W:TPCLOTCH (Warning: This Post Contains Lots of This Crap Here)

 Things are progressing as expected in old Ontari-ari-ari-o. So far I have gotten my AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act) cert, my BASES BSO (Basic Safety Orientation) for local industrial sites, my NOVA NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) cert for NOVA sites around here, and my WHSA (Worker Health and Safety Awareness) cert. I already have my GBA+ cert (Gender Based Analysis (plus)), and my LINC PBLA (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada Portfolio Based Language Assessment certification. I have applied for my VSC (Vulnerable Sector Check) from the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) which is a criminal record check that includes sex offenses, for my new passport, and am about halfway through the online portion of my Ontario Security Guard licensing. This Wed and Thu I will be getting my Red Cross level C first aid/CPR (Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation) ticket renewed. So when all or most of this is finally completed, I just might be employable around here. Fingers crossed.

There was ONE more thing that I've gotten that has vindicated and substantiated many of my not quite 100% tongue-in-cheek references to being "flagged" here in Canada. I got my Social Insurance Number sort of updated. They don't give cards like they used to. I got an official letter from a government office. But while the girl (Faith) was getting this for me I brought up the fact that I have had trouble accessing almost every government website that exists. She said, "Oh, that's because you've been flagged." So...

I'm not even going to say "I don't mean to say I told you so" because I told you so and that's exactly what I mean to say here. IN YOUR FACE doubters! Canada DOES flag its citizens and I was one of the citizens it flagged. And I told you so many times. Faith said it had to do with the length of time my SIN wasn't used. In short, while in Canada we Canadians are meant to be sinning a lot and when we are away, we don't sin enough. In a manner of speaking... 

You see, when we're not in Canada we don't have to participate in the ENDLESS registrations, appointments, sign-ups, and certifications that often require our social insurance numbers. While I was blissfully delivered from that crap overseas, CANADA thought it would be a good idea to flag me. Not contact me and let me know I wasn't using my number enough. No. Not have a message that comes up when I access government websites that says I've been flagged for not using my SIN and remaining an "active" Canadian letting the government know my personal beeswax. No. They purposely fuck up all their websites just for me so that I have a hell of a time doing anything when I get back to Canada and people question my computing skills assuming CANADA is not the problem. It couldn't be!

Well HAH! It's not my computing skills. I can think of 2 Canadian jobs at which I was doubted and even reprimanded passively-aggressively with, "We assume all of our employees are computer literate." And how many of you, my five readers, doubted my posts in which I said I was flagged. Doubt no more, I was. But NOW I have to go back to that office and do all of the things I was trying and failing to do because I was flagged. They said they'd help me. One is accessing the MSCA (My Service Canada Account) to see how much pension I contributed over the years while I was working outside of Canada. There was some I'm sure but it might be a sadly insufficient amount to collect my CPP when I turn 60 next year. That's a decision I'm considering to augment the crappy wages I need to settle for if I want to live in Canada. I say that because I'm pretty much resigned to security work here in Canada. That's the only kind of work I've been successful at obtaining my entire life here really. And now I'm in competition with the record number of immigrants that come every consecutive year. Don't even start with me! That is not the least bit racist and you only have to be in Canada 5 minutes before you notice that almost every security guard you see is from India and/or the surrounding area. Last guard job I had we didn't say "Let's go," when I started a round with the guy who trained me on mobile, we said, "Jallo!" I would say a good 70% of the guards where I worked were of Indian descent and as such they had advantages over me.

ICTC (Pathways to Employment for Newcomers ???) provides wage subsidies of up to 70% to help newcomers gain Canadian work experience. That's right, the employer pays 30% of their wages - less than minimum wage. Why would they choose ME? 

YESS (Youth Employment and Skills Strategy) provides wage subsidies and support for youth (15-30) facing barriers to employment. 

FIN (Federal Internship for Newcomers) offers work experience in federal, provincial, and municipal jobs like airport security.

MOSAIC (Multi-lingual Orientation Service Association for Immigrant Communities) offers jobs, daycare, tax services, English courses, all kinds of stuff for free!

