How is Telus Like The Hotel California?

 Since I only get the chance once every four years I reckon I'll do a Feb. 29th post. And, once again, it'll be about something that has gotten really bad in Canada. It's something I've written about here before. The Hotel California of phone/internet/TV providers - Telus. I imagine Shaw and Rogers are like this too, and I had a HELLUVA time trying to cancel the Bell phone service I got upon returning to Canada where if you want any kind of cable or phone you can check in any time you like but you can never leave.

I am talking to the citizens of Canada right now: 

"Bro" evidently refers to both the male and female of the Canadian species now as I hear when I'm on the way to work and my bus picks up students from the high school and instantly transports me from Calgary to Delhi. Not just the crowding either. Whoops! Who said that? 

Yes, males and females are calling each other "bro" now or some iteration of it depending on whether they have had enough energy drink to move their mouths or if they will just let the word ooze out like jelly from a Tim Horton's donut. So I want to know from all you Canadian BRUHS, what the hell were you doing the whole time I was away? "O Canada we stand on guard for thee." You SING that... 

While you were all "on guard" this place took all forms of communication and monopolized them! Don't you know what happens when something is monopolized? They get away with whatever the hell they want, that's what. Phone/internet and even TV are all FAR too important to be left unguarded from the capitalist swine. Yes loyal readers I am STILL getting harassed by Telus. Despite one of THEIR operators, Ophelia from the Philippines I think was her name, giving me a guarantee that I have a zero balance with them from the time I mistakenly signed up for internet when I lived in Trail, they continue to call me and send me email threatening to sick collectors on me and ruin my non-existent credit rating. Trundle alert! Trundle alert!

I should point out here that I really do not have a credit rating. This is one of those things about Canada that I mentioned in a previous post that make me feel like a stranger in a strange land here. Nobody believes me when I say I don't have a credit rating. They correct me and say, "You mean your credit is bad. Everybody has a credit rating." That's what my landlord in Trail said. Then he called in a credit check on me. There are lots of things you can't do without a credit rating in Canada like rent a place, get a loan to buy a place, get a credit card, get a credit rating... This is ANOTHER thing Canadians allowed to get worse while I was away. Credit in Canada is just as much of a monopoly as cable and phone. Well they call the big 5 banks an "oligopoly" actually. TD, Royal, Scotia, CIBC, and BMO. So 4 telecom companies Shaw, Bell, Rogers, and Telus and I think Rogers just bought up Shaw so 3 telecom companies and 5 banks. That's all our money and communication. We can't live without phones, internet, money, and putting our money in banks and we can't live without credit, something that by no coincidence is established mainly at these very few agencies. We have no choice but to use these agencies which is an affront to our personal agency. 

This gives you a better idea of what I meant when I said in a previous post that every time I look at a car I know how useful (necessary as they say here in Canada) one would be, I just can't justify the entrapment it represents. Especially if you get a loan to buy one. I feel like Canadians are almost trapped in our culture. Maybe that's why I get a completely different feeling when I look up and see a jet in the sky above Canada. 

Today I got not one but TWO calls from Telus. I just refused the first one but, God help me, curiosity got the better of me and I answered the second one with my best impression of a Canadian high school student, "Heeooo?" "Hello is this Dave?" First of all it didn't sound like the call originated at a call center in Manila or Delhi. That was new. Second of all, Dave? Did I register with Telus under Dave? I thought I used David. He'd caught me off guard so I answered in the affirmative. I was intrigued. Without an Indian or Filipino accent the bruh on the other end of the line says to me, "Hi, my name is Mabranbenlucam and I'm wondering how your day is going so far." This did not sound like a teenaged Canadian. He enunciated with vim and vigor that belied his pure loathing of his job. Even so I still didn't manage to catch his name. I never do. Ophelia wasn't Ophelia. I just made that up. It was something like that. I am pretty sure marble mouthing your name is taught on the first day of training at Telus telemarketing school. 

