Musings & Meanderings

Ten Months & Counting for a Phone Installation
No we’re not in a rural area. This is a city of over 3 million.

I moved into this building in October 2005. Needing 2 extra phone lines, we set up the installation service with Bell. It took 3 visits to get the temporary lines working reliably, and by that time the dig to bury the permanent lines had to be postponed till spring thaw.

Not to worry, we were told, all would be completed by end of March.
My calendar says August is ending.

Bell has been here at least 10 times during the past 10 months, including for service interruption due to weather knocking out the temporary lines. Each visit required a minimum of 3 hours including 2 men in a truck with travel time and gas. During their most recent visit, I picked up a business line to make a call and found it being used by one of the repairmen to chat to a buddy about the bars they’d been to that weekend.

Excuse me?

Oh, he was just using my line while he waited for another guy to come back and that wouldn’t be more than an hour.

I’m not paying anything for this.

Exasperated, I ask, how long would you guys stay in business as a private company? You’d be bankrupt in no time!

Where’ve you been, he responds. The phone industry was deregulated here years ago. We have competition now!

Really?

Yeah! he says, haven’t you ever heard of Rogers?

Right. You mean the cable monopoly that now has the right to offer phone service just as the phone monopoly can offer video? Sigh. Would you please just fix the danged phone so I can go back to work???

Yes ma’am, well it won’t be today ma’am, but I promise it’ll be done shortly. The guy was here for 3 hours of waiting for another guy who didn’t show and then left.

The ‘final’ installation was booked for last week. No show. Calls to 611 elicited a sincere apology and a re-booking for October. Now we’ll see if they can get this done in exactly one year.

Guesstimate how much these 2 ordinary phone lines have cost so far and tell me how any company could stay in business.

What bothers me most about all this is the spin and the resulting perception that we have free enterprise in this country.

A quote from a book review by Jean-Guy Rens of
Deregulating Telecommunications: U.S. and Canadian Telecommunications
by Kevin G. Wilson:

In decision after decision, Wilson draws quite a disconcerting picture. What everyone persists in describing as “deregulation” never took place. The phenomenon that actually occurred was, rather, “re-regulation”. Indeed, by introducing competition into telecommunications, the regulatory body quickly discovered that new entrants would be unable to dislodge the former monopolies on a level playing field. To seize a bridgehead in the telecommunications market, the new entrants needed help. The CRTC helped them by inventing “asymmetrical” competition, which imposes a relatively heavier constraint on former monopolies. What was being created was a new regulatory framework that “promotes competition, not by removing regulation, but by giving regulation a new pro-competitive orientation” (p.261).

Isn’t the bottom line here that your average Canadian is working for the public purse the first 9 months of the year while most every service the government controls (especially medicine) continues to deteriorate?

We don’t have time to notice any of this right now, though, because we’re all trapped on the phone with “Emily …your automated phone attendant.”

The tiny restaurant is empty save for the proprietor working by the Gaggia machines that have drawn me in for my fix. As I move in close to the counter, he turns his face up with a welcoming smile. It’s a beautiful boy face, although this is not a child, and I can see it freshly washed over flannel pajamas, trusting to be lovingly fed its share of family breakfast. As he registers my detailed Java preparation request, looking eager to obey, happy to work, I try to decide whether the smooth skin is more the color of chocolate ice cream or mocha cream cake.

Over the hiss of steam we chat about quitting smoking, and he tells me how his seven months of abstinence came about at the request of his young son. It has been a very hard thing to do, he says, sounding as though he’d say it the same way if his boy’s request had been to move the world, as though anything motivated by love and joy makes its difficulty meaningless.

I ask where he is from.
The lilting joy is joined by inhuman knowledge of sorrow as he answers, Somalia.

He wants to go back, and as he tells me this I feel tears and yearning flood the room, although the dust motes in a slant of afternoon sun float undisturbed in the peaceful space. Not with his son yet, who is too young for a dangerous trip. First he just needs to see, to touch the earth where he watched his mother die. There is no family left there. His surviving brothers are scattered from London to LA. In his gentle voice sing a pantheon of ghosts and a flood of memories …love, hate, pain… while the sweet boy man face remains smooth and calm.

