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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-07-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 19, 2012. PAGE 5. As I write, there are an estimated 1.3 million Canadian adults out of work. I can fix that. Put them to work, I say. Put them to work at the other end of my telephone line. There is a galaxy-sized vacuum at the other end of my phone line and it is crying out for human beings to fill it. At the moment it is occupied by a cringe-making mechanical Robovoice. Every time I call my bank, an airline, a government office, the CBC or a large business concern, Robovoice intercepts my call with what has to be the most insincere statement uttered since Richard Nixon’s ‘I am not a crook’. “Your call,” purrs Robovoice, “is important to us.” No. No it’s not. If my call was important it would be answered by one of the living, breathing 1.3 million unemployed Canadians out there who could use a warm, comfortable desk job answering phones. What ‘Your call is important to us’ really means is the exact, 180-degree opposite. It really means “We’ve found a way to make even more money by firing our receptionists and replacing them with a recording. Incoming calls are so cosmically unimportant to us we’re willing to risk offending the crap out of our customers by forcing them to converse with a vending machine.” What’s more, the messages from Robovoice – (‘This call may be monitored to ensure voice quality’ – gimme a break) – are so blatantly false they wouldn’t bamboozle the most gullible and compliant customer this side of Elmer the Safety Elephant. We don’t all surrender meekly. Many of us instinctively dial ‘O’ the instant we hear Robovoice warming up, and often that will put us in touch with a human operative. As for the more devious and sophisticated ‘Interactive Voice Response Systems’, there is a growing guerrilla network of websites that offers tips on how to sabotage the CCBs (cheap corporate bastards). One website counsels that we should abandon the frustrating practice of mashing button after button (‘For help with overbilling, press 368’) and just holler ‘OPERATOR!” at the receiver until a homo sapiens comes on the line. Another website advises us to swear like a paratrooper – apparently X-rated diatribes can trigger emotion-detection technology which brings a live operator on the run. Feels good, but it’s bad for the blood pressure. Problem is, even if we shout or curse or use technological voodoo to bypass most of the commands they’ve still got us dancing like trained monkeys – when all we really want is to connect with another human being with a brain and a heart. Is that really so much to ask? We could always take our business elsewhere – providing there is an elsewhere. But with businesses going global and ‘conglomerating’ like cancer cells, too often Robovoice is the only game in town. My friends say I’m a Luddite when it comes to phone technology. They say I’d be happier if the world communicated by smoke signals. To which I say: nonsense. I’m an up-to- date guy when it comes to telephone technology. After all, I have call waiting. If you call me and you get a busy signal it means you wait until I’m through. Arthur Black Other Views Your call is important – har har Taking a quick spin around the internet these days, finding something strange isn’t exactly news. The entire internet is a big bowl of strange. I was reading a letter written by Al-Haashim Kamena Atangana to The Toronto Sun on the recent string of sexual assaults at York University in Toronto, who suggested that a city-wide dress code for women should be enforced, which would curb sexual assaults at York University and throughout all of Ontario. “The reason why a woman gets raped is because of the way she dress,” his letter read. “If the law enforcements and the Canadian politicians were very serious about solving this problem, they would introduce laws that would make it illegal for women to dress provocatively in the streets.” A pretty silly, and even potentially dangerous viewpoint, wouldn’t you say? I certainly would and I have a feeling that we haven’t heard the end of this letter, or of this man. I’m sure he may pop up in the news once or twice again before this whole debate is done. However, what really piqued my interest was another link on the website. An extremist babbling on about how we should control the lives of women, in a sad way, isn’t really news. If that isn’t news, you may be asking yourself, then what is? I’ll tell you what is: a cat celebrating its 15th year in office. Fifteen (human) years is a relatively long time for a cat to be alive, let alone hold an elected political position, but here we are. Stubbs is defying the odds. The story goes that 15 years ago, the people of Talkeetna, Alaska were not in favour of any of the mayoral candidates running in the local election. A campaign soon began to protest the mayoral candidates and write in your vote for a brand new kitten named Stubbs (named for his stubby tail). Well, the nearly 900 residents of the small town listened and a few weeks later the town had a cat for a mayor. I know. It was the stupidest thing I have ever read too, but apparently people are fascinated by this cat and its honorary mayoral position. Apparently Stubbs has a real following and he has turned the small town into a very real tourist destination. Lauri Stec, an employee at Nagley’s General Store (where Stubbs lives), says she sees 30 to 40 people a day coming into the store looking for Stubbs. For a destination in Alaska, that certainly seems like a lot of foot traffic. And meanwhile, here in Huron County, we have dozens of people who toil over how to make their village or town more appealing to tourists. Economic development officers work around the clock trying to develop ways to increase tourism traffic into their areas. There are studies and philosophies and principles on how to generate tourism and there are gurus who claim to do it better than anyone. However, what this Alaskan town did was put a cat in the mayor’s seat and they’ve undermined every study in the book. (Admittedly I haven’t read every study