Category: Social Media

Canada Post May Strike Out

To be honest, I haven’t written a letter in over twenty years.  I haven’t mailed a cheque since the last century.  I don’t buy stamps anymore, and the only thing I get delivered regularly to my house is a magazine subscription that never seems to run out.  The post office and I don’t interact except on occasional mornings when I say hi to the letter carrier and ask her, “How’s it going?”  So why am I upset about a postal strike?

Like most Canadians I have a love/hate relationship with Canada Post.  I rarely use their services but when I do, I want them to perform perfectly.  I hate junk mail, but I want the post office to pay for itself without my tax dollars.  I think letter carriers have a cushy job, but you don’t see me hauling a heavy bag of pizza flyers around in the pouring rain.  And I’m shocked that it costs… (What does it cost?) … to mail a letter to New Brunswick, but I’m willing pay 10 times that much to follow celebrity gossip on my smart phone.  The thing is Canada Post does a really good job providing a service that very few people need anymore.  I’m worried that the union is going to destroy it before it can evolve into something useful again.

Here’s a brief history of the post office.  It doesn’t cover everything and it isn’t even totally true, but — trust me — most Canadians see it this way.  In the way back days, Canada Post was a valuable part of the Canadian landscape.  People wrote letters to each other.  They corresponded (it was like being connected but way more elaborate.)  It was the way friends and families shared their news, photographs and ideas.  Getting a letter was a big deal, and people had penpals for the specific purpose of writing to each other.  When people went on vacation, they sent postcards home.  At Christmas time, Canadians sent millions of cards to each other, just to say hi once a year.  It was the way people communicated — especially over long distances — because everybody could afford stamps.  Kids sent away for stuff that came in the mail.  Household bills were sent and paid by mail.    There were mail order catalogues and mail-in coupons.  It was an accepted way to do business.   This went on for decades.

Somewhere in the 60s going on 70s, the post office, a stalwart institution for a century, started to lose credibility.  There were tons of reasons for this, but it was mostly because escalating costs had to be passed on to the public — somehow.  Postal rates had to be increased and postal service had to be decreased — just to balance the books.  At the same time, however, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) who may or may not be called militant (depending on which side of the picket line you’re on) began flexing its muscles to get higher pay and better working conditions for its members.  The result was a series of strikes and slowdowns that stalled our country’s ability to communicate and do business.  It also soured the public’s relationship with the post office.  Ordinary people saw the union as the bad guy — a greedy loose cannon — willing and able to hold the entire country up for ransom in order to get what they wanted.  It didn’t help that most of the union bluster usually came during the last 17 shopping days before Christmas every year, either.  Over the course of the next decade, Canada Post devolved into a necessary evil, and very few people (who didn’t work there) had a good word to say about them.  The problem was, as the corporation tried desperately to stop the bleeding ($600 million deficit in 1981 alone) CUPW didn’t relent.  In reality, the exploding costs weren’t always the union’s fault — but the public saw it that way — and nobody down at CUPW saw the writing on the wall.

People started bypassing Canada Post if they wanted anything important done.  Businesses used courier services, people sent parcels by UPS or Greyhound, and lower long distance rates encouraged Aunt May to call (instead of write) when she had news.  Then along came fax machines, e-mail and the Internet.  By the mid 90s, Canada Post was irrelevant to the vast majority of Canadians.

Today, Canada Post has seriously rebounded.  By their own account, they handle 40 million pieces of mail a day, over the largest postal area in the world.  They actually make a profit every year.  Canada Post (and the people who work there) are doing a good job.  In order to guarantee that my never-ending magazine subscription would continue to show up every month Canada Post took the ingenious step of becoming one of the largest purveyors of advertising in the country.  It’s that junk mail we all know and despise; that’s what’s paying the bills.  However, this is not going to go on forever because the cash cow is drying up.  Canada is one of the most connected countries in the world — mainly because mail service had been so unreliable.  As businesses look to catch the next generation’s demographics and lower their advertising costs, they’re turning away from printing expensive paper flyers, delivered — day after day — to your door.  They’re going to the Internet faster than Canada Post can replace the lost revenue.  Our post office is slowly softening to death.

