Good Things

I'm kinda a goniff on visual arts, I am far more narratively oriented (which for me, would include music). But there is one thing that I actually do appreciate alot, and am kind of good at: sculpture. One of the nice things about people thinking you have no talent at something is that when you produce something kind of half-assed, everyone is so impressed. I've done it once or twice; if I had a second career, outside of what comes out of my mouth, it would be sculpture.

I just adore Rodin, I think that the Burghers of Calais is just so way cool it is hard to describe. And it isn't something that you can really appreciate until you see it whole in person in real space, there is no way I think to digitize the real effect of real space occupied and not, and displaced, and the implied narrative.

And that is kinda art talk, but walk up to one of those sorry figures, and look them in the eye, not cry and admire it, well, I don't know. Rodin was touching god there, so clearly and obviously that we cannot talk about it meaningfully.

For me, it is when god stops your mouth, that moment when you realize that there is nothing you can really say about what is in front of you, except, look at it.

Anyway, this is getting alot of meme, but damn, I would like to see this live, displacing real space I was near to. There is nothing at all factual about it, and nothing at all ideologically correct about the creator, but from what I can see in the pix, it looks pretty fucking cool, the whole idea, which is I suppose, way off the intent of the artist.

I think it says five or six or things that slip way beyond what anyone wants it to be.

And that is good.

Which is a Good Thing, I think

If continued....

Peace Be Upon Them

I'm not sure I agree with each and every thing they do and say, but then I don't agree with anybody 100%. But I sure do admire the Christian Peacemaker Teams. I urge you to explore their website, it gives their side of the story, their responses to the many slurs they receive, in a truly gentle, christian fashion.

Well, they may be gentle, restrained, and very careful, but I'm not as christian as they so I don't have to be. I am outraged by the crap they are taking right now. Here are a couple of examples.

Damn it, once again, the actual facts of the situation are not being presented. Here are a few:

1. When CPT went into Iraq, it was not to try and convert islamicists into christians or peaceniks. Their main reason for being there was to bear witness on American activities, not Jihadists' (they are western, not arab after all). They were essentially attempting to reduce violence and abuse by being witnesses, as they are in Gaza and the West Bank, and indeed here in Canada at Grassy Narrows. They were there to help the families of the 15,000 - 18,000 Iraqis under indefinite, warrentless detention, find out about their loved ones. It turns out that the US military, like the Shin Beit and the RCMP are just a little less willing to pull the truncheons out in front of a Christian, Western witness, and a little less willing to turn petitioners away. Howabout that.

2. Whe the CPT went into Iraq, it was with full knowledge that it would be at a high risk of being kidnapped. They left very clear instructions that if they were kidnapped, they expressly did not want to be rescued in a military/commando style operation.

3. The American CPTer that was killed was not tortured. It was a simple gunshot, and not execution style; the expectation is that there might have been a struggle, or an escape attempt, or an accident. We won't know until the report is released, if it ever is, and if you believe it.

4. After the American died, the remaining kidnappers seem to have lost their nerve; they gathered the other three in the living room of the house they were being held in, and then they all left.

5. Somehow or other the authorities found out where they were, and launched the grand heroic rescue operation. Personally, I bet you they got a phone call from one of the leaving kidnappers. I sincerely doubt that it was the result of any brilliant intelligence operation or even skillful coercive interrogation.

6. So they put together this complicated international strikeforce, when probably an office messenger and a taxi could have done the job. The team had a MI6/SAS unit (there were British hostages), a JTF2/RCMP unit (Canadian hostage, check), and a joint American unit (probably Delta)/Marines (US command, check). I checked the papers, yeah, in Canada it was all about the RCMP, in the UK it was clearly a SAS led mission, and in the States it was the US cavalry to the rescue. Everybody gets some credit I guess. (I still think they could have sent out an office boy in a taxi. Or just called the CPT folks to go pick up their guys.)

7. Some british army type has the ungentlemanly nerve to publically act the cad and complain that the rescuers never got thanked.

8. Then all the pundits jump on the wagon. A lot of this and that, but one thing in common: not only are the Peacemakers idiotic unpatriotic naive ninnies, but gosh, this whole experience should have learned them, now they should see the rightness of the occupation and the necessity for Bush's invasion and the absolute requirement for coercive interrogation and finally and most importantly, the necessity of supporting the troops. Because the troops saved you, you mewling traitors, better put away your silly pacifism now.

And then no doubt drove home in a car with a "What Would Jesus Do?" bumpersticker.

Well, like I said, considering the flack, the CPT has been astoundingly gracious.

They aren't going away either, and good for them.

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The Ones Who Walk Away

I really don't want to do a politics blog, there are way way too many of them out there right now, and I basically try not to do an immigration blog much, because those of you who read me already know all that stuff, and it is a little dull to those that aren't really in the biz. But once in a while, things leak through.

Because of my work, I have had occasion to get know a fair number of people that have in fact been tortured. And all the debates over the last few years, have nearly driven me mad, because they all mostly come down to hairsplitting and angels on the head of a pin stuff. Michael Ignatieff has one today, and it is much the same sort of thing. At least he eventually comes down on the side of the angels. (And this is the expat, never very strongly attached to Canada anyway guy, that proposes to become the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada/Toronto, which rather strikes me as a vanity project more than anything else.)

But the thing that upsets me the most, is the complete dissonance between this kind of academic discussion, and the reality. Dershowitz, Bowden, Posner, et all, for example, make great use of the ticking bomb scenario—if torturing someone can save one or many lives, say if the victim knows where a nuke is or something, it may or may not be somehow justifiable.

This all operates under the assumption that torture actually works, that you can get useful or reliable evidence from its use, when in fact it is logically obvious that you cannot.

Like I said, I’ve known a number of victims, from all over the world, and what was true in every single case was this: while torture (or “coercive interrogation,” which is, you see, different) is always initially justified (and perhaps sometimes even initially believed to be so by practitioners, until experience reveals how ineffective it is), on the basis of ticking bombs and public safety, it always becomes far more useful as an instrument of terror.

The purpose of torture, in all societies that practise it, is not to extract information, nor even necessarily to cow or intimidate the immediate victim. It is to cow, intimidate, and terrify the victims’ friends, family, and society in general. It is almost always practiced by rulers with shaky grips on authority, who are desperately unsure of their legitimacy. At the individual level, it is almost always practised by amateurs, very ineffectively, and mostly, it seems, to try and prove that they are the boss. Abu Ghraib would be a very good example of this.

