Neologisms - Part II

Burgess Shale Beasties - Lovingly recreated at the Tyrrell Museum

I learned two new words this week - new both to me and, I think, to the language.

Anecdata

People sometimes rely on evidence to make decisions. When that evidence is founded only in assertion and uncorroborated by facts, it is called anecdotal evidence. 

Nowadays, data is considered to be one of the highest orders of evidence. If you want to make a good decision, you have to look at the data. If the data is incomplete or cherry picked in order to provide a skewed or corrupt picture, it is anecdata.

A fossil of the first thing you'd think would rot away into nothing.

Consultelling 

When you consult with someone, you share your ideas with them and then respectfully hang around until they have told you what they think. Often what they tell you will help you modify or improve your idea. The name for this behaviour is consultation.

When you share your ideas with someone so they can understand that their fate is sealed so far as you are concerned, that is consultelling. 

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I heard both these fanciful constructs at an Ivey Executive Training course. I'm not a trainee in the program. Rather, I am coaching a five-person team enrolled in the Ontario Public Service Leadership Development Program, a large part of which is the Ivey training. 

Each five member team - the members carefully selected to be the sorts that drive one another crazy - is challenged to come up with a proposal all three of useful, doable and attractive to the government of the day.

In the time-honoured pedagogical method of setting utter strangers on an impossible task, the empty space below illustrates how much actual information the teams were given to help them get started.






For about three hours on Friday, I sat, listened, said a few things but most of the time bit my tongue as the team struggled to find enough commonality among their number to land on anything at all.

They didn't. But they will. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen




  

Civics

Whenever there's a Ford in power, I feel more inclined to volunteer.

Last time, I helped clean up the Allan Gardens.

This time, I made a small effort to help re-elect my local councillor, Kristyn Wong-Tam.

A couple of weekends ago, working at her campaign office, I canvassed the ward by phone.

If you've never done it, it goes like this:

You sit at a desk with a phone and a computer. The computer has a program (not an app; this is old technology) that combines a data base and an auto-dialling machine. You click on a button that puts you into a particular campaign, you put the phone to your ear and you click "call." 

Then the auto-dialler does its thing. 

A name and number pops up on the screen and one of several things happens:

1) the phone rings four times and then the auto-dialler hangs up and moves to the next name and number
2) the phone rings and voicemail answers; if this happens, you click a button that sends an automated voicemail message, recorded by the candidate, to the automated voicemail answer as the auto-dialler moves to the next name and number.
3) someone answers; this happens once every ten or so calls. 

If someone answers, then, using my white voice, I read through my script. One of several things happens:

1) the person listens politely without interruption and then tells me they are voting for Wong-Tam. This happens about 4% of the time.
2) the person, when I ask for the name on my screen, tells me I have the wrong number. There is a 3% incidence rate on that outcome. 
3) the person listens politely until they hang up on me, 2% of the time.
4) 1% of the time, the person interrupts me when I say I'm calling on behalf of Wong-Tam and tells me they are not voting for her.
5) once, the person listens politely, marvels out loud that George Smitherman is also running, asks me what I think of Smitherman, observes that they personally don't need anything from anybody and then hangs up on me.

In an hour and a half, I logged 100 calls. That both did not seem like much to me and was just about all I could take, for my entire lifetime.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

Waldo's down on his luck, but still wants to be found...

If you're reading this in Ward 13, get out and vote on October 22 to re-elect Wong-Tam!

Junkies

Welcome back! A pranked work station.

A couple of weeks ago I hosted an impromptu meeting with some of my neighbours at 280 Sherbourne to talk about a mutual problem. 

Our problem was one of our across-the-street neighbours at 251 Sherbourne Street, Toronto Community Housing Corporation's most famously troubled address.  

Our neighbour at 251 (Bruce calls him DJ Wormdick; hereafter DJW) has a sound system that he likes to share. Well, he doesn't share the system, just the noise it makes.

For the past couple of months, DJW has been blasting tunes at all hours and at music-festival-grade volumes. By the time I hosted the meeting, I'd lost about six nights' sleep over the course of some weeks. 

