Sense of entitlement

I owe you nothing.

These should be the words hovering above each person's head as they leave the door each morning. Perhaps they should wear it on their chest as some sort of insignia.
People need to be reminded that nobody actually owes them anything. They are no different, no more superior, no more deserving of unearned perks than the stranger who just walked past them and didn't stop to look.
But in this world that means nothing. All you have to do is complain and it becomes an actionable item.

Let me say it again: "I owe you nothing." Earn it, baby. Lift a finger and then we'll talk.

To often I encounter this attitude of 'I want it that means it is mine unless you prove otherwise, and oh, I'll make you prove it.

Earn it.

Telephone marketing: A new height of insanity

I'm working. In my pj's. Not the the ones you sleep in, though I could. The kind you wear when you have no intention of going anywhere because you are up to your eye balls in work.

I get a call on line two. The one we use as a backup line and without any features on it. We never give the number out. Just for kicks I pick up the phone, knowing it's one of two things: Wrong number or somebody telling me that either I won something or according to their records I'm due for a duct cleaning.

As soon as I pick up the phone I get a sexy recorded female voice asking me to please hold on a minute. No, really, it sounded sexy. I almost got turned on. I decide to hold, wondering what snarky one-liner I should use to tell them off before hanging up on some stunned minimum wage sucker who thinks this is a great way to earn a living.

So, I wait.... a bit longer than it usually takes them to kick in the auto dialer queue thing-a-ma-jig until I get VOICE MAIL! No, not just voice mail. Voice mail that informs me that I have reached 'M' 'G' 'R' and requests that I leave a message.

I don't even know who called me! And, 'mgr'? Short form for 'manager'? Wholly cow! I bet the call display will say they called from 123-456-7891. Do people actually do business with these companies?

For all the talk of fraud, identity theft and the like you really have to wonder if at least some of the people that get victimized sort of deserve it because they actually fell for it.

Actually, we should probably thank all those poor souls for falling for these cheap tricks so that these companies don't have to resort to things that are actually hard to detect until the deed is done.

Here's one for the Village Idiot, may there be more like you.

going off-line

Well, it's crunch time again. The next couple of weeks will be relatively silent on this blog as I have to meet a big deadline. Check back first week of December I should have some more high and mighty opinions to relay.

community spirit

The world is full of different kinds of people. Some are selfish, some are self contained, some are weak, some are passive, and some are driven to "give back".

For those that want to contribute, at some point you've got to wonder about the hidden agenda. Why do they do it?

The worst offenders are people who give everything of themselves and leave nothing for themselves. To me, it seems they are missing the whole point. Why is one person's life worth more than another's and what makes your life the one that should be sacrificed. What is this sense of duty? Unless.... There is always an unless. I guess on some level, I do understand.

After all, I am not above putting everything else first. I don't know why but it seems like these are things that need to be done. Then again, I sort of felt the same way about finishing that random game of Scrabulous on Facebook and staying up all night long to do it. Perhaps I am deeply misguided. Perhaps deeply disturbed. Perhaps both.

Anyway, everybody is asleep now and I should be too. Off to bed I go.

Personal Trainer

So I finally managed to get myself a gym membership and sat on it for a week or two. Today was the big day. I went and met my personal trainer, Rodney.

They give you a free introductory session with your very own personal trainer. The poor guy! He had to deal with the likes of me. Educated, and not very likely to result in additional revenue. He tried to find gaps where he could sell himself on the value add but it just wasn't working for him.

The other thing is this guy is super nice.... I think. He puts nice into overdrive. Like the kind of nice that borders on flaming with two earrings if you know what I mean. I kept wondering about it because it's tough to be comfortable around somebody that is Richard Simmons nice.

Finally, not sure how, I got him to dial it down a notch or to enough to manage a semi decent conversation, except for the gym world's own maze of TLAs. He kept asking me if I would be interested in this that or the other thing and I couldn't figure out if any of it was going to end up costing me or how much. The land of confusion!

Well, I'm pumped. Not literally because all we did was talk today. But I am psyched.

The coolest things was when he pulled out this fandangled gadget that measures your BMI only to tell me that I needed to lose pretty much exactly what I came in saying I needed to lose. Poor Rodney. Didn't get anywhere with me.

Nice guy though.

What Halloween really was

There are many ways to wage a war. You can pick up arms and bash in some heads. You can rape, pillage, and plunder. Or you can adopt other people's customs and tell them that they were yours all along.

This was the case with Christmas and this was the case with Halloween. The Christians took over existing holidays and moved their own to match the date. They weren't actually lying, just bending the truth a bit.

Christ was born in July, or was it June? Does anybody really care about that little detail anymore? Hollow's Day wasn't on November 1st either. Ah, but if the pagans could believe in multiple gods, what was one more thing to believe in.

We are in a similar war now. As long as we are permitted to go along with our way of life, to a point, we are lulled into this false sense of security that life is as it should be and there is nothing to be concerned about. Still, little by little the idea of democracy and western beliefs, particularly the belief that women are people and equally able to think as men, these are all things that are fading into the realm of censored history books.

Freedom of thought is a dangerous thing because with that comes the freedom to debate the rights of others. Ultimately, those who should least have the right to debate human rights are the ones who will make the decision because they are militant and resoundingly convinced that some people are indeed more equal than others.

Stalin knew this. This is why the first thing he did was send the intelligentsia to Siberia. WE live in a glass dome of false security. Respecting your heritage and keeping your mother tongue alive, keeping traditions and religious beliefs going is each person's right, and in some ways an obligation. However, live and let live. There must be a separation between public institutions and cultural diversity. We have become liberal to the point of self-decay.

Public schools are now teaching classes in Hindi or Punjabi because the majority of the class understands that better than English. What then of those whose mother tongue is English? If people move to Canada it should be to live in Canada. At some point the demographic has shifted because most of the people who immigrated over the past decade have been from the East.

At first and for a long time they struggled as the 'visible minority' but now minority is no longer applicable. They are the majority and with that comes the privilege of not having to care anymore. So with each election comes more change before legally and demographically I no longer have a say that matters.

This is not about skin color or religion. This is about human rights and the right to be recognized as human. Democracy is not a sustainable political model. At some point, government has an obligation to defend the rights of all of its citizens. That's called the Canadian Constitution. The trouble with Democracy is that we have the right to revoke our own rights and freedoms.


"Those who forget the lessons of history are destined to repeat it."

Why Rob Ford got elected

Interesting insight came out of a conversation I had with a respected leader of the business community. Rob Ford is Rob Ford but the reason he got elected is because he is consistently sending out the same message. You know what you are going to get with the guy. So you may not like him but, you can probably trust him.

For business, what my source said is that Ford would help level the playing field between union and non-union bidders for municipal projects. Because the unions are so familiar with the work and they have the infrastructure to support the bids, there is no reason for why they should not be successful at bidding. But, their pricing is highly inflated and we are all suffering those costs. Makes sense to me.