Indeed, so would the US occupation of Iraq generally. One simple fact: right now, the US (the US, not the Iraqi “government” which has their own inventory) is holding between 15,000 and 18,000 Iraqis in custody, which in fact is a higher number than Saddam Hussein, who also felt the need to torture, ever did. And if you don’t think that there isn’t still some pretty damn coercive interrogation going on, well, I know of some interesting real estate deals for you.

And by all appearances, it isn’t working worth a damn, is it?

Anyway, Ignatieff gets one point right. Rigorous interrogation always slips down the slope into coercive interrogation, which always slips further down the slope into you know what.

But I don’t think we need any complicated essays on the topic of the justifiable necessity of torture for the safety and good of society generally. The most damning one possible has already been written: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursela Le Guin.

And to make the point again (I’m sure I’ve made it a couple of times already), well, Taking a Long View, history shows again and again that insurgencies are by and large not beaten by mock executions and electrical shocks and gang rapes and search & destroy missions and hearts & minds propaganda campaigns. No, they are beaten by the rule of law, civilian bravery, and open government. Or they aren’t beaten at all.

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Circling Sharks

Circling Sharks

I've been thinking about it, and looking back at it, and you know, most of my posts are pretty circular. I usually end up somewhere pretty near where I started. And I am happy with that, actually.

But wondering how I will get there from here.Well, my last post veered into prurience, so here is another. I totally aced this one, only making an educated guess twice. Yay me, I have a dirty mind and film memory. But it can't be dirty, it was from the people's tv, right?

I would like to underline something though. I do family services. Families without a certain amount of erotic tension right at the centre probably aren't families. But we pretend very hard that that is not so, that families are as pure as the babies they make and the cultures they pass on. Right.

The most powerful and effective program we run these days is a let us help you with your do it yourself divorce thing. Divorce is painful enough, but it is totally amazing and totally restores my faith in humanity, that so many can do it, painfully to be sure, but so very efficiently and, if not amicably, then reasonably reasonably. (Damn but I love doubling up words that you wouldn't think would double up sensibly. I'm very proud of that one, especially since it was so true.) As in not having lawyers involved, which pretty much kills off any hope of reasonableness.

Mind you, it helps when you don't actually have anything worth anything to divide, like most of our clients don't.

Circling back to where I started, I think that we, like sharks, spend a good deal of our life circling, wondering when and how we should dive in, at what risk and cost, and to what satisfaction. We ponder and ponder, and then once in a while take a dive at it. I don't think either sex has a monopoly on this, though we might well circle in different directions.

But I always felt kind of sorry for those sharks in those nature movies, finally diving in towards meaningless chum just to have their picture taken gaping jaws on nothing at all.

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Smenitaed

Smenita

If you don't blogspot, you don't know what fear that word can strike into you. It is right up there with your accountant's "surprise audit" and hard shoulder grip from a bouncer: "sonny. . ."But I can't publish this one either, because it too has been smenita'd.

Smenita: death by stupid code.

Let me assure you, you see that word, you are cooked, the only way you can procede is to kill all your cookies and recent sites and everything.

Grr.

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Mismatches and Duh!s

Well, I've just spent a couple of days caring for a very sick, very very grouchy wife, but the work thing is calling pretty hard, I just have things going on that I Cannot Ignore anymore, so I am back to the grindstone tomorrow.

Budget things, a lot of boring boring budget things, staff things, more than one, and major project things. And some fairly major operational detrius things that I have been moving to the back burner for so long that they are starting to char, and need attention, Now!

Mostly, when you are caring for a drugged out sleeping a great deal post-op patient, you have a good deal of time on your hands, and I have been surfing and surfing and surfing some more. You know what the blogosphere mostly is? Politixblogs, sexblogs, techblogs, and stupid four posts and I lose interest teenblogs. I'm not sure where I fit in that spectrum, I suppose the politix but I really cannot abide reading any more of that.

Techblogs are faintly interesting, in that they seem to always have a good fight or two going on, but since I really don't understand most of what they are talking about, well it gets kinda dull after a while. I do wish my own industry was a little more on-line.

Sexblogs, well there sure do seem to be an awful lot of them. And most of them seem to be pretty improbable, though you never know. What is interesting about that end of the 'sphere, is how many articulate blogs there are by folks that want someone to boss them around and hurt them, and how few by those that want to be the boss and hurt people. In all my surfing, I hit many different flavours, and it sure does seem that there is a dangerous shortage of people who want to be the heavy, and you can see why, once it gets that elaborate it sounds terribly boring.

I don't know if a woman's experience of sex necessarily involves some kind of submitting, I'm not a woman. Certainly a good many women blogging seem to be into that. It is odd, you don't see very much from men, wanting to dominate. Or should I say, Dominate (the orthagraphy/typography can get confusing). Or women looking for free and equal partnerships. Mostly the hetero male sexbloggers seem to want to suck toes, or brag. I dunno, not my way of doing things anyway. Anyway, there seems to be a bit of a mis-match.

But I am thinking about this a bit, I am supposed to be managing family services, and families do really start with a good many things, the menu including rude proclivities. But mostly, all my surfing, well, I was hearing Eleanor Rigby in my head. There sure do seem to be a surplus of lonely people blogging, whether it is tech or sex or politics, that I think a good argument can be made that loneliness provably makes you crazy. Which makes me glad that I am married, and still in love really, after all these years.

And like so much of the blogosphere, that is so much of a duh! moment that I guess I had better put it down for the night.

If continued....

Passion

I frequently get introduced, as being passionate. Here is Rob, they say, and as we know, he is passionate.

Well I'm not. What I really am, is angry. But that isn't polite, so passionate it is.

Truthfully, my whole adult life is motivated by seas and oceans of rage, of outrage, of a temper so strong that ...

Because when I was a child, I was bullied most atrociously. From grade 5 to about grade 10, very formative years, there were any number of people that felt that because I didn't fit in, because I was smart, because they could, fuck I don't know, that they could face me down. Make me fight. Humiliate and hurt and beat and kick and punch and humiliate me again. And they did and did. And the result of that is a lifetime of anger.