There are several programs like FCRP, EHRC, OBTP, ECO, STIP, OSDF - look them up if you doubt me, they provide skill training and matching for newcomers. Oh and by the way, they also get all the certifications and licenses needed for those jobs provided for them free of charge. There was a time not so long ago when I could apply for a security guard job, get the job and THEN get the license and certifications while working. Why would they do that now when they can hire a newcomer with all the paperwork and a good chunk of his/her wages subsidized? 

These are but a few of the advantages for newcomers that equate to DIS-advantages in the job market for a guy like me. But this gives you some idea of the difference between how Canadians who leave Canada (because they can't find work here) are treated compared to the opposite. In short, the government makes things harder for expats and easier for newcomers. I wonder if there's a majority of Canadians who think THAT is right. Oh, what do you know, two thirds don't. But that's what we get from our supposedly democratic government. 

How did things get this way? What happened to my country? Dude, where's my Canada?

If you've ever wanted a perfect example of what's wrong with our country, how freedoms have disappeared, how things have become a lot more expensive, and why privatization is something to be exterminated, you have it in your living rooms, bedrooms, maybe bathrooms, garages, and on your phones: TV. 

Let's do a Mike Meyers flashback memory doodley doodley doo (a meme I can't find at the moment because YouTube wants to give me either ads or Mike Meyers the serial killer clips and the internet - the horrifically expensive internet - is slow as shit right now) and think back to a much simpler and happier time when we only needed a knob with 13 channels on it to get every bit of television entertainment we wanted. In Canada we had CBC and CTV for free and they even had a few good shows on them. But most of us watched the big three to get the good stuff that we'd talk about with friends and that affected our lives and cultures: ABC, NBC, and CBS. There was only one reason I was at all aware of what network my favourite shows were on and that was the Battle of the Network Stars. Otherwise I just knew The Fall Guy was on channel 8 at 9 o'clock and if the channel wasn't turned to channel 8 by at least 8:59 I might miss this:

Oh yeah... simple times fantasizing over Heather Thomas (not to mention Markie Post!). Was there anybody cooler than Lee Majors? He wasn't just Colt Seavers, the Fall Guy, he was Steve Austin the Six Million Dollar Man too! Which brings to mind another Mike Myers meme:

Six million dollars won't even get you a condo in Vancouver these days. It just might be enough for a good cable TV package though. 

Was Lee Majors ever on the Battle of the Network Stars? Who cares? He jogged with Farrah! 

Maybe the Battle of the Network Stars had a no bionics rule. What? You don't remember the Battle of the Network Stars? Where they made teams of actors from NBC, CBS, and ABC shows and put them in events like swimming, golfing, tennis, tug-of-war, cycling, and the best event of all - the dunk tank. It was classic TV viewing! 

I always voted for ABC because they had my favourite shows. Can you even imagine trying to do this today? Here's a list of 185 networks today in the USA. A modern battle of network stars would be like an Olympics and would take at LEAST a couple of weeks to hold. And now there's streaming TV to complicate our lives further. Ever wonder how much it would cost to get ALL the streaming channels?

 I recently tallied up the annual cost of subscribing to all major streaming services, music platforms, gaming subscriptions, and sports streaming services. Brace yourselves, because the total is eye-watering:

• Netflix (Premium): $227.88

• Disney+ (Standard ad-free): $129.99

• Amazon Prime Video: $99.00

• Apple TV+: $155.88

• Crave (Premium ad-free): $220.00

• Spotify Premium: $152.28

• YouTube Premium: $167.88

• Xbox Game Pass Ultimate: $274.88

• PlayStation Plus Premium: $189.99

• DAZN: $199.99

• TSN+: $80.00

• Sportsnet NOW (Premium): $249.99

• ESPN+ (USD): $119.99

Grand Total: $2,267.75 per year 😱 That's over $188 per month just for entertainment and sports subscriptions! Some thoughts:

1. Prices keep creeping up (looking at you, Netflix and Sportsnet).

2. There might be some bundle deals, but still... ouch!

The above is from Reddit so I don't know how accurate it is and the prices have probably all gone up by now but even still, ouch is RIGHT! And I'm sure I know some folks who pay almost double - that is over $300 a month for their TV. I've paid less for RENT!

