God Bless Rich People... Yes, average US citizen, this really does exclude you.

I really, really cannot stand this woman.

THIS is the representation the US population wants?

THIS is the person so many women want to vote for simply because her anatomy defines her as female (questionable at best)?

How Mrs. Clinton lies and Obscures Truth

I just want to make two brief comments here.

About a month ago, Steven Harper's Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie is alleged to have made an off record, off camera comment about a call the PMO had received from the CLINTON campaign office.

It seems, as a campaign plank, Clinton has been making comments about how she'd alter the existing NAFTA agreement between Canada and the US.

However, the call from HER campaign office related the comments amounted to nothing more than politiking and were essentially baseless in reality. This issue was covered in MacLean's Magazine in early March and has since grown to epic proportions.

What rankles the hell out of me is this:

• Firstly, the call originated from Clinton campaign office. That is an established fact. Period.
• Secondly, the Clinton campaign has lately blamed that call on the Obama campaign and has recently gone to great lengths to use their own duplicitous, liar politics against Obama. It is disgusting.
• Finally and critically, the media, in particular CBC is complicit in this lie.

I personally know Brodie. In my opinion, there's no way he'd make comments that frustrate politics in another country unless he has become a very different person since he left his teaching posts.

The other issue is Mrs. Clinton's constant haranguing of Obama over his long relationship with "Reverend" White. Obama has distanced himself from this man and is very likely about to do that again and with prejudice, due to the ridiculous press conference Rv. White gave yesterday at the National Press Gallery.

Mrs. Clinton has been exposed time and time again as a liar and this situation will give her yet more opportunities to make up a life she does not lead. Here's why: during her husband's Lewinsky phase, or when it was forcibly ended by his being caught, the CLINTON spiritual advisor was none other than the Rv. White. Yes. that's right. In the White house.

Why anyone in the US is considering casting anything other than a stone at this woman is beyond me.

I hate Telus TOO!

Man, I am not alone in my extensive dislike for this company's customer 'service' practices. Whilst on hold or trying to make myself understood to SEVEN agents today, I receieved three "I hate Telus" websites from someone I was on Messenger with...

Telus Sucks Info
Rant Vancouver
Follow Steph

I know there are more of those sites out there and I KNOW there are way more people who think Telus's 'service' is so poor that it should win an award.

So, as I'm not afeared of anything or anyone, I sent the following email to the president of Telus and to another guy who has something to do with human resources, which I'm sure he administrates from the golf course somewhere....
"...
I wanted to let you know directly about my experience with Telus customer service today and in the six preceding months. The short form is that there should be an award for such appallingness….

Since Telus merged its two services, I have been unable to log in and administrate my account on line. My internet works perfectly, as does my phone, and I’ve always had access to WebMail via Telus, so none of that was at issue. I could not, however, log in to my services at Telus.com and have not been able to since whenever Telus merged services. I made my first call to Telus some six months ago.

You will note that I said six MONTHS. Yes.

I have tried on several occasions to call Telus for help. The usual scenario is that I’m passed about from department to department only to be cut off somewhere during the transfers. Massively frustrating. It seems that an ability to transfer a call without disconnecting the caller should be a baseline ability for a job in customer service but apparently that is not the case with Telus. Strange that a telephone company does not have this requirement of it’s employees.

Being cut off after having been on hold for ages and not having got any resolution led me to essentially giving up and resorting to trying again another time. One ‘customer service agent’ gave me the helpful advice that I would have to go in to the Telus (mobility!) kiosk in the mall nearest me to have my problem resolved. Hilarious.

Today, I called the number listed on the Telus site. I reached a young man whose first language is not English, which is not a problem in itself as I have a very mixed family and am quite comfortable with various accents; however, he could not understand ME. In order to get to him, I had to navigate the levels of your ‘helpful’ electronic system, which asked me my phone number in order to get me to the right department. When I reached said “right” department, the young man in question asked me again for my phone number, which I gave to him – FOUR TIMES; he could not understand me! I’m sure if you check the recording of this call, you will ascertain that I was very clear in my delivery but I finally had to slow down to one digit per second speed.

I explained to the fellow that everything on my end was working just fine but that I could not log in to my account to administrate it and that I wanted to change a password and add an alias. His next question was “so your internet is not working?” I explained again – having to stop him each time he interrupted me – that everything was working except that I could not log in and I gave him the corresponding error code. I presumed, wrongly it turns out, he would be able to look up said code and find a solution. Nope. He didn’t know where to look so passed me on.