in the book, but if there’s one that points to electing a cat for mayor as the answer, that’s a study I want to read.) Just when you think you’re getting a handle on something, a cat like Stubbs strolls along and ruins it all. It just shows that all the research in the world can go into something and there’s still room for human taste. Cat-calling While I know that I probably shouldn’t be touting the successes of another news medium in my column, I have to say that CBC’s Radio One, despite not coming in very clearly throughout northern Huron County, has really shown me a lot of different angles to subject matters that I never considered. Between jazz and classical music, I have found some really amazing tidbits of information. Did you know, for example, that The Beatles were nearly directly responsible for the first commercial CT scanner? It’s an amazing story and I learned it while listening to a show about profitable business in between some interviews I had to do on Wednesday, July 11. Apparently Electrical and Music Industries Limited (EMI) was formed in March 1931 by one merger or another and, that year, built the legendary Abbey Road recording studio in London, England. EMI produced records for the Beatles and, swimming in the royalties from their international success, began diverting funds elsewhere. Because of this surplus of funds, they were able to fund a scientist with an idea that hadn’t found acceptance anywhere yet; Sir Godfrey Hounsfield. In Hayes, a town in West London, the home of EMI Central Research, Hounsfield created the first commercially viable computed axial tomography (CAT or CT) scanner. All of this happened because EMI took their resources and put it into something other than what made the company successful. Who knew that one of the most advanced medical procedures in the world was made possible by Norwegian Wood? Another show I listened to dealt with the rise and fall of music as a social experience. This particular bit was part of a five-episode piece about the history of the record and the implications it had. At first I laughed at the idea of people not enjoying music as a social event, but then I realized, the fact that I was in my car, listening to the radio station was proof that, no matter how many people listened to that very show at exactly the same time (or a half hour later in Newfoundland), it was still a private experience. Robert Harris put the show together and it will run as part of The Sunday Edition for the next four weeks (and is also available online at www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition). Anyway, back to the downfall of social music. While no two people experience any piece of art in the same way, I believe that no two people can even describe music coherently. One has to look no further than an art gallery to understand what I mean. Whether you love a picture or a painting or you hate it, whether it moves you to tears or moves you to nausea, everyone can look at a piece of visual art and take some of the same messages away. Provided they share the same quality of senses (not colour blind like yours truly, for example), they will see the swaths of purple and black in Van Gogh’s Starry Night being broken by the field of stars, they will see a naked man when looking at da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man Granted each person will see different things beneath the surface, however, when explaining it they will fall back to the basics of what they observed. For example, if I were to describe one of my favourite artist’s work, I would likely talk about what’s in the picture and not the deeper meaning of each aspect. Doing that with music, however, is a bit trickier. You could try and list the musical instruments used and break down the exact musical techniques followed, but without actually either singing or recording and playing a piece of music, it can be downright impossible to try and describe it to someone else. I could say that Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe is an infectious pop song with classical instruments, but that could be said of dozens of different songs put out in the last six months alone most likely. This is why, in my opinion, we so often have songs stuck in our head and why we can’t remember their names so easily. It’s because, while we can describe other things; paintings, vehicles, buildings, plants etc., we can’t really describe music in the same manner. While I’m sure those in the music industry would have ways of talking to each other and describing what they are thinking of, I’m also equally sure that a lot of their technical documentation would mean little to nothing to the average music consumer. I guess that’s why social music, before the presence of readily available recordings, was something that was so important. Without having that common experience, it can be very hard to convey how music sounds. Before the record, people would gather together and they would listen to music together. They would enjoy shows, they would discuss the music afterwards. Music truly was a social phenomenon at that point in time. Now, however, music is quite the opposite of a social experience. Sure you may go to a concert or a play to enjoy music but, nine times out of 10, I would bet, people listening to music do it on their own, especially since the advent of the portable cassette player, CD player and MP3 player. With very little social music interactions, it becomes difficult to share an experience, especially since mix tapes are such a thing of the past. I guess the reason that these two facts jumped out at me was because the latter led to the death of social music and the creation of the music industry while the former relied on the creation of the music industry to safeguard the life of everyone in the developed world. I learned all this because instead of listening to classic rock or new pop, I decided to turn something a bit more educational on. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Denny Scott Denny’s Den Life through the death of music Nothing gives a person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances. – Thomas Jefferson Final Thought