"It hasn't been great," I replied. He started with a tone of genuine imitation concern that he learned on the second day of training at Telus telemarketing school but I cut him off. "Can I ask what this is about?" "Sure Dave, because of your account with us you have qualified for some special deals..." I cut him off again. "What account? I had an account with Telus that took me several months to figure out how to cancel and I finally reached one of your operators who told me I had a balance of zero on that account." He said, "I assume you are now dealing with Shaw then?" I hastily said, "No, I don't have any internet. Don't want any. And I am not interested in starting up a new account with Telus that there is no way of closing. Please put that on your records. And please stop calling me, if I want Telus I'll find YOU. But I can't imagine..." This time he cut ME off, "Well have a nice rest of your day Dave." Now his cheery tone just sounded smug. I wanted to drive Mabranbenlucam down a dark desert highway and work up a sweet summer sweat stabbing him with steely knives till I found the passage back to the place I was before. But I can't! I CAN'T! I must have signed that Telus contract in blood because I think it will haunt me forever!

Punters, Pants and Pulp

 While enjoying a breakfast BELT, not the kind I've enjoyed just after sunup on a Thai golf course with a gaggle of punters who were on the piss last night or may still be, I mean bacon, egg, lettuce and tomato, and waiting for the already late furnace repair guy, I got to thinking. 

Woah! Car tires screech. That might be the most loaded opening sentence of this blog ever. "Where's he gonna go from here?" So many springboards in one run-on, terribly awkward sentence! I could define punting. I don't mean the American kind like the MVP's of the first half of this year's Super Bowl. I don't mean the UK kind either like the kind of guy you might call "Delboy" who would have bet on the punters being the MVP's of the first half of this year's Super Bowl. I'll let you look up what "punters" are in Thailand. That's not where I was headed. And before you ask, the furnace is fine. I'm not reliving the nightmare of the broken boiler in my Mokpo apartment that wasn't fixed for weeks and I couldn't shower or wash dishes at home because the water was frozen. That's not where I was going either although it IS nice to have proper furnace heating and not water in the floor that freezes every winter. I know a lot of people like the Korean "ondol" heating but I always hated it. And, right on cue, the furnace turns on circulating 20-degree air so the floors aren't as hot as a black sand Olongapo beach while waist level to the ceiling is cold enough to hang a moose.

What I got to thinking about was something of a recurring thought process. I wonder if any of you ever do this... You're eating a BELT and you start thinking, "If I could bring this back in time and give one bite to the King of England, I'd be knighted!" But then you continue thinking rather than remaining in your happy daydream of the hedonistic pleasures of knighthood you wonder if you could make mayonnaise from scratch. There's eggs in it isn't there? What else? And they had bread back in the middle ages but I don't believe they had toasters. I'd have to fry the bread, probably over an open medieval flame. And the first ingredient of the BELT, the bacon, it's no cinch to smoke pork belly and slice it in thin strips either. The tomatoes and lettuce though... how good would THEY be?!?! I imagine produce has lost a LOT of flavour since then just through culling, pruning, cross-breeding, and genetically engineering for maximum profit at the cost of yumminess. And the eggs. They would probably be BURSTING with flavour! Not so easily fried without a Teflon skillet or plastic spatula to flip the eggs with, but mighty tasty nonetheless. Heck, the chicken that laid the eggs would be too! What the hay, I'd put a hunk of chicken on that sandwich too. And if chicken meat was better you KNOW beef would be too so throw a beef patty on the sandwich for good measure. My mouth is watering just imagining this now and I've already finished my BELT. To be completely honest, two of them. But what would I call this sandwich fit for a king? Let's see... bacon, egg, lettuce, tomato, chicken, and a hamburger patty... ZOUNDS, I'd call it a BELTCH!