We speak a little of the sorrows of lost family, and of human atrocities too incomprehensible to exist.
When I am paying and preparing to leave, he suddenly looks at me in naked hope, only because, perhaps, I am someone’s mother.
His face follows me for days, soft and gentle …astonishing still.
If I could paint, this gentle face, that bravely showed me a spectrum worthy of Dante over a quiet cup of coffee, would undoubtedly challenge me for months.

There’s a delightful woman being interviewed on television, my mother tells me the other day. She’s identified the cause of terrorism and written a book about it. Who hasn’t? Childhood trauma. Gag.

After I get past my knee-jerk rage at yet another apologist depiction of the perpetrator as victim, I start pondering how this Soviet refugee (mom) represents a drop in the ocean of the development of socialist thought in North America in the 20th century.

They escaped during WWII. Her mother was born at the turn of the century, and survived the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, and two world wars there. My grandfather was taken repeatedly by the KGB and finally only his blood returned to mark the door of their home. Every other family member was killed or disappeared.

I grew up believing that my parents (who met here) were capitalists, grateful for freedom, for the gift of a new life in a system of free enterprise. Half a century later, I’m watching in dismay as mom displays an increasing desire for care and succor from the state, and happily joins in a pity party for insane and brutal murderers.

This is very hard to see, and harder to comprehend.

I’m glimpsing those underlying theories poking up their ugly heads and thinking about the fact that she was one of the first generation of children educated fully under the Soviet regime. If that indoctrination of a child (whose parents refused to capitulate and refused to renounce) who singlehandedly dragged her mother to freedom through countless warzones remains intact below the surface, then how much deeper the conditioning of subsequent generations.

Mom regularly tells me about new arrivals from Russia who promptly turn around and go back because it’s ‘too hard here’ and ‘they aren’t valued and appreciated’.

Hmm, does this sound at all familiar?

Many WWII survivors seem cold and crude and harsh to us, their lucky pampered children and grandchildren. I can’t bear to see them bow their heads in shame as they get older. There is no shame in survival. I and my children wouldn’t be here, free and alive, if you didn’t do whatever you had to. Be proud. May we all live free or die fighting.

Fav Read Today

A reminder for today:

TORONTO, ON – June 3, 2006
Seventeen Arrested on Anti-Terrorism Charges

On June 4, 2006, CFRB Talk Radio in Toronto chose this news as the hot midday call-in topic. Not one person called in.

We don’t have any terrorists in Canada, right?

When I met you in the neighborhood, through my family, in my workplace, the world we inhabited was smaller, the boundaries easier to define.

When most everyone we knew worked at the same job or profession until retirement, we’d always know, more or less, where to find them and what they’d be doing.

When it cost a small fortune in either time or money to connect with anyone far away, our options were limited in a way they no longer are.

Many more options mean so many more possibilities and therefore more attendant risk factors. Is there more of me too, or less?

Do we respond to the expanding horizons and escalating change by becoming more focused? Maybe an endless menu is a good thing, as long as I don’t starve by the time I get through it. Sometimes a session of Pin The Tail On The Donkey starts to sound appealing.
It’s easier and faster to do things electronically (until you run into a snag), but I miss many aspects of human contact that are disappearing.

If I see you every day or every week, it is easier to learn to trust you, I think, but maybe the things we reveal of ourselves will be different.
Will we know more or less of one another?

I’m musing on trust today.

How to meet people, network, connect, form relationships, find the right anyone do anything with …the more we are physically separated by technology, the more I hear and read people addressing these questions… perhaps this is only one question. Maybe the reality hasn’t changed at all, and the only thing different is the extent to which we can now hear everyone ‘thinking out loud’. The openness is fresh air, yet stepping into it can be to encounter a claustrophobia inducing cacophony. How strange, really, to be able to hear so many thinking out loud while talking to no one.

As our physical landscape, influenced by mobility and global perspectives, begins to shift beyond established homogeneous cultural environments, our daily interactions gradually change in form. Are they changing in substance? Certainly one of the most dramatic changes in our societal structure shaped through recent decades by media and increased communication is the erosion of trust.

Trust occupies the core of every relationship, family, personal, or business, yet rarely do we name or consciously examine it. It is the pure, uncluttered bond of the scientist to facts, and of the devoted to the tenets of their faith in every religion. How strange, I think, that people so readily pledge their deepest loyalty to intangible concepts, yet often balk at doing the same with another human being.

To trust and be trusted means being responsible. It carries obligations and consequences together with rewards. It is a gift and an honor and a burden.

Is trust basic to our nature or a construct?