If you're like me, and who really is I mean come on, but if you have this thing in common with me, you go to a Canadian person's living room and absolutely marvel at the alien spacecraft array of remotes, cordage, boxes, buttons, and switches they have to navigate just right to turn on their TV. Just to turn it on! Now if you want to watch a particular show you have to press input on the universal, choose 3, find the remote for Roku, but first you need to log out of the Firestick, which requires a separate username and password, which we have on the Google TV Streamer if you log on and select my icon and go to notes you will find it. This requires a one time service fee of $7.50 because you are a new user but there IS a workaround for that if you go to the internet and type in userfee crack I have it saved as one of my movies. 

And here's me, "Ummm... what's on channel 4?"

Folks this didn't take a million years. It happened relatively quickly and it is a MASSIVE change in our culture! I was overseas so I didn't get socialized gradually into this telecom nightmare but you stay-at-home Canadians have been well trained! Some of you actually think this is BETTER and some even think the explosion of charges from almost nothing to 300 bucks a month for a TV experience that I would even challenge and say is not much better than the old days if it is at all.. some of you think that's fine and dandy. Oh sure, you get more stuff to watch but who has the time anyway? Plus you have to deal with the arrogance of monopoly. Rogers, Bell, and Telus are just plain evil! Scroll down in my blog. It won't be long till you find a post with details on that. And even when you DO pay a few hundred bucks a month and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous entertainment centers, you know what you've paid for? Commercials! With all the commercials you still get on TV it should be free! You'd know that if you weren't so efficiently Pavlovized by the Telecom Trio. 

I watched the most recent Survivor live on TV. It was nice to see live. That was the only thing nice about it. Without any spoilers we had to sit through not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR long strings of commercials, many of them the same, before we could get through tribal council and find out who voted for whom! Maybe the best tribal council ever but it was excruciating to sit through all those commercials! I'm just not used to it. I'm used to my Survivor commercial free and NOT live. I much prefer it that way. 

Anyway, I think you know where I'm heading with all this. TV got this way through privatization. The C in CBC and CTV is for Canada. The A in ABC is for America and the N in NBC is for National. At least I think. While this doesn't necessarily mean they were government networks, there was significantly more government control, regulation, and structural changes. They were part of our governing, not just about money. Now if you've got unlimited funding you could get your own show on Fox lighting your farts on fire. 

Probably, however, the largest contribution to our country (and let's include the US here) or countries that the erosion of TV into the monstrosity it has become is responsible for has been distraction. Distraction from the situations in our countries of which the above is a good example for Canada and a most quotable quote from my beloved and highly quotable friend Heather stands well for America: "I don't know if you've noticed but shit is shitty down here."

Governments: "You wouldn't complain so much if you'd just shut up and watch your expensive, complicated TV!"

Popcorn and Pop King

 There's a Tim Horton's Donuts ad in Canada (or used to be) in which a couple of kids are selling lemonade for $10.00 a glass. A potential customer happens by and says, "My stars! Ten dollars?" Or something like that. The kids then shrug and say, "Hey, supply chains..." 

We laugh but this takes place in real life everywhere we buy things, including at Tim Hortons. What we don't see in the add is the stupid customer actually BUYING the ten-dollar lemonade thus enabling the children's chicanery and encouraging more of it in their peers. Soon Boy Scouts (whose oath includes honouring God, helping other people, and being morally straight) are selling little bags of popcorn for 20 bucks. OR MORE!

I know, it's largely a donation so they can be forgiven. But they claim about 70% is donation. Is it? 

Where have I seen 20-dollar popcorn before? Oh yeah, just last night I went to see "Michael" in the theater. It was the first movie I've gone to since October of 2024 when I went to a scary movie with my American friends. I didn't buy any popcorn then and I didn't buy any last night. I talked with one of the people I went to the movies with last night who said that the prices of everything at the theater concession were, "WRONG!" I had this conversation with her as she purchased popcorn and a drink for heavily unreasonable markup. I guess, like the movie we saw, (which didn't include three of the Jackson kids (Rebbie, Randy, and Janet), pretended "Off The Wall" was his first solo album when it was actually his FIFTH, insinuated MJ laboured over and then finally wrote "Thriller" in a burst of creativity, lied that there were no black artists on MTV and they weren't playing "Thriller" until Walter Yetnikoff called up and threatened them (which probably didn't even happen at all), minimized Joe Jackson's abuse and the disastrous plastic surgeries his nickname for Michael "Big Nose" led to, and, although he was in his 30's by the end of the movie and both women and men were shown in audiences swooning over him, absolutely nothing about his odd sexuality was included) we are just expected to ignore bitter reality and just enjoy the popcorn/movie anyway. And WE DO! That's the strange part. Isn't it? 