I don't know if the name of the sandwich would catch on as well as the taste. Medieval folk had the time to express things in the King's English without representing entire words with single letters or syllables. Indeed, shortening words like barbecue to "barby" or "BBQ" might have been seen as needlessly stupefying one's audience. Oh I might use the acronym BELTCH in certain circles elite enough to understand its meaning, I am, after all, a knight, but I mightn't throw such pearls to the swine-like serfs and peasants England was crawling with in the dark ages.  

Yes, my dear reader, I believe we've hacked our way through that jungle of an opening sentence and rambled and trundled a la Henri Mouhot onto the topic of this post. The furnace repairman was supposed to come between 8 and 9 and it's now 11:22 so I didn't need to put on my pants, I might just as well have worn only...  my pants. English can be mystifying enough a language without adding to its impreciseness with desperate use of abbreviations uttered as statements of loyalty to the members of the groups blessed with their understanding. Regional definitions of punts and pants can frustratingly vary more than enough to befuddle even an accomplished purveyor of this bastard tongue, we don't need you assuming our accomplishment of deciphering seemingly random mashes of letters, or slapping us upside the head with our ignorance of them. Even before I was chasing wallpaper that will undoubtedly raise my station in life by producing several written statements a week the purpose of which is to do precisely what acronyms and abbreviations are often repurposed for - and that is to assure our betters, with just the perfect quantity of sniveling suppliance, that we subscribe to and wish to belong to their clubs, I had a healthy distaste for politicians, philosophers, sophists and salespeople who purposely spoke in elevated language for the purposes of hiding the flaccidity of their message behind the awe at their eloquence. Now the life has worn me down to a nub and I am on the fast track to becoming that which I had grown to hate, it behooves me to find fault in the minor area of the hypocrisy I have embraced... that I have not yet embraced: the overuse of abbreviations, acronyms, and short forms to give the impression of superior knowledge or status. 

I know you probably all use job jargon that can make communication quicker and more efficient. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a person who uses that jargon on people who don't work at the job. But I'm also talking about on the job too. Have you ever watched the TV show called "Bosch?" It is chock-O-block full of what I'm talking about! I watch it sometimes with Rob and Terri and I like it. It's got some good mystery and intrigue. But it's hard not to think of my days working security, or even before that my days building forts and forming clubs as a little boy as I watch. Just start with the name of the show. Try to think of other detective TV shows that were just the last name of the cop or detective. There shouldn't be that many, should there? Let's just list the ones I like: Columbo, Kojak, Banacek, Monk, Shaft, Ironside, Hunter, Mannix, MacGyver, Baretta, Luthor, Longmire, Cannon, I'd even include Holmes, Hammer, Hutch, Hart, Steele, Poirot, Magnum, Rockford, Marlowe, Mulder, Scully, Cagney, Lacey and we can't, I mean we just can't leave out Drebin. 

Do you know some of these names? Most of them? ALL of them? Can you name as many, oh I dunno... world leaders, CEO's, authors, journalists, governors of central banks, people who actually affect our lives? Maybe not. The reason will probably not surprise you either. Another thing I was pondering over the succulence of my sandwich this morning was the word "pulp." I recently watched a movie of that name with a young and sophisticated Michael Caine in it. I grew up in a lushly forested area of British Columbia where pulp was used to make paper. But I'm talking about orange juice pulp. Would any of us know what that is called without TV? I mean we don't really need a word for it do we? We could call it the lumps or something. 

Even the Sopranos. There's another last name show. TV taught us what is cool. It teaches us a LOT of things. All those cops are cool. A lot of them have cool sounding last names. Cannon, Baretta, Hammer, Steele, Magnum, some are kinda violent sounding. 

My point is, who is cooler than a cop? They can drive fast, shoot people, have super close friends but trouble with the spouse, have laissez faire attitudes but when there's an emergency they're serious as a heart attack. What's cooler than that? The way a good, hard-boiled cop or detective talks. How many of you don't know how to radio in a robbery? 2-11 in progress, right? That's like "pulp." We shouldn't know that. But TV taught us that. Here's a long laundry list of the abbreviations, codes, and acronyms used by cops and FBI that appear in Michael Connelly writing, including the show "Bosch." And there's a pic of Michael Connelly trying to look as cool as Bosch. 😄

I guess I just see all these acronyms, short forms, abbreviations, TicTalk as a bit immature. People trying to act cool. These days we're socialized to use this lazy language by social media as much as or MORE than TV, but us old folks know this pattern. It is something that makes me smile when I go to work and listen to all the jargon thrown out at meetings to make the new teachers aware of both their wormy little existence as well as the superiority of the speaker. Like we don't know the club password yet. I see it in a lot of other places too. I feel like it's a kind of microaggression that is largely unchecked because we buy into the "coolness" of it. We use those short forms cuz we wanna be cool too. 

I don't know. I'm probably overreacting again.

Are We Nuts or Just Collecting Them?

 I wasn't going to blog today but I was sent an email that riled me up enough to post anew. Besides, I only have one post in Feb so far. 

The email? It was a job offer to teach English online to kids 6-13 years old. Classes of 1 to 18 kids. The pay? 12-18 dollars an hour. They post the pay as $2500 US. Take out the old calcutator here...

So a teacher could make 12 bucks to teach 18 6-year-olds for an hour. That works out to 52 hours a week or 10.4 hours a day if you only want to work 5 days a week TEACHING 6-YEAR-OLDS! Now this is teaching so add to that a good amount of lesson planning and you're up to 65-70 hours a week CONSERVATIVELY! BlingABC is the name of this cuntpany. It's a subsidiary of New Oriental Group (and then in brackets New Oriental Group is written in Chinese). Remembering that this is China, let's say they only charge 180 RMB or 25 bucks an hour for online English classes for your 6-year-old.  That's the minimum you will find there so it's a darn good deal even in China. So the scumbags at BlingABC are making $450 and paying the person who does most of the work 12 of those dollars. No wonder they want you to work 52 hours a week! The asshole owners can buy a lot of bling with that! Your company is making 37.5 times what they are paying you. In other words you make 2.67% of the profit. Do you reckon the teacher is doing less than 3% of the work in this scenario? Oh the management and owners will have their speeches about business expenses, overhead, and all those words they make up in the business world to make us think businesspeople actually work as hard as they say, but they're snowing you. 

The worst part is somebody is going to take this job. Which is just gonna encourage these analrapists to keep on doing what they're doing. This is one of the things that has made it so hard to find a good ESL teaching job. Teachers are nice. It's our weakness and business is all about exploiting weakness, am I wrong? Am I naive cuz I think I can remember when business wasn't like this. Employers are just saying, "Fuck fair wages, long-term employees, ethics, let's just screw the worker. EVERYBODY ELSE IS DOIN' IT." Bunch of lemmings. Does nobody remember that bridge our mother's told us about? The one that we shouldn't jump off just because everybody else is jumping off it? Or do mothers not say that anymore? Maybe not Chinese mothers. 

And just to put a cherry on top of this story, it was Serious Teachers Job Alerts who sent me the email. If they keep sending me offers like this, I think they need to change their name to Are You Serious??? Teachers Job Alerts. Or maybe even insert an F-bomb in there...

This being part of the reason why I haven't yet put an ocean between my work and my home and native land for... geez it's been pretty much a year now, brings up the question of how my work has been going here in Canada. I have blogged a bit about that, and it hasn't been positive, but I have to say, although I'm still not settled into a good, full time job yet, work is rounding into shape. And in just under a year's time. Way to be Canada!!! I'd say it'll be a couple more months, or maybe a bit more, before I finally start working full time for a decent wage here. The problem is, will I be happy?

I've been on a bit of an Asia kick here lately. I ate at Jollybee the other day and shopped for Chinese, Japanese and Korean stuff. I've got the ingredients for Sam Gyup Sal in the fridge/freezer here and I think I'll be giving that a whirl for dinner on the weekend with Rob and Terri. I dunno if they'll like it but honestly, who doesn't like sam gyup sal???

Yummy dog? I took this at the Japanese 100 Yen store here. It's called something else but I forget the name. Things are more than 100 yen too. I didn't buy these but I thought about it. lol. For those rare occasions when I'm craving poshintang...

That's the grill I'm gonna buy to give Terri and Rob a taste of my Korean "heritage." Ar ar. 

That's what it looks like only I'll have garlic, mushrooms, and kimchi grillin' on there too. 

I've caught myself thinking wistfully of life overseas quite a bit lately. Maybe it's the fact that I always had enough money to go out and GET some food like this while I lived there. Or maybe I'm missing friends. I think it has a lot to do with something I never thought I'd say though: I don't fit into my culture any more in a lot of ways. 

When I'm on the bus I look out the window and see all the people driving their cars and think of all the money they have to pay for their cars, fuel, repairs, insurance, and of course licensing I get scared. Literally fear rushes over me. It's not the expense and it's not the thought of driving or even flunking the driver's test again. Although those driving examiners are monstrous creatures! I think it's the fear of how a car would force me to stay in one place and likely at one job for an extended period of time. I was recently reading Somerset Maugham's "Razor's Edge" and Larry, the main character reads a lot, travels a lot, explores a lot, thinks a lot, and does a lot because he never weighs himself down with possessions of any kind. Even marriage is mentioned as almost as comprehensive an ending as death. 

I'm staying with my brother Rob and sister-in-law Terri and they have a lot of possessions! But they seem comfortable traveling all over the place and leaving their stuff unattended while they're out. Their address is... Their alarm code is... The names of the attack dogs are... 

I think that's great and I envy them for the many trips they've taken and things they've seen that I haven't. More than the pile of possessions. This may be my dilemma. I am not going to be able to acquire enough of a pile of possessions to enable me to do the travelling I'd like to do, and if I did, I don't know if I'd be comfortable leaving my pile of stuff to do that travelling. 

The goal in Canada, and it's the goal of our culture to be honest, is to get that pile of stuff. You need to chain yourself to the country, a location, a job, maybe a spouse and some kids, and a lot of the stuff in your pile in order to accrue enough wealth to explore what life beyond that pile of stuff is like. In the Razor's Edge, Larry had an inheritance or a patronage I think. He gallivanted all over the world on it. He worked too but only for the experience. He much preferred to "loaf." When his wife-to-be heard that, she just couldn't understand it! I totally understood it. Oh for a patronage that allowed me to explore the world and soak in more than the miniscule single piece of the mosaic most are afforded!

I think if I choose to live and work in Canada I'll need to find a way to satisfy myself with that limited view of the whole mosaic. I don't know if I can do that anymore after having seen some of the other pieces. I am hoping a good job with high pay might be encouragement enough but I'm doubtful.

Having said that, it appears that the option of working overseas and making enough money to see the sights, travel, and immerse myself in a few more cultures might be disappearing. The offers I keep seeing are looking more and more like BlingABC's cheap chicanery. 

At any rate, I find out soon if I'll get extended hours at the LINK ESL job I'm doing part-time. If so, I will most likely accept them. If not, I still have a lucrative security offer that will allow me to collect a few nuts and maybe a den in which to squirrel them away. I'll keep you updated dear readers.

Ciao for now. 

My Best Buddy Kelly

 I was challenged by my teacher this week, (the second of my 10th master's of education course which is the Understanding Barriers To Learning course I am taking right now) to imagine there are two students with learning disabilities in my classroom. What would I do with seating arrangement (eye roll) and how would they impact my role as teacher. This is what I wrote to make the best of this pretty pedestrian writing assignment:

Two Students With Disabilities

I have worked with students with disabilities before and have read literature that included recommendations for classroom accommodations that should be made for students with physical, sensory, or intellectual disabilities and it seems the more I do either, the more my teaching style is reinforced as “disability friendly.” Like Faris Algahtani, I attribute some of my methods to constructivist and behaviorist principles (Algahtani, 2017), but I think I owe even more to a young man named Kelly who is one of the members of a family of very close friends of mine.

