Print Edition: February 20, 2013
The gas price dance
Commuters know the pains of gas prices. We drive along Highway One and watch as the prices go down cent by cent the more eastward we travel.
We wonder if 264 Street exit is where the cheap stuff is, or is it Mt. Lehman? What about Clearbrook or McCallum? Sometimes I drive out to Whatcom, an extra two exits onto my commute to school, just to try and get the cheapest gas in the Valley.
It’s an agreement between driver and gas station that I have come to accept. Sometimes the extra 10 minutes of driving might save you two cents per litre and even though mathematically you may not be getting a better deal, logically you abide by the arrangement.
The last straw, however, was on a Sunday morning when I drove past a gas station advertising 135.8 cents per litre and when I drove back three hours later it was marked down to 125.8. Ten cents in three hours? Sure, it’s brilliant to catch those early morning travelers who didn’t have the foresight to get gas when it was cheaper the evening before, but 10 cents? In three hours?
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back as I grumbled and did absolutely nothing about it – except to wait until Monday forces me out east again.
Give us a (bathroom) break!
Press one for service in English. Press two to talk to a customer service agent. Press three if you expect that agent to be wearing an adult disposable diaper.
Though diapers are not yet (nor hopefully ever) the workplace norm, they’ve been raised as a threat for tardy bathroom-breakers in the apparently high-stakes world of call centre productivity.
While waiting on hold can be maddening, (there are only so many instrumental John Denver covers one person can take!) the latest news about call centre working conditions show that the other end of the receiver is perhaps even worse.
At Norwegian insurance company DNB, for example, workers are protesting a flashing alarm system that alerts management when an employee passes their daily eight minutes of allotted bathroom time. In the UK, Barclaycard centres have workers log their bathroom time manually: three minutes allowed for a pee and five if what you’re doing requires a bigger flush.
For better or worse, most centres aren’t creating elaborate schemes of enforcing shorter pee breaks; they’re simply denying them altogether. Employees’ right to their bodily functions are often denied or humiliated in the name of productivity.
So next time you chat with a customer service person who acts like they don’t give a crap, remember, it might be because they’re not allowed to.
The little human is walking
There’s a problem with the world we live in, and it operates heavy machinery. Driven by a clock whose seconds tick closer together every day, this problem is about to be late for work or class, and doesn’t seem to notice the little human-shaped walk signal or the larger human walking. This is literally an accident waiting to happen.
Pedestrians know it as, “the driver.”
We’ve all had those days—we woke up late, we didn’t think the queue would be that long at Tim Horton’s—but I don’t understand the driver’s inability to wait 10 seconds for a pedestrian to finish crossing the street.
That’s right: I’m already in between those white lines that demarcate the crosswalk, in that sacred space where I have the right to stride without fear of your front bumper.
If you want to make the world a better place, leave earlier. Wait for both of my running shoes to touch that sidewalk before you turn.
The joy of eavesdropping
It’s not anything sinister. It’s not anything sneaky or underhanded as common associations with the term might imply. But I have a confession to make.
I love eavesdropping.
Listening in to a nearby conversation at just the right time to catch an out-of-context quote from a stranger is a favourite past time of mine. These bizarre phrases are that much better robbed of any meaning they might have had within the conversation.
This happened to me twice in short succession at a coffee shop in Vancouver last week. I was left alone for a few minutes and heard the following sentence uttered by what was perhaps a 20-year-old woman in conversation with her friend next to me at the bar across the storefront bay window:
“It was just a zoomed in picture … of our butts!”
Mere moments later, from the other side, I caught this gem:
“It’s such a victory when I see a cat I recognize from six months earlier.”
I’m afraid the victory is all mine. And it is such a victory when I hear stuff like this.
I don’t know whether it’s a product of random happenstance, or whether these full conversations would yield more sentences just as remarkable. While waiting on public transit, in line at the grocery store, or studying alone in a coffee shop, it’s worth it to pull out the ear buds on occasion and just listen in on the conversations happening all around.