Anyway, if you like his music and dance moves, go see Michael. If you like documentaries, don't. He's portrayed as flawless in this movie and it's a good bit of fun for fans who already believe in his unearthly qualities. Wait, wasn't there another movie like that?

At any rate, back to popcorn. It costs theaters roughly 50 cents to make the large vat size of popcorn they sell at the theaters. That includes packaging, labour, oil, salt, and buttery flavoured topping. Add labour and it's about a buck. So selling it at $15 represents a 1500% markup. In what universe is that reasonable? Yet we are stupid enough to buy it. Well, most of us are.

I was in a local pawn shop the other day. The proprietor, a large lady covered in tattoos, proudly announced that they pay about 25% of the value of items they buy. While considerably more reasonable than the movie theaters, is this reasonable? Let's have some fun. I'm your buddy and I brought over a six-pack of beer so we can watch the game and have a few pops. Even though I bought it, if I were to drink 4.5 of those beers and leave you only 1.5 what kind of friend would I be? 

There exists a level of reason in almost every financial arrangement we enter into and it's pretty universal. It goes into the shitter at the very mention of "business." People get away with an awful lot in the name of business, don't they? "Personally I'd give you a couple grand for your old car but my business can only give you fitty bucks." We've all seen this and probably experienced it. Why we put up with it is a mystery I'll never understand. 

The recent gas price hikes allegedly caused by the Straight of Hormuz shenanigans are another example. Before the US or Canada had any shortages whatsoever of gas, the prices skyrocketed. It's a common market phenomenon driven by "anticipation of future supply constraints." The stock market is just guessing! Don't take my word for it: 

"That LITTLE portfolio you have." What a dick! 

So what you pay for something is not always supply and demand or anything like reasonable pricing. It can just be speculation. And if you have the power to CAUSE speculation by, for instance, selling or buying stock in bulk like the above dude and many other people like him with far too much money, or maybe a person with far too much power who can, for instance, close a Straight or start a war, you can anticipate speculation and price hiking, buy stock in advance of your actions before the speculation and price hiking, and have an easy way to make money for yourself and anyone else you let in on your stock manipulation scheme. 

Here is a BBC article on some of the market-moving statements that Trump has made that were regularly and predictably followed by massive investments that made money for him, his family, and his Mara Lago golfing buddies. And if you think the price of oil will go down once this is over... 

Will he get busted for this? Of course not! Nobody ever does, why would the president? Why not? It IS against the law. There's even a name for it. Insider trading. But there's another name for it that seems to - ahem - trump them all: business.

So back to the Tim Horton's kids. Are they any different? Nope. They're just finding whatever reason they can to charge outrageous amounts of money for their product. Who can blame them if the public is clueless enough to buy their product?

So what's the solution? We know that prices will never go down so the best we can hope for is a moratorium or price freeze at least on products essential to human survival. Well anyone who suggests such a thing is met with reasons why that can't happen that are on par with the reasons for inflation in their lack of truth and/or creativity. My personal favourite and perhaps the most traditionally effective is that good old serviceable scareword SOCIALISM. But there are others.

If you freeze prices there is no incentive for competition in the marketplace and capitalism will be hamstrung. To that I say maybe capitalism needs to be hamstrung. There comes a time in competition when things become overcompetitive and inevitably cheating is the result. That way the bad win and the good lose. Sound familiar? It's the very state of business today. We need a referee or a gym teacher who will call the game and say, "If you can't play fair, you can't play at all. So for the rest of the class we'll do passing drills, shooting drills, skating drills, and calisthenics. Maybe next class we can try a genuine game situation but only if you behave." 

What do you reckon? Any chance that'll happen in our lifetimes?

The University of Blefuscu

 "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place." Jonathan Swift (maybe).

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired." Jonathan Swift, Letter to a Young Clergyman, 1720.

"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out." Sidney Smith (1771-1845).

"... what we generally refer to as traditional schooling is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into convention." Alfie Kohn.