 Almost single-handedly Kelly taught me about challenges with recall, learning generalization, and motivation that are common in students with intellectual disabilities (Algahtani, 2017). He gave me object lessons on the difficulties with self-esteem students encounter when they try very hard but are just overwhelmed with the information teachers are trying to teach them and they become frustrated and lash out (Algahtani, 2017). He graphically illustrated struggles with social skills, conceptual skills, and practical skills that make learning more difficult for students with intellectual disabilities as well (Algahtani, 2017). Maybe most importantly, Kelly employed the teaching tactic of modeling to educate me on the various strengths that exist alongside the weaknesses students with intellectual barriers to learning have. Incidentally, Kelly has Down’s Syndrome, and he has the above weaknesses.

Kelly has many strengths as well. To list just a few, Kelly has an uncommonly developed dedication to making people laugh. He has capacities far beyond most of his peers for joy, affection, and forgiveness. When Kelly hugs you, he means it. These are strengths that short-term teachers may not discover in Kelly and without getting to know him well, some of his teachers have developed similar weaknesses as described above such as frustration, demotivation, and, sadly, self-esteem issues that cause them to question their efficacy as teachers.

Patience was the key that allowed me to unlock methods that were successful with Kelly, and I found that most work well with all students regardless of intellectual ability. For example, teaching from the known to the unknown; employing meaningful real-life contexts; increasing active participation with engaging lesson subject matter; simplifying using mnemonic techniques such as summarizing/paraphrasing/predicting/using mental images; rewarding good performance; chunking; and modeling (Algahtani, 2017). I cannot imagine any of these being very effective without utilizing time and patience to get to know the students and to find out what the “known” is; what is meaningful; what is engaging; what is memorable; what is a good reward; how big a chunk should be; or whether I am trusted enough to be an effective model for each individual student.

So if I had, for example, a student with autism and a hearing-impaired student in my class, reasonable accommodations would be made for IEP’s such as more time for processing and assessing, closed captioning on videos, arranging desks to make room for note-takers or other helpers, special equipment, noise/light/space allowances due to sensory sensitivity, repetition of answers and questions, not turning to write on the board as I speak (Aruma, 2019), and so on, but my teaching style would not change much. As for my role as the teacher in my class, it would remain the same: to get to know the students so I can pinpoint any learning barriers. How else can we overcome them?

References

Algahtani, F. (2017). Teaching students with intellectual disabilities: Constructivism or behaviorism? Educational Research and Reviews, 12(21), 1031–1035. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1160452.pdf

Aruma. (2019). Types of sensory disabilities. https://www.aruma.com.au/about-us/about-disability/types-of-disabilities/types-of-sensory-disabilities/

 

 

I love this dude!

For reference if you ever teach Kelly, anything about wrestling or Hello Neighbor will maintain his attention, he will exercise if it involves walking the family dogs or riding the bike while listening to tunes or watching something he likes. His "known" requires only a little bit of interest and care to unlock. Meaningful real-life contexts and engaging subjects also require getting to know him which will not take too much time if he likes you. Same goes for what is memorable. I found smoothies to be a good reward in the summer but that changes... Chunk size and trust is determined by how genuine you are. Kelly can tell. These things will all be outdated by the time you read this. You need to do the same research as I did. Get to know Kelly!

Future teachers be warned: This kid can be your best or your worst student! One time he looked at me, smiled, and dropped my cell phone on the ground smashing the screen! And he LOVES me! But if you ever need to recuperate from such a nightmare, you can always reference the part of this post that outlines Kelly's strengths. If you haven't yet seen them, have patience. He'll show you a student that is easy to love.

That is all.