He transferred me to a second person, but did not advise that person of why I was calling. The second person asked me the same questions again and then transferred me to a third who asked again for the information. He passed me on to a fourth, who passed me to a fifth, who passed me on to a sixth. That person said that I had to call a SEVENTH and that they couldn’t put me through because they didn’t have the means to transfer my call. WHAT? Time elapsed? 50 minutes….

I told each person I spoke to NOT to put me on hold, because if they did and I were disconnected, I would in their offices in 20 minutes, which is how long it takes me to drive to Telus’s office in my city.

The seventh call I made was back to the original number! By that time, I had either been explaining my problem again and again and giving my phone number over and over or I had been on hold. Total time on hold today? 35+ minutes. UNacceptable.

I finally reached Greg ... who was able to fix my problem with little disruption – except that Telus’s own servers are so slow today that neither of us could advance from one Telus page to the next without at least a TWO minute wait between pages. As it turned out, and as I’d suspected, the fix was relatively simple: it required that my existing account be decoupled and re-established. Pretty simple. Additionally, Greg sent me five very useful websites. Well above the scope of his job, I’m sure.

Greg was able to resolve a problem that it has taken six months and probably 12 previous calls to have resolved. I told him how I’d finally got to him and he observed that not everyone in customer service is as diligent as they could be. Actually, he was more pointed in his comments but in order to protect him, because he actually cares about the job he does, I’ll leave off with that. Suffice to say that he is very right.

If only one in seven Telus employees actually cares to find a solution to customer problems, you have a serious issue at Telus. I might add that the myriad “I hate Telus sites” that can be found on the internet should be a huge wakeup call to your organisation. Those customer satisfaction surveys you spend money on can be done away with, as there is an answer to every “how are we doing?” question at those websites.

Greg, on the other hand, deserves serious recognition and a huge raise. He is a key player at Telus, simply for his attitude; he derives personal satisfaction and has some personal honour from making things right.

I bill out at $65 an hour in my business. I am a writer and have recently worked for two years as a corporate trainer. My area of speciality? Customer Service. Suffice to say that as much as I am very glad to have regained access to my account on line, I’m quite certain that Telus is not about to reimburse me for the time it took today to make that happen – which amounts to about $98 not including GST… two months, approximately, of Telus service fees… relating to today’s merry-go-round - nor, I’m sure, will Telus be interested in the time I’ve spend in the last six months trying to resolve this issue.

I take it there are many clients calling in and receiving very poor service, if those websites are any indication, but I also take it that the cost to Telus of this poor service is not enough to inspire a change.

So, Mr. President, how’re your Telus services working today?
..."

A Complicated Kindness

I've had a cold for two days - one bad enough to keep me mostly in bed and bored. As I've finished reading both The God Delusion and God is Not Great (how religion poisons everything), I picked up my copy of A Complicated Kindness.... in the end, I didn't put it down - it fell out of my hands a couple times because I fell asleep, but I didn't stop reading on purpose....

Anyone who's grown up in the creepy, shifty reality of a religious home or community and who's either come out the other side or is still struggling for breath now, will be instantly sucked into this book. It's about us. The kids (I think that's actually spelled "victims") of the fantasy they call a loving god....

The worst thing is those who never learn to breathe and who, as elderly people finally realise how stifling and crazy the whole thing was but know it's too late to do anything about it, so they cling to it like a rickety, waterlogged, falling apart raft because they know, either way, they've already drowned.

Burn scars are thick and hard and immovable and they never heal. One learns to cope and to move in ways that don't cause those scars to stretch and tear - or to suck up the pain when they do - but they're always there. That's what escaping a religious community leaves a person with. Burn scars.

They tell us we're going to burn for eternity but they don't tell us that, if we escape, the burning stops and we're left with deep scars that either severely restrict us and how we are in the real world or paralyse us.

So anyway, this is what I wrote... about a place where religion didn't intrude or at least not enough to touch me.

"Funny about that old house. I remember it spotless too. Austere in a way but still warm and somewhere I really wanted to be. Different after my gramp was gone though. I loved how it smelled - it still smells that way, underneath the other smells there now. Gram always had a cloth in her hand, never to let the smallest crumb escape.

When one sees that house from across the yard, the cracks and broken bits don't show. You know when you meet an old friend you haven't seen for a while? They look exactly the same from 15 feet away but up close you can see time stamped on them.

