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 …