with DHL was $10 cheaper than UPS, so I figured I would take that and save a little dough. Plus, given couriers are couriers, they ought to have an equal probability of dropping the ball in the same manner. That was mistake #1, because not only did DHL drop the ball, they tossed it into a fracking black hole and said sweetly, “we’re looking into it.” The package was delivered into their hands on December 6th in the evening, and began transit on December 7th. The seemingly useful online tracker told me the package arrived in Richmond, BC on December 8th. Here’s where things started to go wrong.

On Monday, the last update on the tracker said “Left Richmond depot” at about 2pm. Nothing else updated after that, so on Tuesday I phoned DHL asking about the status of my package, since the last status update was on Saturday. The customer service rep said it left the Richmond depot and was being transferred to the Burnaby depot. Thanks dingus, that was Saturday, I just told you that. You want a cookie? It does not take 3 days to transfer a stupid package from Richmond to Burnaby unless you gave the job to a gimpy midget. “Oh, well I’ll put a trace on it and someone should call you tomorrow.”

Hate begins to build.

Wednesday comes and goes. No call. Okay, time to call DHL again. “We haven’t been able to locate your package, but I’ll tell them you called and escalate it.” So you lost my package? Hoo-freaking-ray. Time to e-mail Thinkgeek. Response: they’ve initiated a trace as well, but that could take 8 business days. Oh great, so they MIGHT find it AFTER CHRISTMAS. The upside is that Thinkgeek refunded my shipping charges because I paid for express and obviously a week is not express.

The weekend goes by, no package. By now I’m pretty annoyed and my roommate, who also had stuff in the order (Christmas presents to Ottawa no less), was also pissed off. She phoned DHL herself and got bounced around from Customer Service to Accounts Receivable to Brokerage (WTF?) and back to Customer Service. She was promised a supervisor would call her within a day (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA) and that they were submitting an escalation form. Wait a minute, isn’t that what they told me on THURSDAY when I LAST called them?
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaate.

Monday comes, no call. So my roommate calls again, because by now I’m too mad to even deal with DHL. She was told the driver “couldn’t get to it” on Saturday. Wait, what? You have a package that’s a week late and it’s NOT the first goddamn thing you deliver? Or at least ONE of the first things? You leave it until the end and then the driver just goes home? So why isn’t it delivered on Monday? “Oh, well we have to confirm your address because the driver couldn’t find it.” Are you KIDDING me??? Is your driver too stupid to use Google Maps? Does your dispatcher have give directions from a TomTom that’s been dropped in the toilet? Or did you just decide to hire a local high school dropout looking for pot money to deal with the Christmas rush?

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.

So my roommate tells them to leave it at the depot so she can pick it up, because if their delivery drivers are so stupid as to not be able to find a house two blocks off of bloody Hastings, what else kind of idiocy do they have working for them? She calls Tuesday morning to confirm the package is at the depot and they said they’d call her once they confirm that. One hour later, no call. She calls again, and was told it’s best to wait for the call because they can’t say how long it’ll take for them to confirm the package is there. Isn’t that what your barcode scanner is for?!!

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.

I bet you can guess what happens next. Yup, no call. To her anyways. DHL decides to call ME at 4pm to confirm the delivery address. The same address that my roommate confirmed previously. If I wasn’t directly involved, this would be such a comedy of errors. However, I am, so I start chewing out the girl on the other end. Her reply? “I work in the warehouse and just got this today, so I don’t know what happened to your package previously.” Lather, rinse, repeat. Since I had work to do (because, you know, I actually DO my job), I hung up instead of wasting more time listening to more vocal diarrhea. Surprisingly enough, the package gets delivered on Wednesday…in the afternoon. That’s right, they’ve had my package for 10 days and lost it twice, it’s STILL not priority to deliver first thing in the morning.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.

The end result was that my roommate had to ship her gifts express to Ottawa, which may not even get there for Christmas. Way to go, DHL, not so much as an apology from your CSRs. Thinkgeek apologized, even though it wasn’t even their fault. For warehouse incompetence, driver stupidity and worse customer service than a phone-in tech support line, DHL gets my nod for Douchebag Company of the Year That I Had to Deal With.

Being a history minor that focused primarily on the 20th century, you can kind of expect some kind of response from me when discussing the events surrounding this time of year. After the First World War, we swore: Never Again. Twenty years later, we broke that promise. After the Second World War, we swore we would never forget. But have we?

No, I don’t believe we have, not entirely anyways. There are still memorial events around Victory Square, Remembrance Day specials and war movies on TV. However, something was amiss this year. I didn’t see a single poppy stand, can or tray person anywhere. I work downtown, not that far from Gastown. My company’s office is in a building with a major tourist attraction and a campus of a major university. It’s across the street from Waterfront Station, a major transportation hub. This weekend I was at Coquitlam Centre, the biggest mall here next to Metrotown. In all of these places, no one was handing out poppies, no store even had a can to hold donations for the Legion. For a promise of “Lest we forget,” we sure as hell aren’t doing even the simplest things to fulfill it.

Every year I like to get a poppy. For one, the pins aren’t that sturdy for the most part, and, after a week’s worth of wear, I usually bend it, so a new poppy is good. Besides, it goes to supporting the Legion and the veterans. But I had to recycle last year’s poppy because no one was handing out poppies. I also hear that no one’s doing it on the main Burnaby campus of SFU either. So what the hell is going on? It’s rather disheartening to see that no stores could even take the time to call up their local Legion and dedicate a small part of their cashier/customer service counter space for a poppy can. Does it really take that much effort?
I understand that the WW2 veterans are getting fewer in numbers as the years go by. Most of them are in their 90s and really shouldn’t be out there in the cold for hours handing out poppies. But where are the rest of the veterans, the ones of later conflicts? Korea? Gulf War? Afghanistan? Why aren’t any of these guys doing poppy duty? What of the kids? Air cadets? Scouts? Where are they? I know they still exist, and it mystifies me as to why none of them have taken up the torch in this regard.  Doubly so since I’ve seen them do it in years past.
It doesn’t really help my cynicism when there are always douchebags that don’t shut up during the 2 minutes of silence requested during public gatherings. What really irked me was when I saw a commercial on TV advertising a Veterans’ Day sale. In an age of political correctness up the wazoo, I’m curious as to how a marketing campaign like that got the go ahead. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given the ads for World Trade Center silver dollars and scrap metal. Mind you, 9/11 has sort of lost some significance with Rudy Giuliani uttering the phrase every second word.

Maybe this year was just an off year poppy-wise. Bad logistics or poor planning, whatever, hopefully it’s fixed for next year so this doesn’t happen again. Regardless of whether you got a poppy this year, I hope you take the time to reflect on the significance of Remembrance Day. If I may take a paraphrased page out of another chapter of history: Remember, remember the eleventh of November. We made that promise; we ought to keep it.