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