I do not know how accurate any of the above quotations are in their sourcing, but I have encountered such futility with overnumerousness and would heartily add that it has no more fertile a breeding ground than in the halls, or online echo chambers, of academia. I hesitate, with a hesitation born of this very futility, to add that I believe the above quotations to be using the unisex "man," "him," and "he" since it occurs no less, possibly even more, in circumstances under which unreasonable positions have been acquired by members of the fairer gender. The mere fact that I type the phrase "fairer gender" with no such hesitation illustrates my point.

I much prefer the illustration of the Blefuscudians. You may know about them without recognizing the name, but if I said Lilliputians, it might ring a bigger bell. A proper Blefuscudian, you see, breaks his morning eggs at the large ends and considers the heresy of breaking eggs at their small ends to be an act worthy of war. Referring back to the original quotations, the war of the "Big-Endians" vs. the "Little-Endians" is the ingenious satire of Jonathan Swift comparing France and England and their conflicts over absurd political and religious differences. The quotations, if correctly attributed, undoubtedly are as well. 

I propose to you that the convention of initiation is another such practice that is perpetuated on no other grounds than the most common of justifications (and the most absurd) tradition, habit, or rules. To me this has always seemed a type of vengeful, pay-it-forward thinking that cannot withstand even rudimentary rational examination, yet it has caught on in a profession that is meant to champion just that. In academia the absurdity is magnified in that the thinking (or lack thereof) behind initiation originates in the supposedly erudite and superior intellects of professors and even "doctors." The "thought" progression seems to be as follows: I worked VERY hard to earn my advanced degree. My professors made things difficult for me. I am now in charge of training initiates and judging their efforts to be worthy or unworthy of that same degree. I MUST make their experience as difficult or MORE difficult than mine in order for them to suffer the hardships that I suffered.

Unfortunately this is one of the outdated policies that have calcified into convention in education and it belies the very nature of it. Is a professor a teacher or just someone who professes to be a teacher? As teachers it is an integral part of our jobs to be facilitators. That word comes from the same root as "facile," which means easy. We are supposed to be making things EASIER for our students. Initiation is the exact opposite. Now, add to the absurdity of all of this the situation I have been in for quite some time now: my final course of my master's has been presented and taught under conditions in which initiation has replaced facilitation, students are initiates, and professors are the initiators... and my major IS EDUCATION! For three years the focus of my studies has been on progressive educational policies and philosophies, but it has been taught under the auspices of what we mistakenly call "traditional" education. My university? UofB - the University of Blefuscu.

Here is a detailed explanation taken from waaay back in Feb. of last year when I first tackled this impossible capstone project.

Look, I understand that part of any advanced degree needs to be rigor. Hard work. But good course designers, professors, and educators don't just manufacture rigor for rigor's sake. I did 11 courses and most of them were well done. I can say that from a position of superior educational experience than most of my professors, if not, all of them. I have designed more courses and taught more courses than my teachers so I recognize when things are legit and when they are not. I encountered one illegitimate teacher who was in over her head and more concerned with appearances than performance and I dropped her course. She tried to make it look harder than it was and gave low grades for the same reason and, frankly, it was one of the more elementary concepts in education. I later took the course again with another professor and it was done well. I suppose inept educators who are more concerned with resume fodder and relevance in the highly competitive education racket than good teaching is a problem you might encounter if you are a "tuition free" university. My university is marketed as tuition-free so the professors get less than other unis, but although it is very cheap, students still pay and professors still receive payment. To be more positive about it, you also get teachers who ARE good at their art and less concerned with career advancement and money than educating people. It's unfortunate that you never know which you will get when you sign up for the courses...

There I go being all positive again signing up for a cheap school! I suppose it's time for a little aside. I've learned that Gen Xers (like me) tend to hope for the best but expect the worst. We are the last generation to truly experience long-term boredom, so we often chose to educate ourselves and think critically about our world analyzing things and coming up with world views that to younger generations appear jaded, pessimistic, and cynical, but which are logical, pragmatic, realistic, and not self-delusional or ignorant. I could tell you I have a horrible opinion of what has happened to education all over the world since industrialization and I could tell you that I have done extensive reading, research, and had loads of personal experience to back it up, but I'd still be accused of being jaded, pessimistic, or cynical. If the U of B had allowed me to write a thesis (which I thought I was going to be doing up until the 11th course) it would have been on how education has been destroyed by commercialization and the corruption it inevitably drags with it. Since my uni is an American one, I'll give you a few pretty high-profile examples of what I'm cynically, pessimistically, and jadedly bellyaching about. It's all in the documentary Inside Job from about the 1:22:00 mark. 

These examples are from fairly recently, but I can give you examples from a hundred years ago of academics publishing flawed research (that industry paid them to fudge) and that research being used by industry to improve conditions in government, finance, and education for themselves. During my master's studies I read a very well written and very wrong paper on how class size (that is number of students per class) shows no correlation to student achievement. The lady who wrote that probably retired from teaching afterwards. Or maybe she became education minister or a banker. These three rackets (big finance, education, and government) still trade players like sports franchises with little to no regulation even though the conflicts of interest are glaringly obvious! I'll give you a few names from the doc: Martin Feldstein- Harvard U. professor of economics + Reagan's chief economic advisor + AIG board of directors. He advocated the deregulation Reagan's administration implemented. Glenn Hubbard- Dean of Columbia Business School + chief economic advisor to the GW Bush admin. + Bear Stearns defender, Met Life board member, and advisor to many other financial firms. Laura Tyson- Professor at Berkeley + Director of economic counsel of Clinton admin. + board member of Morgan Stanley. Ruth Simmons- President of Brown University + board member of Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers- Treasury Secretary who deregulated derivatives + President of Harvard University (2001) + made millions consulting for hedge funds and speaking fees from lots of investment banks. Frederic Mishkin- Federal Reserve board of governors + Columbia Business School + Wrote a paper on Iceland lying about their central banks being solid when they weren't. He was paid $124,000 by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write this paper. The title of the paper was "Financial Stability in Iceland." It was later changed in online credits to "Financial Instability in Iceland." Richard Portes- Most famous economist in Britain + prof. of economics at London Business School + also commissioned by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to report on the strength of the Icelandic financial sector.

Based on the purchased reports of Portes and Mishkin (can you say conflict of interest?) and possibly the paper Hubbard wrote singing the praises of CDO's and other garbage written by "scholars" in which truth took a back seat to financial advantage, the top 3 banks of Iceland were allowed to deregulate and operate using foreign currency. They promptly "borrowed" 120 billion dollars or 10X the Icelandic economy. I enclose the word "borrowed" in quotes because they did things that only banks can do for the most part. One example of this is their central bank (which Mishkin praised as trustworthy) jacked up interest rates which attracted foreign currency deposits in Icelandic kronur, which were promptly loaned to the Icelandic banks who then re-loaned it out willy nillilly. 

You know the rest cuz it has happened several times in several countries in several points during history. Bankers got rich, housing prices more than doubled, prices of everything shot up from all the fake money creation or "fiat" currency. Despite all of THIS, crooked credit rating agencies reported (after undoubtedly being paid off as well) that Iceland was AOK and raised their credit rating to triple A. While their credit rating was 3A their unemployment rate got a rating of 3X. That's right, it tripled in 6 months. The few regulators who tried to stop this went to banks, were met by teams of expensive lawyers ready to squash their claims and either went away defeated, or if they did really well, were offered jobs. 1/3 ONE THIRD of Iceland's regulators accepted those jobs with the banks.

Okay, so I know the world has gone to shit like Iceland and bad educators are at the very heart of it. I also know that the solution must have GOOD educators at the heart of IT. This has been a big part of my pursuit of education as a career. I have always wanted to do my part in turning the corruption around. I have mountains of respect for educators like Howard Zinn, Alfie Kohn, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Reich whose positivity seems unassailable in the face of overwhelming negativity, but I guess I'm not as strong as those guys. The negativity at the University of Blefuscu overwhelmed me.

I didn't quote Rush at the outset because it is a three-parter. I would say it's a toss-up between Grand Designs and Subdivisions for the best lyrics ever in a song that I know of and BOTH are by Rush. "So much poison in power, the principles get left out; So much mind on the matter, the spirit gets forgotten about" That describes the above situation to a T does it not? But wait, there's more from one of the greatest lyricists in rock music ever, Neil Peart. "Growing up it all seemed so one-sided; Opinions all provided; The future pre-decided; Detached and subdivided: In the mass production zone... Nowhere is the dreamer; Or the misfit so alone"

When the poisonous principles of power take over education, schools become mass production zones where quantity trumps quality, learning takes a back seat to finishing, and students are assessed and judged to be worthy or wanting by the Standardizors! This is what musicians sing about, (Pink Floyd did it well too) authors write about, (Bradbury, Salinger, Orwell), educators complain about, (Freire, Dewey, Gray) and education courses even educate about, yet it persists... even in the very schools that teach the evils of it!

