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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-03-26, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2015. PAGE 5. Of all the social niceties we observe in our day-to-day lives few are more confusing than the one called ‘tipping’. Tips. An acronym, one folk tale tells us, that stands for To Insure Personal Service. The French call it a ‘pourboire’, meaning ‘Hey bartender...have a drink on me’. Other cultures, other names – baksheesh, lagniappe, perk or to be perfectly crass about it – bribe. I go up to the counter and place my order in a Victoria coffee shop. The cashier punches it in, then spins the electronic sales pad around for insertion of my credit card. “ADD A TIP” the screen commands me and offers three options: 15, 20 or 30 per cent. Umm, actually, seeing as how I wasn’t occupying a table or engaging the services of an actual waiter and all I wanted was a lousy cup of coffee, I was thinking more along the lines of... zero per cent. But there isn’t a button for that. There’s a line-up behind me. The cashier is humming and drumming her fingers. Like a putz I cave and punch in 20 per cent. That comes to a tip of half a buck for a cup of coffee. Which is downright loony considering there’s a newspaper delivery guy who gets up at the crack of dawn six days a week to make sure I’ve got my morning paper. There’s a postal person who slogs through rain sleet and whatever else the weather gods can sling at her to deliver my mail. Sure, they get a piece of Christmas cake and a card when Yuletide rolls around, but that’s not quite the same as a cash stipend every time they serve me. I tip my taxi driver but not my bus driver, the parking valet but not my dry cleaner. If life was fair and folks got paid for services rendered, I’d have showered $20 bills on the captain and crew of Westjet flight 154 last week – they brought me safely down to earth from 30,000 feet! All I gave them was a cheesy ‘Thanks, eh?’ as I filed off the plane. When I stay in a hotel I leave a tip for chambermaids I’ll never meet, but I wouldn’t think of slipping a fiver to my bank clerk who corrects my lousy math and reminds me of my account number several times a week. It’s against the law to tip in an Australian casino or in an American government office. Offer a tip in Beijing and you’ll be frowned at; do it in Hong Kong and you’ll get a big smile. Pay for a New York cab ride with a credit card and you’ll get three tip options: 20 per cent, 25 per cent or 30 per cent. Thirty per cent? Who makes these crazy rules? Probably an American. When it comes to slipping ‘a little something’ to your server, Americans wrote the book. You can sit in a London pub all afternoon and chat with the bartender. He’ll be embarrassed if you try to tip him. In America, not so much. I learned that the hard way in a Buffalo tap room. There I was slurping Diet Cokes and scarfing free peanuts, chatting with the bartender. “Where ya from?” he asked me after my fourth of fifth Coke. “Canada,” I told him. “Really?” he said polishing a glass. “So what’s the difference between a Canadian and a canoe?” I told him I had no idea. He pushed a saucer of peanuts toward me and whispered “A canoe tips.” Arthur Black Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Journalists are really not given a fair shake in the media (which is ironic, but I’ll get to that in the moment) because of a little thing I like to call internet sensationalism. You watch television shows or movies and journalists are one of two things: scumbags interested in nothing but the scoop or superheroes using the mild-mannered reporter guise when not saving lives. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually met a reporter who was a superhero on the side. I have, however, met many non-scumbag reporters, so I think something is getting lost in translation here. People out there claim the media controls content and that news sources are the worst among them. If that’s true (and this is where the irony comes in), wouldn’t we want to make people believe that journalists and reporters aren’t bad people? Wouldn’t we use that control to make people think we are more like, say, Clark Kent and less like, say, Kate Mara’s character Zoe Barnes in House of Cards who sleeps with her sources? Well the answer is, we don’t control it. We can write the journalistic equivalent of spun gold but, if it doesn’t get shared, then it dies the moment the next issue comes out. Normally, that isn’t a problem. Around Huron County (and especially The Citizen’s readership area) people are usually more than willing to say, “Hey, did you see what was in the paper this morning about XX?” XX could be anything from wind turbines to political remuneration to farming bylaws. There’s only one thing XX is guaranteed to be and that’s important to the person sharing the information. When you go broader, however, when you go to the internet, sharing becomes a bit more complicated. Last week I was talking to an old public school friend of mine who now works for the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority (MVCA). He was telling me that, since the MVCA subscribes to all the local papers, he always checks out my column. I told him he would have to forgive me some of my ‘misses’ as far as topics go. Writing something new every week can be difficult. Writing something negative every week is easy, but you can’t always be angry, or at least that’s what people tell me. It seems to me that some of the people who survive the longest are the most curmudgeonly, but I guess that’s a topic for another day. So finding something that interests people and something that I can have definitive stance on isn’t always easy. The internet, however, does help. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. They bring me the top news from the top news sites both in Canada and across the world. If there’s nothing happening locally (say, townships fighting over services, people claiming falsities, etc.) I can usually find something within those lists of stories with a local hook that I think people probably want to know about and try and present my view on it. This week, however, when I went to check the news, I noticed something disturbing. The list of the top stories provides me with a lot of information. It tells me who posted the story, how old it is, a brief synopsis if I want and how many times people have ‘favourited’ or ‘shared’ it. There’s that word again, share. In this case, however, sharing isn’t a good thing. When something reaches a certain level of being shared over a certain time period, it’s considered notable and the colour of the number changes to bring attention to it. So what was ‘sensational’ enough to garner thousands of shares early this week? Well, it wasn’t a story about Canada’s electronic spy agency’s techniques, nor was it a story about a man killed at the Canadian- American border. It wasn’t a story about Isis, a girl from Sault Ste. Marie who was forced to change her name on Facebook or a story about suspended Senator Patrick Brazeau and his court trial. Those stories had been up for an average of five hours and had between 2 and 400 shares. After 26 minutes, however, a story about someones’ sealskin purse being seized at the U.S. border had over 3,000 shares. After two days, pictures comparing Canada’s east coast to Star Wars’ fictional ice planet of Hoth had 7,000 shares while a story about Ontario’s liquor sales legislation, which was up the same length of time, had only 100. A cat who had been stuck under a deck for 40 days and survived had 9,000 hits after three days while the final results of Canada Reads 2015, a competition which highlights some amazing Canadian literary talent, only had 200 after the same amount of time. The media isn’t controlling this. The readers are. Readers are choosing whether they want to share the story about Bubba the cat getting stuck under a snowy deck or whether people should know about Canada Reads. Readers are deciding that the story about a woman’s sealskin purse being confiscated at the border is more important than someone being fatally shot there. Let that sink in, a person’s life being cut short is less newsworthy than a purse. Don’t get me wrong, the purse story does highlight some cultural differences, but we’re talking about a person’s life here. However, when a reader decides that funny pictures of snow-related incidents is a more important news story than, say, the floods that will likely follow the melting of all that snow (no snow job here, the funny pictures had 7,000 shares whereas the flood story had a mere 500), they are not only creating sensationalistic news by elevating the mundane over the important, they are also telling reporters that if they want to get more shares, more hits and, thereby, look more impressive to their bosses, they need to post things that are all sizzle and no steak, all flash and no bang. So while it’s hip and trendy to blame the media for the stories that eventually take centre stage, remember who is really making them popular. Stop the sensationalism and share stories that need to be shared. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Big win, big weekend I’ll admit that when local councils were debating fire truck rides for winning hockey teams several years back, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. In Pickering, where I grew up, you weren’t allowed to ride on the fire truck. Maybe Santa was in the annual Santa Claus Parade, but that was it. Having said that, there wasn’t really an infrastructure – or rather, a tradition – in place that made riding on the fire truck a possibility. If you won something (my Pickering Pirates baseball team was a provincial champion twice) you got a trophy and that was about it. On Sunday night, however, the joy was clear to see as soon as each member of the Blyth Brussels Midget AE Crusaders got their turn to hoist the Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) championship cup, talk turned to the fire truck and when it was going to arrive at the Brussels, Morris and Grey Community Centre. Granted, the team’s escort came a bit late, as with one minute left in the game the Huron East Fire Department was called out to an emergency, but when they arrived at the arena, the players were finally able to cash in on what they had earned just minutes earlier on the ice. It was truly a great weekend to be in Brussels. As I stood at the front of the arena on Saturday night chatting with local caterer and farmer Jeff Cardiff, we both watched as visitors streamed to the centre. Whether it be in street clothes for the hockey game or in dress attire for the Brussels Optimist Club’s annual spring dinner and auction – or the dozens already in the centre for the Brussels Curling Club’s spring bonspiel – it was great to see so many people out and supporting great causes, whether it was Autism Ontario, the Optimists or several local sports clubs. The icing on the cake, of course, was the big win for the Crusaders, who dominated their competition from Lambton Shores to take home a well-deserved win at the provincial level. As someone who vaguely remembers competing at the provincial level of baseball, I remembered being that happy to be at the top of my game. Knowing how happy the members of the team were, I can’t imagine that the afterglow will fade any time soon. In my limited dealings with the team, I can say that while competitively, it couldn’t have happened to a better team, the same goes for the players as young men. At The Citizen, we have been treated in a polite manner and with respect by everyone associated with the team (and with any local hockey team, for that matter), so these are truly young men who deserve the provincial crown. I, personally, was thanked by one of the players on Sunday for making the time to come to the game. In the excitement of winning the game, hoisting the gold cup and taking a ride on the local fire truck, to take time out to thank me truly stood out as exceptional behaviour. So, to the coaches, trainers and players, congratulations on this great accomplishment. You treated the community to some great hockey and you’ve instilled a great sense of pride in the community – both for your play and for how you carry yourselves as people. It was plain to see as community members of all stripes, not just those directly affiliated with the team, were out to support the team over the weekend, that a win like this runs deeper than being happy for your kid on a job well done. This job well done is felt by the entire community and all of its members. Other Views Sensationalism is the big problem Here’s a tip for you …