The parlour looks like someone left in the middle of moving. To get to it, one must step carefully over the dry, curled-up-around-the-edges, seaweed-coloured dining room floor, which is obviously not safe. I suppose one wouldn’t fall too far, if it gave in, given it's probably only a foot or so above the ground. It looks as though it might suck you down but it's just joking in that creepy-old-uncle kind of way.

Gram's bedroom looks like she made her bed and then went out for a bit. There are clothes on the counterpane and hanging on her door; there are creams and such and her handbag on a old white table beside, but then, at the foot of the bed there is a box of books on the floor - her guest books - faces up, daring the rotting ceiling to fall in on the whole scene.

Time stops in that house - or goes backward or something.

It completely terrifies me that things have changed as much as they have and that they will so much more in the years to come. Who are all these strangers moving up the mountain and why are they there?

I think often about moving down there, as if then things would cease to change and it would be 1968 again, and nothing adults do would make sense but it wouldn't matter and maybe I could accidentally step on a different butterfly this time - one with smaller wings and who's departure would not cause such chaos - and then it would always be summer that smells like hay and tastes like peas eaten sitting in the field and feels like frozen ocean on hot day and where dads never leave and moms never yell and there are always fresh doughnuts in the kitchen and apples in the cellar and crickets to sing us to delicious humid sleep.

This is Spring in Alberta?

his is what is currently passing for Spring in our city!

Nice hey?

It's warm, despite what it looks like.

Wow, nice makin' up the rules!

Just a quick link to one of my favourite writers, Mark Morford, who is simply brilliant.

Sin 2.0

If you like this column, stick a live bookmark into your Links bar. Mark posts weekly.

Drunk Drivers: It IS a dead end road

Today I went with my daughter and about 15 other teens and a bunch of parents to stand with a friend who was very badly hurt - nearly killed - by a drunk driver on November 18th 2006.

Go here for the first installment and HERE for the next
More HERE and HERE.

I cannot begin to find words to describe sitting there listening to those people's vicitim impact statements.

I cannot imagine how one lives through a cop coming to one's door at 1 a.m. with a wallet and cell phone and the news that your child was killed by a drunk driver.

I cannot imagine how one lives through a child being in a coma for six weeks and that the rest of that child's life will be lived in a wheel chair or how one deals with the "what happens to my child when I'm gone?" part of that story.

I thought, for a second, that I felt sorry for the guy who killed Connor, so badly injured Mike Hagar and who's left John Broadbent with serious emotional scars.

Only for a second though.

See, as Mike's mom so eloquently stated, it is a priviledge to use mind-altering drugs. Along with that priviledge comes RESPONSIBILITY. That means if a person decides they're using alcohol to the point of imparment they have the RESPONSIBILITY to make sure no other person suffers from their drunken state.

The guy who killed Connor got drunk all by himself - he chose that state - but he did nothing at all to protect people.

And he killed a guy, maimed another for life and seriously damaged another guy. And two weeks after that, his FaceBook profile has, as his favourite activites, "Drinking."

And that's not it. Three families are directly, permanently and devastatingly affected.

A HUGE group of friends lost their innocence along with losing a really, really great friend.

A school's population was unalterably changed by this 'accident.'

So no, I don't feel sorry for the driver. He has serious problems. Rumour has it he'd had several previous charges for DWI - seven I've heard. ONE is too many.

Yes, he's going to do jail time. Yes, he's remorseful.

Yes, in a few years, he'll walk out of prison with a fully functioning body and mind. He'll get a job; he might have a wife and he might have children. Yes, he'll probably never forget.

But he'll have a life.

Mike? Unending boredom; loss of freedom entirely; loss of speaking ability; loss of mobility; loss of a best friend; loss of a business; loss of many friends, because they don't know what to say or how to act; probable loss of marriage prospects and children; loss of independence.

Connor. Dead.

Connor's family ...

John's family...

Nope. No sympathy for the driver. None. He deserves every second of suffering he endures because what he suffers will never, not in a million, billion years equal that of those who by no fault of their own, lost everything.

I wonder how much a taxi would have cost.....

Certainly not that many lives.

Religion sucks

Criminal negligence disguised as religion! If you're a right-winger, fundamentalist "christian," you can let your sick children die without fear of going to death row. Nice.

Girl Dies After Parents Pray for Healing Instead of Seeking Medical Help

By: John Amato on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:00 AM - PDT

This is so sad. I’m all for freedom of religion, but this didn’t have to happen.