I was punched, kicked, had my underwear dragged out to show, made to run run run, punched so hard I could hardly use my arm for a week, kicked so hard that it hurt to move my leg, humiliated so much in front of giggling girls that it took me all my life to ever trust them again. Truthfully, I still don't, I still think they are just waiting to giggle.

I spent so many of those years in terror, running away, trying to hide, trying to figure out what it was that I did that was so wrong that I deserved it, because there appeared to me to be a general consensus that I did. Hiding what was going on from everyone, I had and have so much pride. And once in an odd while, shaking all over, forced to, finally cornered, fighting like a rat. And usually (well, actually, always) winning those fights, but getting absolutely no satisfaction from it, because all I wanted to know was, why is this happening? I still want to know.

Well I grew up big and tough, and it all stopped because of that, but it left something behind.

Being bullied teaches you to lie and hide, teaches you that you are under a microscope all the time, and everything you do wrong will get caught and punished, teaches you that there is no safety, that you have to hide almost everything about yourself, and most of all, which is kind of the point, that you have no friends.

Because when the important ones, the big ones, the ones who run things, get on you, you have no friends. Let me assure you, you have no friends, I've been there and I know it. You are all alone, and they have all the cards. All you can do is run and hide.

It made me very angry, and basically, ever since, when I have seen it, I have refused to walk away, to look away, to say it isn't any of my business. It is my business.

Back then, the bullying was about you aren't so smart, you aren't so good, I can still be better than you. And fair enough, I can understand how an arrogant little bastard like I was all my life could piss off the losers.

But nowadays, what I see so often, is not that petty little let me show you that I am more important than you. Though I see that often. But what I see all the time, is you are inconvenient.

Fuck you. Deal with it. People are inconvenient, that is why god loves them, and I will not have it, that you think they are inconvenient, that they disturb the even tenor of your life. I will get in your face, as nicely as I can to be sure, but goddamn it, inside, I am seeing that terrified 12 year old running, running as hard as he can, around every corner and looking for every possible place to hide.

Which is why I go to meetings and meetings and meetings over my children. Because I will not let you win, will not let you beat them down, to suit your convenience. Nor my clients, nor my staff, nor anyone at all.

Nor my family. I simply will not have it, and I will call it when I see it.

From my point of view, well, I am so sorry, but you are a bully until proven otherwise, and I am sure that you can backslide. It is so sad, that I am so scarred and broken, that I must see everyone I meet through that lens, that was given, impressed on me by the bullies of my youth.

But always remember this: I am not passionate, I am angry, with an anger that goes beyond angry, so that it is so much a part of who I am that I don't think I can ever let it go.

It is really very simple. I cannot abide, and will not abide, people treating people like shit, just because they can. I just cannot let that stand.

If continued....

What to Do

I am sorry that I keep going on about such a depressing topic as domestic violence. And god, I am beginning to feel that the phrase "domestic violence" is kind of a sugar coating. Well, it is like "sexual assault" which covers everything from an unwelcome grope to very violent forced physical intrusion, and I suppose that there is a point to bringing all violations up to the standard of being violations, rape or no. But in this case to call a spade a spade, it used to be called "wife beating" which is what it is most of the time (though I do not by any means wish to deny or downgrade the reality of very very nasty psychological abuse), though I think the thing that really has me going is that often it should be called "attempted murder" which is what it can be, spousal or not. Or perhaps "aggravated slow-motion poorly executed attempted murder."

What has set me off is the wretched cycle we seem to be in. Every few years, five or six, there is a particulary horrific instance of a murder, usually a murder-suicide, and the politicians make noises and the system tightens up and cracks down. But after a few years of women going back to their abusers no matter what sanctions the state applies, well, the state gets tired, and lets things go, until the next woman dies.

We are in the lax stage hereabouts these days. Just had a case, where the Crown Prosecutor decided to cut a deal, even though the case was in our special family violence court (set up after the last horrific preventable mess), against the concerns of the family violence worker, the child protection worker, and us. Because when he was arrested, it was back in the house; even though she wasn't there (seeing as how she was at the ER), and he was in violation of a restraining order being there, the assumption was that the only reason he was there was that she had called him and let him in. It had to be that, you see, because it so often is.

So he was out, because he pled guilty and had no priors, and it was probably her fault, sentenced to time served (4 days). The judge god bless him wasn't happy, but with a recommendation from the crown and not much other evidence, he went along.

For once the cops were on the side of the angels, I know because they called me, they had had a car going by regularly, and were terrified when they found her Not There. She wasn't there because we put her somewhere else. Because we think she has a very high chance of being a dead woman.

She is so frantic, child welfare won't give her her kids back, until she is safe, and the crown prosecutor has just seen to it that she won't be, at least until he attacks her again and can get charged with something again.

Actually, no-one concerned wants the guy punished, he no doubt has his own problems and really needs help. But she needs to be safe, and her children need her, and she really needs them, and we don't quite know what to do, with him on the street, probably looking for her. We complained of course, and got the inter-bureaucratic equivalent of a "fuck off," but that really doesn't matter.

You want to know how bad it has gotten? Look at Calgary Housing. Not only do they tell immigrant women who arrived under the Family Class program, sponsored by their husbands, that they are not eligible for subsidized housing because they are sponsored, and must ask their husbands for support, no matter how many restraining orders and outstanding charges and even convictions there are. In this case, they won't let her stay with her brother, because that means that there are too many people in the apartment. If he lets her stay there, they will evict all of them. Yes we complained, but we got the same old bureaucratic equivalent. And a bureacratic buck pass it's your problem, not ours.

And she has no money at all either: it takes about three weeks to get onto welfare hereabouts (the $50,000+ workers are overburdened you see, you'll just have to wait, maybe a church can help you in the meantime). One of the reasons he kind of kept her prisoner for the last three years was to get his hands on the Child Tax Benefit, which together with Student Finance for the Theology course he wasn't attending was what they were living on. It is going to take a bunch of work to get the CTB sent to her again, especially since she doesn't have much of an address right now. Bureaucratically, of course, not their problem, and since we are helping her, it is our problem, thankyou for your dedication.

Its a tired old phrase, but you know what? There is no justice. No justice at all, and we should all be ashamed.

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How Angry I Am

I cannot begin to express how angry I am. Librarians are heroes of mine, well, outside of the York School Board. God forbid that we should expose our children to any kind of thinking or controversy, or even worse, tell them the truth.

Its an old saw, but a true one: if you can't explain the point of what you are doing to a reasonably bright 7 year old, what you are doing probably isn't worthwhile. Until it comes to middle-eastern politics, well then it is necessary to shield them.

You see, its just too complex for their little minds. We need to spare our children complexity, don't you know. They should grow up in a world where everything is clear and simple and easy to understand, with good guys and bad guys and no bombs falling out of the blank sky or houses being bulldozed for complex reasons.

There is a word for that kind of thinking, and it begins with "F" and ends with "ism" and the uncle I never knew died fighting it. So I take it personally. And it should not happen in Canada. And that's all I have to say about that.

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Words

I saw "The Aristocrats" tonite. A very uncomfortable film, really. But the whole point of comedy is to transgress, I suppose, and watching some professionals take apart the machine and then put it back together, well, it was fascinating really. And goddamn funny in spite of its very vile self.

And astonishing, really, I never thought you could mime a nasty dirty joke, but you actually can. That, and the women, especially Sarah Silverberg, laid into it as well or better than the men.

But one bit really caught me. Doing a routine, one standup referred to "Indians, I mean slurpee Indians, not casino Indians." I pretty much put a drink through my nose on that one.

That, and the references to playing the rusty trombone. I actually used to play trombone, but nevertheless consider myself pretty worldly and experienced, but I had never thought... Nasty, is all I have to say about that.

Transgressive is good, but now I have to get a whole lot of really nasty images out of my head. And the sad part is that I put them there myself; the film shows no shocking imiages at all, it is just the words. Which is the point of course, and why George Carlin was so prominent in the thing.

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The Good Father

Essentially, I got my medal for telling three stories, being very lucky that I did so at the moment in time that people were prepared to listen, and proposing a solution. Here is the first story.

In our hostel, we had an unusual arrival. It was a single parent family, a Kurdish guy from Iraq, with four kids. Typically, middle-eastern men do not raise young children. But one of Saddam's bombs had taken out his wife and bombs or gas or death-squads had taken out pretty much all of his extended family, so he had to. Somehow, he had gotten his kids across the mountains into Turkey, I have no idea how and cannot imagine what that entailed. (And they tell us we have to teach them "life skills." Fuck that, they should teach us life skills.)

Anyway, he had lived in Turkey for a year or more, and somehow made the very lucky cut and gotten accepted as a refugee, and arrived in our hostel.

It was tough, at the time we did not have the resources to care for his kids when we oriented him on Canadian money and labour market and leasing arrangements and shopping and education and healthcare and everything else that someone from the back hills of Kurdistan needs to know to live here (the feds tell us it takes 13 hours, max, 5 of which must be devoted to his future relations with them), and his kids ran wild up and down the halls and pretty much drove everyone crazy. So we took him aside, and said something to the effect that the kids were causing a bit of a problem, could he do something about it, meaning, we thought, talk to them.

Instantly, the kids were no problem. They stayed in the room, we never saw them, all was well. Until a staff member walking down the hall saw the door swing open, and saw them, tied to the bed with a rope.

Today, in Calgary, an immigrant woman got sent to jail for eight months for tieing her child to the couch with a rope when she went to work washing other people's toilets (sorry, no link, all the ones I can find are behind the subscription wall of one of Canada's near news monopolies). Because she had to go to work, of course, and couldn't afford childcare in Alberta's wretched system, and didn't know what else to do.

Mr. Harper will give her $100/month, so she won't have to tie the kid to the couch any more. Thank you Mr. Harper. Well, except that she is in jail, and that will learn her. And help her kids while they are in foster care too, no doubt.

But back to my Kurdish father.

We have a certain experience in these things. Instead of calling the cops or child welfare or berating him, we sat down and asked why. (In my experience, we spend far too little time asking why.)

Well, in Turkey, responsible for four young children for the first time in his life, he was warehoused by the local refugee agencies in a house in a very dangerous slum, and very lucky at that, Kurdish refugees being regarded by the Turkish government as being roughly equivalent to HPV. The house had four bedrooms; he was given one. The kids could not go outside, it was very dangerous, and if they caused problems in the house, the family would be thrown out. And he had to be absent a lot, to stand in the endless lines that are a refugee's lot, to get food, to get status, to get this or that paper, to try and come to Canada, to prove that he was not a terrorist.

Being unwilling to beat his children, the only way he could keep them safe was to tie them to the bed. It was all he had, and it worked. They did not get thrown out of the house, when others did, and the kids did not go out into the slum and garbage dump that surrounded the house, and he did not have to beat them. It was actually a very realistic compassion, and became a learnt response to stress.

So instead of being outraged, we were compassionate: we asked why, and showed him that we had a playground that was safe, and a family room with games and arts and crafts and things where his kids could play if you took a little time to show them how (a frequent feature of my professional life, is that we actually have to teach children how to play with stuff, and how sad is that?), and eventually moved him into a building where there were Kurdish women that would help him out.

Nobody needed to go to jail, all that was needed was taking the time to listen, and to understand, and to creatively find some help. This isn't rocket science, it is just taking some time, and asking a few questions, and trying to understand.

This guy, he is about the best father I have ever met. I should be so good, and weather my children alive through such storms. How can I not be humble before him? What arrogance is it, that says we have to punish him into better behaviour? Or that we have anything at all to teach him, about being a parent?

What solutions are we offering, to people that just need some choices?

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Reality

Phone call this evening, in the midst of a stupid conference:

H: Hi Rob

Me: How are you doing, H.

H: I want to thank you for everything, they found me a place to stay, and I got your letter, but I haven't spent the money and I read your letter of reference and I spent the whole day crying.

Me: That's ok H, we just want things to be good for you.

H: I'm coming back to Calgary, I still have a job, right?

Me: . . . What? ... Why? It isn't safe.

H: We talked for two hours. He's sorry. It won't happen again.

Me: H, it always happens again. I don't think this is a good idea.

H: We talked for two hours. He is so sorry. It won't happen again.

Me: H, It'll happen again, I am pretty sure.

H: Do I have my job back? Can I start Monday?