My neighbours at 280 and I had before then been acting independently - calling the police or Toronto 311; one neighbour even crossed the street and confronted DJW. 

That's a funny story. When my neighbour demanded an explanation for the ridiculous commotion, DJW explained "It's a civic holiday."

While our individual efforts were making some difference, the problem was not going away. My neighbours and I agreed concerted action was warranted. 

Part of that concerted action was to participate in a "safety walk" organized on behalf of the neighbourhood by a local councillor and the police. I didn't go, but two others did.

And that's when we realized that noise is the least of the neighbourhood's problems. 

Drawn by proximity to dealers and safe injection sites, junkies congregate just south of my home near the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne and in the laneway behind 251 Sherbourne. 

This neighbourhood has always been troubled by the drug trade, but I have not seen anything quite like this in the ten years we've lived here. 

Numbers defining the opioid crisis are about deaths and emergency room visits. Plus missing doses of prescription fentanyl. And numbers of pharmacists arrested for profiting from human tragedy.  

The number of users is possibly the greatest of all and for the most part unknown.  

At our meeting, a neighbour estimated that fully half of the people he talks to in a day are high on something.

"Really?" I said. "That explains a lot of what's going on at the Ministry."

And At the Office ...

This past Monday, I had a large store of uneaten birthday cake. I took it to the office, knowing full well it would not last the day.

But I also knew, because this is Canada, and even more so because this is Toronto, no one would take the very last piece:

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Eager to Please

This week, the government tabled new legislation (that my team developed) that will make it easier to expand natural gas services to parts of Ontario where - but for this new law, Bill 32 - it would be too expensive to do so.

Nothing too weird about that. Unless you're worried about climate change.

In his speech at the International Plowing Match in Pain Court, Ontario, the Premier maligned the previous government for its former program, a bureaucratic regime that forbade private sector involvement in natural gas expansion.  

Photo credit: CBC news.

The Premier's comments were his colourful way of describing a $100 million grant program, started by the last government, to help expand natural gas. There were twelve projects in the hopper when Ford was elected. Now there are three. And some former recipients are hopping mad. 

Because my team prepared the Bill, it's our job to review what the government wants to say about it. We keep an eye out for factual errors and over promising. 

We worked overtime on the materials for the natural gas legislation. Some of our advice was ignored, and not just the stuff about the old program.

A while back I predicted "the massive cost in political capital and actual dollars of cancelling cap and trade will be Ford's signal out-of-the-gate mistake."

I'd like to rephrase that. Cancelling cap and trade was Ford's out-of-the-gate signature move. And, until his heart stops or he's voted out of office, this is what governing in Ontario will look like.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen
    

Notwithstanding

Someone testing how long balloons will stay inflated on Charles Street east of Church, 15 September 2018.

I spent Tuesday this past week trailing in the wake of a late-stage luminary of the public service. Richard Dicerni is the chair of a panel tasked with reviewing the Ontario Energy Board. My team supports the panel. 

Because I was with him practically the whole day, I heard the same things many times.

A favoured pearl of wisdom, told to every fresh audience, was the tale of the perilous period of "transition" - that three to six month window - and Richard's seen plenty of these -  when a spanking new government is all of full of itself, saturated in hubris, ignorant as a newborn and firing on all cylinders. 

Like the guys we have now.

Richard told his story perhaps to reassure his several audiences that things are ever thus; the wild ride will eventually be over and things will settle down.

Maybe.

There is, as an exemplum of the proclivities of the new guys, this whole changing the number of ridings in Toronto in the middle of a municipal election thing.

The judge who handed down the decision finding parts of Bill 5 unconstitutional said the Bill was motivated by "pique not principle."

There was a dog pile on the judge for using that phrase; some commented that there was no evidence of the Premier's pique.

No evidence until later that day that is, when Doug Ford doubled down on his imagined solution to an unproven problem.

So here we are. A special session of the legislature will start in about 50 minutes as I write this to see the reintroduction of the Better Local Government Act. 

