Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2016-11-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2016. PAGE 5. Other Views In praise of big fat chairs appiness is a butterfly which pursued, remains just beyond your grasp. Sit down quietly, and it may alight upon you." — Nathaniel Hawthorne I don't know whether that's true, but I've spent a lifetime acting as if it was. Butterflies or no butterflies, I am a guy who is happy to sit anywhere, anytime on just about anything. I've roosted on bar stools, fence rails, barber's chairs, church pews, rockers, wingbacks, Ottomans, Adirondacks and unadorned cedar stumps — any protuberance or upwelling that offers a brief respite from gravity. Show me an oasis that offers a place to park my butt and I'll back in and settle down before you can say, "Take a load off." Which is why I greeted the news from Cineplex Entertainment with a dozen Hosannas and a quartet of Hail Mary's. And I'm not even Catholic. The news is, the movie giant is installing 1,000 motorized recliners in selected movie theatres in the city I live next door to. Capitol 6 Cinemas promises to follow suit with 564 luxury recliners in its theatres. It's an exploding trend in movie houses across North America. The proprietors are doing everything they can to entice customers away from their living room TVs and back into the movie palaces of yesteryear. What kind of luxury seating are they offering? The swanky Goin kind. High backed, extra wide and plushly padded with footrests that shoot out and lift your feet off the ground as soon as you lean back. All this and popcorn too? Sign me up. This return to big fat chairs in movie houses is especially refreshing because the rest of society seems to be galloping in the opposite direction. Seats in modern busses, trains and subway cars are brutal monuments to minimalism. They practically declare war on the human bum. And don't get me started on airplane seating. Sure they're padded — sort of, and recline — a little. But they're so whittled down and crammed together that flying economy feels like riding in an ice cube tray. It's happening in our work spaces too. In many offices, chairs have been replaced by `stability balls'. Desk workers are encouraged to toil while perched like over- achieving hens on armless, backless exercise balls. I know a lot of office workers who have tried to work while squatting on stability balls. I don't know a single one who has lasted more than a week. Some doughty spartans of the workplace eschew even the stability ball. They prefer to work standing up, or, even more perverse, at a treadmill desk. It comes with a built-in desktop, calorie -counter and — I can't believe I'm writing this — a speedometer that allows a worker to trot from half a kilometre to 6.5 kilometres per hour while working. 0' Brave New World! Now you can type up those warehouse requisitions and run a marathon at the same time. Stability balls and treadmill desks share one defining characteristic: they're both exhausting. Memo to head office: Humans have been using chairs with arm rests and back supports for centuries for one simple reason: they work. Me? I have a stressless chair — aka a recliner, a LazyBoy, or as I like to think of it — my Big Fat Chair. It comes with a footstool, it reclines far enough to let me look at the ceiling, it even has a mini -desktop attachment to support a laptop, a heavy book or a saucer bearing a peanut -butter and banana sandwich. Yes, it was obscenely expensive and yes, I love it very much. If it's legal I may even one day be buried in my stressless chair. In the meantime I intend to spend an outrageous amount of time just sitting in it. Watching for butterflies. above and beyond... or not Last week I received an oddity at the local post office: two packages with the same tracking number. Why was it an oddity? Well it turns out that never happens. Packages, even packages from the same order from online retailers, each come with their own tracking number. One tracking number per box. At the time, I chalked it up to someone asleep at the warehouse. My wife had ordered two books, so I figured, in this world fascinated with packing materials, they decided to send the books in two boxes even though they would fit in one. It was during my lunch break that I received the odd packages, so I tossed them into my car and thought nothing of it until I got home that day. Ashleigh and I opened the boxes, finding the items she had ordered in one and another person's order in the other. The other order was destined for a person in Toronto and, as far as we could see, had no connection whatsoever to ours. After a brief discussion with my wife in which she reminded me that the presence of a Lego set doesn't allow me to forget my morals and keep the package, I found myself on the phone with the company responsible for the shipping situation. After explaining to the customer service representative what had happened, I was informed that this was an unheard of situation, not just to the individual I was talking to, but to pretty much everyone he could chat with during the rather lengthy period he placed me on hold. I laughed, he laughed, and then he told me there was really no way he could remedy the situation from his end. Essentially, what had happened was two labels were printed for our order with the same address and tracking information on it and they were placed on two different orders. Unfortunately, because we weren't the intended recipient of the second package, he couldn't print a return label for us with the Denny Scott Denny's Den order information. Simultaneously, because my wife's order was fulfilled completely, he couldn't print a return label that wouldn't somehow result in her being refunded for the order, which we were not planning on returning. After explaining to the individual that the company's closest retail outlet wasn't exactly around the corner from my home in Blyth, he proposed another solution: pay to mail the package back to the warehouse then call the company who will issue a refund. To me, this seemed to be one of those, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," situations, and I for one don't believe Wimpy ever ended up paying for his burgers. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and watch some Popeye cartoons. I'm sure you'll pick it up eventually. Against my better judgement, I said I would talk to my wife about it — after all, if a refund was issued it would have to be to her credit card because she was the one that made the original purchase. The conversation roughly went as follows: Me: "They want us to ship the package back and they will refund us." Ash: "No." Me: "No, what? I didn't ask a question." Ash: "No, give me the phone, I'm calling them back." Fortunately for me, Ashleigh is often the ying to my yang. Whereas I'm usually happy to go above and beyond what is necessary if someone asks me, she reminds me that sometimes it isn't right that people ask so much of others. While we did eventually find a way to get the package back to a retail outlet (that involved a relative dropping it off on their way past, a favour that we really shouldn't have to ask) it was kind of an eye-opening situation for me. This isn't the first time I've just assumed that I should do more than what was absolutely needed of me. Years ago I worked at a fairly well-known coffee chain in Goderich and a regular customer got stuck in the drive-thru. Apparently his fuel gauge didn't work and he had misjudged just how much fuel he had left in the tank. My manager and I were the only two people in the store who didn't balk at the idea of pushing a truck out of the drive-thru so we got behind the bumper of the old truck and pushed it. Apparently, my manager had intended to just push the truck out of the drive-thru and then let the truck owner handle the issue himself, but that thought never even crossed my mind. After all, there was a gas station less than 200 feet from the coffee shop. On the way back, he said we probably should have just left the truck in a parking spot at the coffee shop, but he was glad to know that I go above and beyond for a customer when the need arises. Whether it's nature or nurture, I can't say, but I've always done those kinds of things and never regretted it. However, situations like the mislabelled package remind me there is an important distinction between going above and beyond and being a door mat. Had Ashleigh not decided to take matters into her own hands, we would likely be out a bit of money to ship the package back and waiting patiently for it to show back up on her credit card. As with all things in life, balance is important. It's good to go above and beyond, but sometimes it's good to remember that the onus is always on each of us to make sure we dedicate the time and resources to having a good life of our own. 4111. Shawn At Loughlin Shawn's Sense No place to hide As the National Hockey League season began late last month one Montreal Canadiens fan made his way around the internet for all the wrong reasons. And no, it wasn't Citizen reporter Denny Scott. It was on Oct. 20 at the Bell Centre in Montreal and the Canadiens beat the Arizona Coyotes by a score of 5-2. Of note for Blyth residents is that the village's own Justin Peters spent some time in net for the Coyotes after starting goaltender Louis Domingue allowed four goals in just over 25 minutes on the ice. Peters stopped 23 of the 24 pucks that came his way for an impressive showing in relief. However, we're not here to talk hockey — even if Justin's parents live just a few doors down from me. We're here to talk about bathroom etiquette in the age of smartphones. What came out of that game was a photo that has been shared on a number of sports websites, including some reputable ones like Vice and Yahoo! The photo depicts a young fan relieving himself at one of the Bell Centre's many urinals with a fully -stocked, freshly - purchased serving of stadium nachos stashed under the aforementioned urinal. The picture is gross, there's no doubt. To place food under a receptacle for your urine, while you're in the act of urinating into it, is simply a difficult thought process to comprehend. However, the bigger picture here is that someone has taken a picture of this man going to the bathroom for all the world to see. Most of us now walk around with a camera in our pockets 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the form of a smartphone. Those phones are also, in the vast majority of cases, connected to the internet, meaning that it takes just a few thumbprints on the screen to take a picture of what's going on in front of you and broadcast it out to the world. If someone were to walk into a public bathroom with a digital SLR camera (equipment used by professional photographers the world over) and take pictures of men or women going to the bathroom, that person would be promptly arrested and charged. However, because the picture was taken covertly with a smartphone and the people of the internet have deemed it disgusting/hilarious/interesting, it's now seemingly allowed in this brave new world. It's not uncommon to hear about someone stashing a hidden camera in a public bathroom to capture images of people, usually women, going to the bathroom. The accused is usually deemed a pervert and faces a whole host of charges. Call me old-fashioned, but there's just something about it that doesn't sit well with me. The restroom is one of the few places left in the world one should feel safe and now people have to worry, whether they're doing something deemed disgusting or not (frankly most of what goes on in a public bathroom is disgusting in one way or another), that their picture may end up plastered all over the internet the next day because one of their fellow restroom -goers snapped their picture. Earlier this year, a Playboy model snapped a candid picture of a woman showering in a gym change room for the same reasons and found herself in some hot water as a result. I can't imagine that a woman showering wants her picture all over the internet any more than a man going to the bathroom does. Whether you deem what this fan did to his nachos as disgusting or not, should he not be granted the same level of privacy we'd all like ourselves?