Unfortunately, the dinosaurs at the CUPW still think it’s 1965.  They believe in the antagonistic relationship between labour and management.  They don’t understand times have changed.  The downtrodden workers of the 40s and 50s have retired.  Canada Post isn’t a Third World sweatshop and everybody knows it.  After all these years, the CUPW has little or no credibility with regular Canadians.  It’s going to be very difficult for them to convince the public that workers at Canada Post are getting the shaft.  Canada Post isn’t essential anymore, and any job action will be met with indifference, at best.   A strike of any magnitude will irreparably damage Canada Post – the reason the CUPW exists in the first place.  Instead of sticking to their 19th century trade union guns, they should be trying to reinvent themselves for the 21st century.

Personally, I’m upset because I like the post office.  I don’t want to see it go under.  It’s part of what I grew up with.  If I have to read my magazine online, I’ll do it, but I’m old enough (and nostalgic enough) to hate to see a time when Canadians no longer say, “Hey, did we get any mail?”

Food Snobs and the Quinoa Hoax

I‘ve been eating quinoa for several years now.  Like most things I eat, it just showed up on my plate one day and when I didn’t whine about it, it kept coming back.  However, I had no idea quinoa was cool until I was given a free lecture the other night at a dinner party.  Apparently, quinoa is an “ancient grain” and the best thing since zippers on jeans.  It has more nutrients, phosphorents, vitamins and protein per weight by volume (or vice versa) than anything else on the planet.  It can fix migraines, heart disease and … menopause?   Its calcium content is beyond compare.  It has enough fibre in it to cure whatever ails ya.  It fights free radical, better than James Bond.  And probably if you eat enough of it you will see Jesus – if you believe in Him — or some hocus-pocus god from Uruguay (if you don’t.)  I learned quite a few things the other night, but mostly I found out that food snobs give me a shooting pain.

Let me set the record straight on quinoa.  It might be called an “ancient grain,” but first of all, it isn’t even a grain.  Google tells us that it’s not a member of the grass family; it’s an edible seed.  Plus it isn’t actually any more ancient than most of the regular grains, like wheat, that ordinary people have been eating ever since Grog the Cro-Magnon got tired of hunting and bought riverfront property in Mesopotamia — about 10,000 years ago.  And finally, Google tells us, quinoa comes from South America where it was the staple food of the Incas for thousands of years.  Everybody ate it.  They practically worshipped the stuff.  The question then becomes: if quinoa, is literally stalk and kernel above everything else ever chewed and swallowed, how come the entire Inca nation, including an army of 80,000, got their ass kicked by Francisco Pizarro and 170 Spaniards, one Saturday afternoon in 1534?  The Incas might not have suffered from migraines or menopause, but they obviously couldn’t fight very well with that muck in their belly.  For my money, I think I’d be finding out what the Spaniards had for breakfast before I started making wild claims about “ancient grains.”

Here’s the real meal deal on quinoa and most of the other trendy foods that have been creeping into our diet lately.  They’re food.  They’ve been around for thousands of years.  They taste good (if the cook knows what to do with them) and they’re better for you than 90% of the processed food you find on Safeway shelves.  That’s it.  You can make the same claims about an orange, a lamb chop or spelt the (actual) ancient grain of the Bulgarians.  Quinoa is no more or less healthy than any of those.   It has all that fibre, calcium, manganese, copper etc. in it because it comes in a bag – all by itself.  It hasn’t been processed to death.

What food snobs don’t understand is it’s not the foods we eat that cause problems.  It’s the adventures that food has to go through to get to our plate that’re bad for us.  The things processors do to food ought to be illegal.  Read the labels!  Honestly, when Wonder Bread gets hold of quinoa, there isn’t going to be enough food value left in it to keep a good-sized cat alive.  And when it finally makes it to the Munchy-Crunchy Snack Bar stage, no amount of “Vitamin C added” will be able to save it.

You don’t have to look any further than breakfast.  One of the “healthiest” breakfast cereals around advertises itself as containing something called fibre twigs and clusters of whole grains.  What the hell is a fibre twig?  Is it a small shoot from a wild fibre tree?  And, by the way, what’s holding those whole grain clusters together?  Magic?  People who eat this stuff spit on Cheerios.  There’s another “healthy” cereal on the shelf that doesn’t even call itself food.  The ads say it’s a “meal replacement.”   I’m scared to look at the list of ingredients on that one.  I don’t care what the claims are, in general, if you’re going to have breakfast out of a box, you’d be just are far ahead to eat the box.  Notice, most of the cereal ads say “part of a nutritious breakfast” and show a picture of toast and orange
juice.

This is the problem with food snobs.  They think there’s something wrong with toast and jam.  They’ll kick people out of the way to get at clusters of whole grains held together by God only knows what chemical and turn up their noses at a scrambled egg – which has absolutely every nutrient needed for human survival (cholesterol aside.)  They also don’t realize that just because nobody’s ever heard of something doesn’t always make it better for you.  Sometimes, finding that new fruit or vegetable in the health food store is the result of refrigeration and the global economy.  It’s not an Amazonic cure for cancer.  It’s just an exotic version of the ordinary apple or carrot we all grew up with.

You’re Only as Stupid as the Warning Label Says You Are

Recently, while waiting for the cable guy to hook up my new HDTV, I took a moment to quit doing the man/guy thing of feigning interest in all things electronic and passed the time reading the Manufacturer’s Warnings.  It was an interesting read.  It cautioned me against doing all manner of dumb stuff to my new TV, like hitting the screen with a sharp object or operating the unit underwater.  While I can imagine going Elvis on a bad hockey result, I don’t know why anybody would want to watch the news in the pool.  How silly!

Of course, stupid product warnings have been around since the mid 1970s, when corporations started telling people their coffee was hot and not to drink the Drano.  They have accelerated since then to the point where just about anything you buy, these days, comes with a checklist of “thou shalt nots” longer than the Ten Commandants.  For example (and these are just a few simple ones)
“For external use only” – on a hair curling iron
“Caution: Do not spray in eyes” – on deodorant
“Do not use orally” – on a toilet bowl cleaning brush
“Choking Hazard: This toy is a small ball” – written in two languages on a
small ball
And there are a lot more out there that get a lot more complicated.

There is a collective idea that we have these stupid warnings because our society is under siege from bloodsucking lawyers who will do anything to initiate lawsuits.  This is not true.  Yes, our society is under siege from bloodsucking lawyers (this, by the way, is a general comment, not directed at any particular bloodsucking lawyer.)  However, we have stupid warnings on products because people are stupid.  I’m not talking about high profile Darwin Award stupidity; just everyday ordinary incredible acts of Dumb and Dumber.  You know for a fact that there’s some fool out there who will give the aforementioned small ball to a two year old and wonder how in the hell he got it in his mouth.  And this is not unusual behaviour.  People on bicycles, weave in and out of traffic, wearing nothing more than shorts, an iPod and a helmet, as if the helmet were a shield of invulnerability.  I’ve seen a guy staple up outdoor electric lights while they are plugged in.  People who are driving, race red lights while eating pizza, attach Ikea furniture to their roofs with twine and I’m not even going to mention texting the spouse to see what to pick up for dinner.

Get them out of their cars and they don’t get any smarter.  Recently, a family was doing some spring gardening, using a device called the Weed Wand.  The Weed Wand is an advertised alternative to the chemical warfare we’ve been using (and most cities have been banning, thank God) to control weeds.  What it is, is a snout attached to a handheld propane tank that shoots flames directly at the weeds and kills them by cremation.  (I’m not making this up; this is a real product.)  Guess what?  They set the house on fire!  These are ordinary people, but their actions do beg the question: who buys a flamethrower — even a small one — to tidy up the driveway?  When asked about it, the guy said, “In my opinion, it’s not a safe product, and we certainly weren’t using it in a reckless fashion…. I don’t think products like that should be on the market.”  You can read all about it here but my point is – it’s a flamethrower!

The problem is our society is basically benevolent.  We have eliminated most of the dangerous elements in our world and control as many of the hazardous ones as possible.  However, in our zeal to make a risk-free society, we’ve created a couple of generations of people who think this is the natural order of things.  They believe the world is a safe place.  They wander around as if nothing on this good green earth is ever going to hurt them.  Then, when something does, they think there’s been a malfunction somewhere.  I’ll grant you that they might not be as stupid as I think they are but they sure act like it.

The reason corporations put all those idiot warnings on their products is — sure as hell — somebody somewhere is going to find a way to poke themselves in the eye, lob off a finger or operate the unit underwater and electrocute themselves.  Then they’ll scream bloody murder that the manufacturer didn’t warn them about the dangers and run for the lawyers.  Sometimes, I wonder if our well regulated society has beaten the self preservation gene out of our species.  I’m not saying we should return to the days of dog-eat-dog/devil take the hindmost, but every once in a while, just a touch of common sense wouldn’t hurt.