I don't have to turn on the news to know that there are crowds of protesters on the lawn in front of Queen's Park. 

I don't doubt for a minute that the Bill will pass.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Eye of the Beholder

Look who's back! And who's storing stuff to eat in my back yard!

I once had a person on my staff - this is quite a few years ago now - who considered me the source of all evil in the known universe.

I know this because they told me so. Many times. 

This person's low opinion (or high, depending on how you look at it) of me had roots in their own issues with authority and need for recognition. I was not the leader of their dreams and could never be. Nor could I ever admire their contributions enough. 

This last failing was exacerbated by the fact that they contributed very little to the team.

They saw their incapacities as my fault.  Nothing I did to assuage their pain hit the mark. Everything I did -- with the exception of helping them decide to retire -- just made things worse. 

The months and years I spent with this malcontent on my team taught me the lesson of how others see us.  And the even more important lesson that sometimes no matter what I do I am a despised object in someone else's world view.

We've all been there.

But this is nothing to shrug off. 

People offended by random happenstance, convinced by their take on the situation, can feel entitled -- even obligated -- to act out, or make bad decisions. 

Depending on who the person is, their actions or decisions can have sweeping consequences. 

Erratum

The painting pictured in last week's post was incorrectly identified as "BC Bugaboo." The proper name is "BC Boogaloo." I asked the artist about the story behind the name. Here's Murray Mcdonnell's response:

The title is an oblique reference (very oblique almost obscure) to a very famous painting by Piet Mondrian called Broadway Boogie Woogie painted in 1942-43 and currently in the MoMA, (see below). 

He loved boogie woogie music and (some say) based the work on the street pattern of Manhattan. The underlying structure of the reflections in your painting was a series of ripple derived rows (vibrating when I saw them) and, well... it was BC, and a boogaloo is more energized than a boogie woogie and so... the title😊.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

A Portrait

This is "BC Boogaloo" by the Canadian artist Murray McDonnell. I love it because it captures so beautifully the miracle of light at the water's edge. By the other miracle of how legal tender works, I now have this stunning canvas in my home.

A convention of routine day surgery is that no post-op patient may leave unescorted. 

Bruce needed an escort sometime after 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning. I didn't know how much time after, so I got to Toronto Western at 10:30. That turned out to be an hour and a half too soon. The nurses at the patient pick up station told me they would call me when Bruce was ready.

TWH has a big, bright atrium on the ground floor with a food court with lots of seating and unhealthy things to eat. I grabbed a stool at a counter in front of the Booster Juice franchise and connected to the office on my iPhone.

I was feeling happy, comfortable and productive when a man - small, thin, heavily bearded, sporting an impressive shiner on his left eye - tried to squeeze his walker into the space between the counter I was at and the one next it.

He vocalized a bit, saying something like "Will I fit through here?" I figured he wanted someone to talk to, so I looked up, smiled and commented that he seemed to have lots of room.

He got himself onto the stool at the counter next to mine and started to talk. He said his name was Mike.

Mike told me about how he had gone to a friend's stag party and was surprised that the guy keeping track of who paid the $25 admission charge needed him to sign a piece of paper but then he won the lottery! He went to the store with his lottery ticket and he won! Three hundred dollars so he was going to put some of it in the bank probably two hundred dollars and not spend it all on drinking which he doesn't do a lot of. His drink is vodka and orange juice and he will have one or two but no more than that and when he walked past the pub on the way to the bank there was a guy there who said "Hi Mike!" and Mike was surprised and asked him how he knew his name and he said you bought me a drink last week so they sat down and had a drink but Mike didn't stay too long because he has this cough that he can't get rid of so he goes to the hospital to get some cough medicine but they only give him one dose so he has to go back to the hospital the very next day. They should give him the whole bottle ...

I picked up my dark, silent iPhone, looked at it and said, "Mike, I gotta go. It's been nice chatting with you. You take care of yourself and have a good day."

Mike said, "It's been nice talking to you. What's your name?"

"Stacey," I said.  

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen