HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-11-24, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2011. PAGE 5.
One sunny Saturday when I was a little
kid my big sister took me to the beach.
She picked up a sea shell and put it
next to my ear.
“Listen,” she said. “You can hear the ocean.”
Damned if I couldn’t. I thought it was a
miracle. I took that shell home and put it on
my dresser. Every once in a while I’d pick it
up and listen to the faraway ocean waves.
My first long-distance call.
It was good practice for the telephone on
our kitchen wall which was the next thing I
held at my ear and listened to. I couldn’t hear
waves but if I breathed through my nose
and remembered not to cough I could listen
to Old Missus Paton gossip with Old
Missus Chapman (we had a rural party
line).
My next technological lurch forward was the
pay telephone – specifically the pay phone in
the hallway of a flophouse I lived in for a
summer in Montreal. Leo, the saxophone-
noodling, pot-smoking landlord had a bent
piece of coat hanger dangling from a string
attached to the phone. When you stuck the
wire into the coin return slot and twisted it just
so, you had free long distance. Feed a coin into
the phone and it registered as a deposit, but
came right back to you through the return slot.
You just fed it back into the phone as many
times as necessary.
Using a pay phone was never easier.
Certainly not in Britain, where you dialled
your number and got connected, whereupon a
tony robot voice asked you to “Please deposit
sixpence”. By the time you did, the party you
were calling had often hung up.
That was still better than Spain, where you
couldn’t even use a pay phone until you found
someone willing to sell you a ‘ficha’ – a metal
slug with a hole in the middle of it. That was
the only ‘coin’ Spanish pay phones would
accept.
I was nudged into this telephonic reverie by
something I saw during the recent World
Series – team manager Tony La Russa in the
St. Louis Cardinals dugout, yakking
away…on a pay phone. They still use them in
big league baseball dugouts.
Which is heart-warming, because the North
America pay telephone is the Ivory-Billed
Woodpecker of communications technology –
so endangered it might as well be extinct?
You used to find them everywhere – corner
stores, gas stations, laundromats, hotel
lobbies, hospital waiting rooms, even on
roadsides. Now, outside pay phones are rarer
than Sasquatch sightings. Mobile phones did
that. In Europe there are more cellphones
than there are people. Here in Canada, cell
phone usage is nudging 80 per cent of the
market. Many of the outside public phones
that still exist are regularly ravaged by meth
heads looking for change. The phone
companies won’t be replacing those feverishly
– if ever.
It’s a trend that’s unlikely to be reversed.
People used to appreciate the convenience of a
public telephone but I doubt anyone ever fell
in love with them – not like cellphones.
And love is not too strong a word to use –
particularly for the unseemly bond that unites
many iPhone owners with their devices. An
American branding consultant by the name of
Martin Lindstrom recently conducted an
experiment in which he studied the brain wave
patterns of 16 subjects interacting with their
iPhones.
“When the subjects saw or heard their
iPhones ringing,” he writes, “their brain scans
displayed activity in the insular cortex of the
brain which is associated with love and
compassion. It was as if they were in the
presence of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family
member,” writes Lindstrom. “These people
actually loved their iPhones.”
I don’t get it. But then, I’m a geezer. I
remember when wise guys answered the
phone saying “Your dime; my time” – because
that’s what it cost to make a call from a pay
phone way back then. You didn’t need a fifty-
dollar-a-month contract and a pricey piece of
plastic in your pocket. All you needed was a
pay phone and a 10-cent piece. For that you’d
even get the assistance of a helpful, actually
human operator to flirt with as she walked you
through the call.
I wonder what happened to all those
wonderful operators. I know there are jobs out
there waiting if they want them. Why, Aegis
Communications Limited just put out a call for
10,000 employees to work in their nine new
call centres fielding customer service
problems.
Aegis is an Indian corporation based in
Mumbai, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to
move. The company plans to outsource those
10,000 jobs to the USA, to take advantage of
cheap labour.
Hey, you know those Americans. They’ll
work almost for nothing.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Steve Jobs, what have you done?
When I was young and going to
elementary school in Pickering, it
was a big deal when baseballs were
banned. We baseball folks liked to bring our
ball and glove to school to play a little catch, so
that was a bit of a change for us.
Now, Toronto’s Earl Beatty Public School
has recently outlawed any type of ball that
doesn’t have the word ‘Nerf’ in its title, further
increasing the nanny state being imposed in
schools around North America.
The controversy erupted when a parent was
injured by an errant soccer ball causing a
concussion. Students, however, weren’t happy
with the decision and revolted last week taking
to the playground in an organized rally
shouting “we want our balls back” while local
media outlets covered the mini-revolution.
You have to think though that it might be
some of the upper echelons of the school, and
other schools like it, that should adopt the
chant... if you follow me.
Just a few weeks ago there was the Ottawa-
area school that cancelled its almost-20-year-
old celebration that brought military replica
weapons and tanks to the school grounds to
give students a more hands-on concept of
warfare and what veterans lived with during
conflict.
A spokeswoman for the Ottawa Catholic
School Board stated that many of Notre Dame
Catholic School’s students come from war-torn
countries and the annual exercise ‘upset’ the
students.