An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday. Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

“She got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to “apparently they didn’t have enough faith,” the police chief said.

The family does not attend an organized church or participate in an organized religion, Vergin said. “They have a little Bible study of a few people.”

I hope this sends shock waves around the world to this type of community so it never happens again. I grieve for that little girl. Can you imagine the pain and suffering she was subjected to for thirty straight days?

Ah... so the rules only apply to everyone BUT you?

I see.

About 10 years ago, you ordered me, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from your family. As I'm decidedly uninterested in your weird, pathologically insular family, I happily complied and continue to do so.

However, despite 14 years having passed, you persist in contacting my family.

A fool is defined by his actions. As your choice of family members is two, bitter old women, it's an interesting, odd definition.... Like definitely attracts like. Ridiculous. Whatever do you hope to gain?

As for the guilty parties, you can protest all you want that you love your children, but your actions reveal another story. Why you continue to fraternize with a person who abused your child and your grandchildren is beyond comprehension.

You're all silly and you all deserve each other.

Holidays and stuff

I've been preparing the Easter meal today (yeah, I know, I'm a heathen... what am I doing?). It struck me today that I haven't ever smelled an apple that didn't make me think of Nova Scotia.

The smell of apples draws me instantly into many, many memories of Nova Scotia and why that apple smell is so delicious: it has nothing to do with the fruit really and everything to do with peace.

As I cut up and cored the apples, I realised - maybe it finally crystallised - that what I mean by Nova Scotia is not the province but my aunt and uncle's house in Garland and their farmstead in general. More than that, Nova Scotia is certain people.

I suppose one always knows at some level that a place one visits is the sum of the people who populate it and that, without those people, that place loses its essential element.

We were recently in Nova Scotia and stayed with my aunt and uncle up there. My grandmother lives with my aunt and uncle and it think it was her very advanced age that suddenly and sharply dragged me into the present - the one where my lovely aunt and uncle are not 30 years old anymore, despite that, in person, they are no different than my childhood memories of them and where I harbour a very real but childish wish that nothing will ever change in Nova Scotia.

In the last 10 years, as I've left behind many traditions that have no relevance for me and my family, I've struggled with how to replace those with traditions that are specific to us and to create some context for those. The four days we spent with our family in the east finally cracked open a door towards building those traditions.

My aunt is a deft and wonderful cook. She makes the most magnificent food and she does it with what looks like no effort. Deliciousness pours out of her capable fingertips. Her buns and doughnuts are such delights as cannot be explained. Suffice to say even the fullest belly cannot resist just one more cloud-like dinner roll slathered with butter.

Suppers with my aunt and uncle are delightful and relaxing and are characterized by much giggling and the occasional sharing of a family secret or recipe - how that delicious pie crust comes together, for instance, or how Uncle Clippy got that name anyway. After supper, in a real-life scene from a Norman Rockwell that only we know about, the men slip into the living room while the 'girls' sip after supper tea. Somehow, with no break in the flow of the evening, the dishes are done and put away.

I'm not sure if my aunt and uncle realise the how profoundly important they've been to me and my sisters; we live on the almost absolute other side of the country - some 7000 kilometres away - so we don't see each other often but their influence when we were children, and much more so now that we are adults with eyes open and whatever innocence lost, is profound.

That influence, and the constant nature of their lives and that place, is solid, dependable ground. For those of us whose lives have been lived occasionally struggling on ground that looks solid but is actually brutal quicksand, such ground allows us to breathe and focus.

So, auntie and uncle, for our family dinner tonight, I'm serving apple pie that reminds me of you, that my sweetie will have for breakfast tomorrow (because, really, why not?) and home made dinner buns that are never going to be as good as yours but we'll drown them in strawberry jam and eat too many anyway; and we will laugh and giggle and have tea and share some family secrets and pass on a recipe or two - but not the pie crust, cause that one's a keeper; and, while I try to get the dishes done by the same magic as you do, out of the corner of my eye, I'll see that tuft of sweet-smelling hay that uncle Bill gave me (he thought that was so funny and he'll probably think me nuts because I smell that hay every day), which is now firmly attached to the wall in my kitchen; and we'll send the men off to the living room while the girls have their tea and we will celebrate important, real things in place of anonymous holidays that we're supposed to observe (who says, actually?); and maybe I can give my family a taste of Nova Scotia - what it really is.

Love you all much.