Me: H, please, it will happen again, I've got a lot of experience on this.

H: Do I have my job back? I read your letter of reference and I cried for three hours.

Me: Well we aren't going to fire you for having an abusive husband...

H: Its ok Rob. We'll be OK. He's sorry.

Me: I don't think so. As long as you are there, it will go on. We'll be doing this whole thing again.

H: No, we talked for two hours. He is sorry. It won't happen again.

Me: H, I'm actually crying right now. That's not the way it works.

H: No, it will be alright. We talked for two hours, it will be alright.

Me: I don't think it will be alright. I don't think this is a good idea.

H: I'm coming back to Calgary. Do I have a job?

Me: [What can I say? Of course you have a job, the letter was the truth, you are very good at what you do, but you have a batshit crazy dangerous husband.] Of course H., we will always love to have you, but this is a bad idea.

H: I will call you Monday morning.

Well I'll be hoping with every incoming call, that it is her, and not the police.

Sometime over the next few weeks, I am pretty sure it will be the police.

These things don't end easily. Often, I look at my clients and friends and family, and have to ask, Love is a Good Thing?

God, is love a good thing?

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Hopeless as it May Be

I am just getting so sick of domestic violence cases. I get them again and again and again, nothing peculiar to immigrants, its a pretty widespread phenomena. Actually, lately it has mostly been my staff, lately.

The thing is, there is so much mythology out there, and like homelessness it can be a pretty slippery concept, but one thing I've learnt over the last little while, is that there is a whole lot of general beliefs that simply aren't true.

For example, that it is poor people. Being poor can cause stessors on a marriage, but it also makes it a lot easier to leave; in fact in terms of being right on the bottom, leaving can be economically advantageous, and certainly not make anything worse. In a low income relationship, there are generally far fewer reasons to feel constrained to stay. Which is why it can actually be a good deal worse on more affluent-family spousal victims.

(Mind you, in the contexts of the great welfare debates, this is generally presented as a Bad Thing. Sorry, it isn't.)

Another myth is that it is relegated to drunks, drug addicts and other low-life. While I have seen plenty of cases where that was a factor, but most of the worst cases, well, it wasn't. In fact, in cases where it is only occuring in the context of substance abuse, there is actually a chance it can be mended, if the substance (almost always alcohol) abuse can be mended. If its happening sober, well, its pretty much an unalterable escalating given, with no hope.

For the yahoos out there that ask, yes it works both ways: depending on how you define it, well, something between 10 and no more than 20 per cent of the cases have the women doing the violence, or at least giving as good as they get. But by and large women don't kill men, men kill women. And other men (a man is much much much more likely to be killed by another man than by a woman).

In almost every part of the dynamic it is different, although in one sense it is the same-- men and women will just insist on sticking into hopeless dangerous harmful situations, because they love, or feel they should or have to, and men are no more immune to that than women.

But what has been the real eye-opener to me these last few years, is that I kinda thought that after all the shocking cases, the cops and courts would be just a little bit more sensitive and responsive. WRONGO! I mean not in the sense that she deserved it or its a matter between a man and his wife, no, its more along the lines of this isn't so important, isn't dangerous, is a waste of our time. That thinking is very much alive and very well, let me assure you. That, and the political/budget pressure to concentrate on raising traffic fine finance and suppressing antibusiness things like grafitti and streetwalking. We have our priorities, after all.

I know this would be much better if I told you some actual events, but this is deeply personal stuff for the people involved, and Best Practises, well I just can't. But it is heart-wrenching stuff, lemme tell you.

Well this: If you are alone, and in a strange country, know nobody, don't speak the language, and have no understanding at all of what is going on when the judge takes your kids away from you and the ER says you are fine and puts you out onto the snow covered streets and and you have no money and the only interpreter available (when he is available at all, which isn't often) is your husband's brother in law, what do you do then?

Well, one way or another, eventually, we end up catching you. Or trying to, sometimes it's a bit of a leap for the pop-fly, and sometimes the flop is kind of hopeless, but if we mean it we go through the motions nevertheless, hopeless as it may be.

If continued....

Medical Therbligs

I had a lot of time, in the ER, to sit and watch and ponder. I don't know medicine, or triage, so I won't go there (though triage as a way of thinking is a very powerful tool indeed, one that I have used several times in management to great success).

Just for starters, why can't government implement what we in the private sector learnt years and years ago: the client gets to see the screen. Let me repeat that: The Client Gets To See The Screen. It is impossibly rude to sit there and ask questions and type things into a computer when the client can't see what is going on, and has no idea what is being typed in. Or why.

It is also very inefficient.

I know this because I work with a lot of clients with unusual names, from unusual places, with weird histories. If they can watch you type stuff in, they can correct mistakes on the fly. It is all about making the client a participant in the process, it can be called empowerment or dignity or whatever, but what it really comes to is utilizing the resources of the client by making them active, not passive participants.

But biggist change I would make is in seperating out the functions of the Triage Nurse. Looking at sick people and guessing how sick they are and assigning resources, that is one thing. But checking out visitors and telling them where to go and entering basic data into a computer, well, that is a whole different task. Why make sick suffering people wait in line behind people coming in to be with their loved ones? Could you not set up a seperate desk manned by one of the idle security folk you are already paying, with a great big sign saying something like "if you are not sick but just visiting, come here"? Give him or her a basic screen showing bed assignments and if visitors are allowed-- it isn't rocket science, and would make people feel a good deal happier.

And why on earth pay a highly skilled medical professional to type? When you have a clerk sitting like 10 feet away playing solitaire? I would think that a Triage Nurse should never ever get within 10 feet of a keyboard, that's not what she is good at. Especially when you have a keyboard specialist necessarily on staff, hospital administration being what it is these days.

But the biggest thing of all, was the deep uncertainity. You enter the medical system, you become a thing, an object. It is not necessary to tell you what is going on, or why things are happening the way that they are. Such information might confuse you, I suppose, or provoke you to Ask Questions. No, it's sit still, take your turn, and do what you are told. And DON'T ask questions (you have to stand behing the Red Line for 20 minutes to do so, just for starters). I was treated with more dignity in grade school.

And it is deeply inefficient. It looks like a waste of time, tell a client what is going to happen before it happens, it seems like front-end loading, but experience has taught me again and again that it actually greatly increases efficiency and reduces error, when a client is participating and is informed. The intake receptionist may not be able to tell you what ails you, but can tell you what will happen next, and what after that, sort of how it works, and why. It takes a few minutes, but it puts people into much better frames of mind, and allows them to plan a little too. There was some minimal effort made at that, but it was very carefully restricted as to who could tell you what: the triage nurse could tell you how long you might wait, but not the clerk. The ER nurse could tell you that she was going to put in an IV, not the triage nurse. The Doctor could tell you that you needed blood tests, not the ER Nurse.

Tell a woman that her ultrasound revealed abdominal "abnormalities" and then refusing to discuss it with her, indeed refusing to have ANYONE discuss it with her for the next 7 hours, except to tell her that she can't leave the hospital, well, there is a word for that: cruelty. Totally unnecessary, the ultrasound tech or the triage nurse or someone could have said something like, "it looks like you have gall-stones, but we need a doctor to look at the picture and confirm that with you."

It is a small thing too, but appearances count. There may very well be no beds, and nothing the Triage Nurse can do, but standing around in front of a bunch of suffering waiting people, and joking with EMTs or talking with other nurses about their vacations, well, it is just not what we in my trade call Best Practises. You may not be able to do much, but you should at least let everybody know that, and act like you are concerned. Howabout coming out and joking with the patients, for instance, instead of your colleagues?

That aside, it was the old Canadian guild thing that really set me off. Up north, in isolated communities, where there are no Drs because it is too poor to pay one, a station nurse can give injections and order blood tests and so on. But once she (pretty much always she) arrives in an urban area supplied with MDs, apparently she suddenly forgets how to do all that, and it can only be done by a Dr. What I saw in the ER was an awful lot of routine stuff left hanging, until a DOCTOR could show up and authorize it (not actually get his or her hands dirty doing it, mind you).

I fully understand that medical stuff can get complex, and this is a system that has to be very fault intolerant, and probably worst of all, in this medical litigation crazy climate, people have to behave unreasonably because lawyers tell them to, but still. I basically make my living by trusting my staff to do stuff on their own, and only bring stuff to my attention when it is truly heavy and needs my input. We spend a lot of time and energy training staff on what needs to be be passed up the line, and what can be done immediately. And everything goes up the line eventually for review anyway.

And a final thought. I saw an awful lot of people occupying beds in ER that should not have been there, that were just waiting to go somewhere else. Causing a lot of sick and suffering people to sit in the chairs on the other side of the Red Line. From my own experience managing intake/triage type systems, that is just very very inefficient, to say nothing of cruel. I think ERs ought to be measured in terms of turn-around time, how quickly they can get patients out of there, whether home after treatment or into a ward or something. One of the things that I look for in a faltering intake system, is whether it is being used as a warehouse. It is a very poor place to keep people, and that is what is happening.

If continued....

ER frolics

Part I

What happened was, Leslie (my wife) comes downstairs at 1am Sunday night (well, technically Monday morning), just as I am starting to clean up the kitchen prior to going to bed (yes I stay up late). She has terrible indigestion she says, and is out of antacid. So I hop in the car and drive around until I find an open place that sells some, and bring it home. She lies on the couch groaning while I work on the kitchen.

It isn't working.

I call the 24 hour health link line and talk to a nurse; after discussing the symptoms and finding out that she has been in pain since 7pm the night before, we are instructed to go to the ER, RIGHT NOW. So we do, arriving at about 2:30 am.

ERs in Calgary work like this: you come in, and there is a bank of clerk stations (behind glass) with, at 3 am, one of them manned (or more accurately, womanned). You walk up to them, and they say, no, you have to see the Triage Nurse, and points you up the hall. There, you find a thick Red Line painted on the floor, behind which you must stand until the Triage Nurse 10 feet away calls you forward to her station (also behind glass). She then asks you what is up, types some stuff into the computer, and probably invites you behind the glass to take your blood pressure. (Over the last couple of years, I have had a fair amount of hospital experience, and they sure do love taking your blood pressure, even in cases where there is absolutely no reason to. Every hour on the hour in fact, in ER, ICU and surgical wards, no matter what ailment brought you in. It's a RULE.)

You then are told to sit in the chairs and wait to be called, and the Traige Nurse does various mysterious things behind her glass, typing things into the computer, joking with the EMTs who are hanging about, talking to other nurses, whether about their recent vacation or the availability of beds, who knows. Eventually she calls the next person standing behind the Red Line forward.

One of the clerks from the first bank of stations then calls you up, to do the paperwork, or actually in this day and age, the typing stuff into the computer work, and then its back to the chairs for you, until things are ready on the other side of the glass.

Which in our case lasted about an hour, with Leslie passing out once from the pain. Sorry they said, we are waiting for a bed, we are a little busy tonite, nothing we can do. It didn't make a lot of sense to me, we were pretty much out of the line of sight of everyone except the check-in clerk, who was pretty absorbed with her workstation (playing solitaire? surfing boy-band sites? entering critical medical data?) An alien could have exploded out of Leslie's abdomen, and no-one would have known.

Yes, it was fun sitting there with a couple of insane (literally) people, and deeply ill groaning shivering people, and a couple of junkies hoping to cadge a fix, with your wife crying and groaning and passing out, with no idea at all of what was up, or when or what might happen next.

Well, finally, at 3:30, they took her in. Only by this time she couldn't walk, so they fished out this high tech wheel chair (wheel chair tech has improved immensely in the last few years, I must say). I am excluded though, they will call me when they feel ready to, so I sit with the sick, insane and addicted for another half hour.

Finally, the Triage Nurse waves at me, and tells me where in the warren Leslie is, and I walk by a bunch of people who have far far worse problems than I do, to where she is, lieing in a blood spattered bed (they drew blood for tests, and kind of made a mess of it, so the bed & floor are a little scary.) The Dr saw her and administered a little IV pain relief while they await the results. She's looking a little better, but not good. We sit & lie respectively for a while, listening to the groaning and clatter around us, under very bright lights.

I suddenly realize that this is Calgary, and I haven't paid for my parking (somehow slipped my mind, how irresponsible). I dash out and get there just in time to not get a ticket, and note at some other poor fellow's expense that, yes, at 3:30 am on a Monday morning, the Calgary Health Region does indeed tow cars from its ER parking areas if the owners haven't paid the exorbitant fee.