“Let no one be under the impression that any
of this glorifies the horrors of war... but if these
folks from these other countries had not been
helped by Canada, what situation would they
be in?” asked five-tour veteran of the Canadian
Armed Forces Wayne MacCulloch of the
decision. However, this November was the first
time the event didn’t take place at the school in
20 years.
Let’s also not forget the New Brunswick
school that did away with the singing of O’
Canada until the school board’s superintendent
had it reinstated. The original decision was
made by the principal of Belleisle Elementary
School to respect the wishes of some students
who weren’t comfortable taking part in the
singing of the national anthem on a daily basis.
So back to the students at Earl Beatty, they,
and their parents, were informed of the
decision last week when students were sent
home with a letter informing parents of the rule
change. The letter stated that all ‘hard balls’
would no longer be welcome at the school,
which includes basketballs, soccer balls,
volleyballs, footballs and even tennis balls.
When I was a kid going to school and
baseballs were banned, we were told to bring
the safer, softer option to school to play with: a
tennis ball. So either skulls are growing softer
over time or we’ve become even more cautious
over the years.
The landscape of schools in Canada must be
confusing for children, and that’s without even
getting into the recent approval of a second
afrocentric school in the Toronto District
School Board that some people label as
reverse-racism.
Now I’ve suffered a few concussions and
I’ve come up short on a few sports-related
collisions over the years, but that’s what being
a kid is about to a certain extent.
Above is my picture from a few years ago
playing for the Bursey Real Estate tee-ball
team, complete with a quickly-disappearing
shiner from a gym class dodgeball mishap.
These things happen and young boys playing
sports couldn’t be prouder to show them off.
Occupy Earl Beatty
The annual conversation I dread came up
recently between myself and some very
important people in my life; what do I
want for Christmas?
This is quite possibly the most dangerous
trap an individual can fall into.
It may not seem it, but if you think about it,
this question is more terrifying than trying to
answer “Do these pants make my butt look
big,” and more dangerous than giving the
wrong answer to “If you were listening to me,
what did I just say?”
You have to answer, or else chance
Christmas Day coming around and having to
fake a smile while opening socks.
And I don’t say that because I’m greedy, or
because I don’t like socks (as a matter of fact,
my puppy Juno has taken to hiding all of mine
and I only find them when they’re holier
than the Pope, so socks might not be bad),
but giving a gift is just as great as receiving
one.
Nothing beats that genuine smile that shows
you that you did well in reading a person and
picking out what they want.
I can only imagine that the week-long smile
I had when Ashleigh and her family surprised
me with a trip to Montreal and a Montreal
Canadiens jersey was enough to light up a
room, or make me look slightly touched in the
head.
So it’s dangerous to answer, because if you
don’t, you’re just going to hurt someone’s
feelings if they don’t read you well, get you a
gift and have to face the reality that you may
return it.
In my family, returning a gift is akin to
wasting apple pie, it is simply not done.
Okay... maybe the apple pie thing is just me,
but returning gifts is still pretty frowned upon.
Aside from having to give an answer, you
have to be aware of how your request (I
usually stick to singular items) makes you
look.
Nothing is worse than having a typed-up,
laminated list of 200 items... well, except for
maybe a laminated list of 300 items, but you
get my idea.
You can’t ask for everything your heart
desires because the impossible items would
hopefully take up the first 100 slots (those
being things like world peace, social equity,
etc.) and the rest would just make you look
greedy.
You also can’t ask for that one big ticket
item you’d never buy yourself but would really
like, because, again, it would make you look
greedy.
I, for example, would love a DeLorean
DMC-12 for Christmas, but I don’t think
anyone has the (approximate) $70,000 to drop
on one.
More realistically, I won’t be asking for an
Apple iPad either, it’s just expensive.
On the other end, asking people to donate
money on your behalf, or give to a charity,
while noble and honourable, can rob the
people who want to see you happy of the smile
that only comes from seeing something you
really want.
It’s a veritable minefield of problems and, in
my mind, the most dangerous question to
answer.
I think, however, a few years ago I stumbled
on to the perfect gift request.
Ask for money, but don’t be crass
about it.
I asked my parents, grandparents and
everyone else who wanted to give me a gift to
get me money or gift cards to put towards a
camera.
It is the perfect Christmas request.
Find something that you can use, that you’ll
love and that you can justify getting in a
professional way (obviously the camera
worked for me because I have to take a lot of
photos).
Ask the people who would get you a gift
anyway to help you with your goal and be sure
to show them the results.
Fortunately, for me, my grandparents and
parents get to see the results of my gift every
single week; the lessons I learned from
that camera taught me so much more than I
had learned before simply because it was
mine.
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but
whenever I get a new gadget, I like to know
everything it’s capable of and know how to
tweak every single setting.
So, what did I say? Well that may be a topic
for another column, but, suffice to say, I think
I’ll be using my new tactic to try and improve
my career and make my loved ones happy at
the same time.
Just remember; if someone wants to give
you a gift, it’s not greedy to accept it.
Accepting their generosity and genuinely
smiling while you’re doing it is, in my eyes,
returning the gift tenfold.
Seeing someone happy because of your
actions will always be the greatest gift as far as
I’m concerned, and I would never deny that to
someone I cared about.
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
My very abridged Christmas list