Back in, well, I have to stand behind the Red Line, in fact behind a lineup of people standing behind the Red Line, until the Triage Nurse gets around to me, so that I can go through the door and back to my wife, which takes about 20 minutes.

Um, I'm not really happy at this point.

Back in, the Dr. eventually shows up, says they have to wait for the blood tests, but authorizes some serious narcotics. The results will be back from the lab in half an hour apparently. In 40 minutes, I run out to put more money in the meter, and have to stand in line behind the Red Line some more to get back in.

We sit.

At around 6:30 the doctor comes back. They are pretty sure it is a gall bladder problem, but the blood tests are inconclusive, Leslie needs an ultrasound. However, that is booked up, could she come back Tuesday morning at 9 am? She is actually feeling rather better. They issue her with powerful narcotics in the meantime, and its off to do the paperwork and go home, which we reach at about 7:30. Just in time to drive the kids to school, and then me to work. Where I am, I assure you, very productive.

Part II
Tuesday morning, Leslie is feeling pretty good, I was going to stay with her, but she says no big deal, I'll call you when I'm done, so I drop the kids and her off and go off to work. Round about 11:30, having not heard a word, and getting worried, I call the hospital. Yes she has had an ultrasound, and has reported to ER. ER says, well, yes she is here, but it is a little busy, so she will have to wait a little bit. No, she can't go home.

Round about 3:00, she phones. She is still in the chairs at ER, waiting. It more than a little busy, it is insane. She can't leave, because the ultrasound revealed "abnormalities," an no, we can't tell you what kind or anything else, you have to talk to a Dr in ER about it. She is starving, she has done all her puzzles, could I bring her her knitting and something to eat (the food available from the vending machines is all contra-indicated for people with gall bladder problems, go figure). I do so, arriving to stand in line behind the Red Line because I can't find her in the chairs and the only person who can tell me anything is the Triage Nurse.

20 minutes later I am finally led to her bedside, where she is awaiting a surgical resident. Yes, she has gall stones, wait for the next Dr. The resident will come down and ask questions, and then take it back up to the surgeon, who will then come down and ask the same questions. This takes about two hours, its 5 oclock now.

The cool thing is, the surgeon turns out to be the son of the owner/founder of her employer. She is going to get a hell of a Dr's note, that is for sure. A really nice guy actually. They have decided that surgery has to be Right Now, or in Two Weeks, and eventually, decide that Two Weeks is the best option.

I should mention that on both visits, I had to stand behind the Red Line multiple times, because I did not want to pay more exorbitant parking fees than I had to, and they kept saying "half an hour" when they meant "an hour and a half." Or maybe my ears weren't working. And I discovered that the clerks behind the glass actually do pay attention, and they have a very important task. To jump on anyone daring to use a cell phone. In the waiting room. Which is bullshit.

Sitting there chatting with Leslie, I mentioned that Calgary is having hospital capacity problem, which Ralphie is going to fix with his "Third Way" rather than by, oh I don't know, blowing some of that SEVEN BILLION DOLLAR SURPLUS. For the last year, at any given moment, at least one of Calgary's three general hospitals has been in a situation where they cannot accept more arrivals, called a "Code..." something or other, some kind of colour, mauve? pink?

"You mean 'Burgandy' I think-- it has been on the PA all day" she says. And indeed it is a mess, I count 17 trolleys with attending EMTs in the hallway, waiting for ER staff to get around to dealing with them; the chairs outside the Red Line are packed with about the sorriest collection of human beings I have seen in a long time, and the secure rooms at the end of the hall for possibly violent crazy people are all full with cops and EMTs hanging around outside pushing them back in when they try and escape.

I wish they would put me in charge, I can think of several substantial improvements that would not cost hardly anything more.

If continued....

A Distant Ship's Smoke on the Horizon

You know, I am beginning to regret sort of calling off my job-search about a year ago. I'm just not seeing what I want to see, and fair enough, I'm not the boss. But I've cashed in almost every chip I have, raised as much hell as I could, and still, well, it isn't going to go the way I think it should.

The way I think it should be, would surprise almost everybody I think.

Its very sad, really. But I think its almost done, now.

I am so tired of confidences and what you can tell who and lack of focus.

And to tell you the truth, of religious and ethnic bias, of absentee management, of old battles and histories that don't concern me, of justifications that only relate to yesterday and people I don't care about. Of a lot being taken on credit, when that credit may not be there anymore.

Perhaps its time to fire up the old resume writer.

Thing is, its a friend. A friendship based on a lot of loyalty and shared thinking, and trust across years, a handshake that meant more than any contract. Gosh it hurts, to think away from that.

So sad.

If continued....

Therblig

Now, one of the things I am good at is a sort of systems engineering, or management or administration or something like that. I can look at a system of doing things, and see things that are being done in some way or other because that is how they always have been done, and see a really good way of doing them differently and better. I've done it repeatedly over my career, I just did it Friday morning, in my daycare, when I realized that everybody was doing the laundry on Friday afternoon/Monday morning, which was causing traffic jams and putting many child care specialists to work as laundry workers. We've got five rooms, effective Monday each has its own laundry day, and I am pretty sure more child care specialists will actually be working with children, not folding and sorting. Seems simple, but so much is done because it has always been done that way, not because its the best way of doing something.

I got my medal, mostly for similar thinking, which has been written up, which I will post about as soon as the link to the written up bit goes live, which it seems rather sluggish about (I've had the hard-copy sitting on my desk for about two months now; academic journals can be awfully stodgy.)

Probably the best one I ever came up with was the first, which is utterly irrelevent now, but caused a bit of a wave at the time, and did not get me any glory or thanks, except from the lowly occupation of library book-shelvers.

Way back in the day, as a student I worked nights and weekends at the university library, checking books out and in and trying to fix the goddamn photocopiers when they jammed (photocopiers and I have a long and toxic relationship). (The biggest perq to the job was access to the reserved section where all the drug and sex books and journals were kept. Cool stuff. I've actually read most of de Sade thereby, and a sad little man he was.)

Anyway, this was in the days before computers; well, there were computers, big mysterious machines down the hall that spun things and had blinking lights and used five inch floppies. But cataloguing and checking books in and out and so on were pretty much all handled with cards and drawers and such.

You'd check a book out by taking its card out and using a bit of tech to imprint the borrower's library card; you would then take the card and file it away in its catalogue order in a sort of drawer thingie. On the other end, you would fish the returned books out of the bins, look at their card number, fish out the card, stick in the book, and then put the book on a shelf labelled for its general category, waiting for the shelvers to show up in the morning.

It was kind of tedious work, walking back and forth with four or five books at a time and hunting and pecking cards. And I am a profoundly lazy man. Well, as the pioneering effeciency expert Frank Gilbreth once said, it pays to watch how a lazy man does his job, and I frankly think that laziness is a highly under-rated management capability. I would let the books pile up, and then panic and do them in one blast, because I have pretty good finger/eye coordination, and could hunt through the cards pretty quickly. But that wasn't good enough either.

So sort of invented my own version of batch processing. At the end of the shift when the return bins were full, I dragged over a shelving cart, sort of a mobile bookcase, and took all the incoming books, and sorted them on the cart into correct catalogue order. (In fact I had a sort of multi-level sort, first into category order in big tottering piles, and then into subcategory onto the shelf, and then final precise order.) I would then go through the card drawer, in order, and pull all the cards at once, in order. I would then stick all the cards in the books, in order, wheel the cart over to the shelvers' area, and put them on the shelves, in perfect order.

This meant I would actually do no work until the last hour or less of my shift. I would then do the whole damn thing at once. (I would also do the whole file cards from books checked out thing at once, by a similar process.) It was insanely efficient, they used to staff two of us, and all my partner had to do was check out the odd book, and I could sit and read or do homework or whatever.

The shelvers loved it, they would come in in the morning and find all the books precisely sorted for them instead of lobbed into general categories, it saved them roughly an hour's worth of work in the morning. My partners loved it, because I was doing all the heavy lifting. But the day staff, well, they Did Not Like It. It wasn't the Right Way to Do Things. I got some heck for it, and was told not to sit on my ass all night like that.

But since no-one ever came by at night or on a Sunday to supervise me, I kept right on, reading all the sex and drug books, or doing my homework, until the last hour of my shift, and I never got caught. And several times the shelvers came up to me and smiled and thanked me.

Which is why I found my recent ER visits so profoundly annoying. Sitting there all those hours, I could see several immediate ways to make things work a good deal better. Which I will be telling you about shortly.

If continued....

Librarians

A small story, but it made me think. What happened last week was, some of my staff are upgrading their professional designations as Early Childhood Educators (daycare workers, and I am sad that I have to explain that to you through lower case letters) through highly efficient cost-effective distance/internet programs. Eventually, you have to do your final, on-line, and for that you need a "proctor" to supervise the effort to make sure you don't cheat. There is an endearingly old-fashioned list of Professionals allowed to do this, including clergy, accredited professors, commisioners of oaths, I don't know. One of the allowable professionals is "Librarian."

Now, the staff in question a) being on the other side of the digital divide, did most of their on-line work in the library where access is free; b) had the support and assistance in doing so through the assistance of another immigrant, a woman from Poland who was working as a Library Assistant at the public library because her Polish library degree is not recognized here in Canada; and c) have a fair but not exhaustive or subtle understanding of English or Canadian professional guild mentalities.

So when it came time for the finals, they selected her as their proctor. She told them that she was not a "Librarian" but just an assisant here in Canada, but to their minds and understanding of English, someone who works in a library is a librarian. So they put her name in as their proctor, figuring that the college could sort it out, and would tell them if it was ok. She signed the forms, agreeing to do that, so pleased to be able to do what she was trained for.

She was kinda excited after all, someone, somewhere in the great country that she now belonged to thought that she was kind of worth something.

As a result, she has been fairly severely disciplined, for claiming to be a "Librarian" when she is not. Good god, people doing things for nothing but the best motives and intentions and out of pretty clear reasonableness, and get punished. Its the whole guild mentality that bedevils Canadian professions, start to finish, and pretty good example of how we serve immigrants poorly.

Now I worked in a library once myself, and I believe librarians are like some of the most important people on the face of the planet. They have consistently fought book burnings and censorships (even internet access censorship) and controls like nobody's business, much as we have the stereotype of the Library Lady shushing us.

Libraries used to be pretty much what the internet is today, or is becoming. I just loved it in University, all the reference librarians, mysterious folks to most who never had to use a serious research library in a serious fashion, had a sign on their desks: Please Disturb. How cool is that? (So cool that I am now wishing I had used it for this blogname...)

Nowadays you only get to disturb the search engine at Google or Wikipedia, which while pretty good, are nowhere nearly as creative or insightful.

If continued....

Cool Tech to the Rescue

Big Bro should like this one. Technology is just simply amazing.

Libraries store a good deal more than paper; they also store sound (and images and various kinds of artifacts, and much more besides). Music, speeches, whatever. In the media they were produced in at the time, and that is a problem, because pre-digital mass produced media have a frightening tendency to decay, to the point where tranference becomes destructive, aside from being very poor indeed. If you've ever listened to those amazing Smithsonian collections of early very real folk and blues, where you can hardly hear anything through the hiss and pop, but what you can hear is just magic, you might begin to understand. Well, just at the last moment, it appears that high high tech has come riding to the rescue.

A fuller account of the story here, but basically, a high end scientist was stuck in traffic listening to a description of the problem, and realized that he could transfer his and his colleagues' technology (from particle physics of all things) to the problem. Basically they optically scan the old media (no physical contact; very little possibility of physical damage) at a very high level, and then put a virtual stylus on the result, and some high-end standard audio clean-up software, and some very high-end data clean-up software. The preliminary before and after results can be listened to here.

It is simply amazing, and will retain for the world a treasure we were just about to lose. (Though I do note in their selection of samples, Michner's law that audio tech-fetish tends to be in inverse proportion to musical taste holds true-- a truth that bugs Big Bro no end, because it isn't true in his case of course, the questions of ambient and new music aside.)

Now me, I can hardly wait for this technology to really trickle down, I have several boxes of old scratchy vinyls that I would just love to rip decently without spending a ton on finicky analog audio gear. And I'd love to see the RIAA start suing over that one.

If continued....