"So much style without substance! So much stuff without style! It's hard to recognize the real thing. It comes along once in a while." Rush again. For 10 courses I believed I was getting the real thing. I had a couple teachers that were not the best but I signed up for a budget master's and I expected some parts of it to be a little worse than Harvard. I'd have been crazy not to expect that. But the final courses threw me for a loop!

In its defense, my online master's uni has only been going for 17 years and it only got WASC regional accreditation last year. So for 15 years they were trying really hard to get established and they finally did. This was great news for me when it happened because I had only a short time before found out that regional accreditation is the big one. Without that the uni can't really be taken seriously. I might have even been refused teaching jobs overseas with just the international accreditation. And that was the big reason I was pursuing the master's. What I'm saying is my master's degree might not have been substantial enough to get me the jobs I was looking for until just last year. Good luck for me? Not so fast hombres!

You see the final two courses were originally designed as primary research conducted on actual students then written as a primary research assignment in the form of a curriculum or curriculum adjustment plan. We were supposed to find something lacking in a school and then, using previously published studies, our research and experience, and the results of our own private study, compose an action plan that would strengthen the class/school of the students and solve an educational issue you observed to exist in their class/school. My initial plan was to write a thesis about Paulo Freire and how his wildly successful language teaching methods that revolutionized the citizen literacy in his native Brazil could be used for teaching ESL in other countries. That would have been a thesis. They don't want theses.

I did 10 group projects during my studies and every group member I talked to about this was under the impression that our "capstone" courses would be in the nature of theses. I don't remember reading anywhere or being told at any point in my studies otherwise. It's a massive thing to leave out and I believe it was left out of our course descriptions purposely. The university wanted people assuming the standard thesis would be the final course and they conducted the first 10 courses as if it would be simply because if students knew we were going to be responsible for one of these boring, repetitive, highly technical, almost mathematical, and mostly common sensical educational studies, we might not have signed up at all. I also believe that the hundreds, or maybe thousands of these studies published by students from my uni have kept that uni relevant in academia and have played no small part in its regional accreditation being granted. 

At any rate, that's just educated speculation. Here's something that's NOT speculation: I called and actually talked to a lady named Heather who is moore than just your average representative at the University of Blefescu. She told me that they were running into legal and liability issues with master's students who were unable to obtain permission from students, parents, or schools to conduct their studies. This was when I was having difficulties with course number 11. I was expected to do a study on some students but I was in Calgary about to move to Maryland and it was July. All the kids were on summer holidays and I didn't have a class of students at the time because I had just left my job teaching adult refugees and immigrants to Canada. Heather said the course was going to be adjusted and sure enough by the time I took it, it was just about research in education designed, I guess, to help us find secondary sources of research for our ultimate capstone assignment that was going to be changed to a secondary research assignment in the form of a curriculum or curriculum adjustment plan. Sounds like an easy tweak but holy jumping Jonathan did the University of Blefescu ever fuck this up! Or did they...

Suffice to say they left elements of the primary research assignment and instructed students to conduct them in the form of secondary research. Some of this was literally impossible! In some places we were clearly asked to do our own primary research; in some places we were told to come up with fake school and principal names and even possibly fake research results; and in other places we were instructed to make sure everything was secondary research. This is impossible to do so I tried three times with three different teachers to point out the flaws and contradictions in the assignment instructions and asked them to give me their interpretations of what it was we were supposed to be doing. The first lady gave me a hearty thumbs up on my initial ideas saying she was excited about my choice of topic, then after a hellishly long week of work she poo-pooed almost everything she was formerly excited about telling me in no certain terms the abstract ways she expected me to amend my original submission IN ONE DAY. So I dropped it because if you don't drop the course at the one-week point, you can't continue and you eventually fail it. 

The next teacher was much worse! She told me that if I didn't understand the instructions and the difference between primary and secondary research, maybe I shouldn't be enrolled in a master's course or something dismissive to that effect. Would not tell me her interpretation of the assignment or acknowledge any mistakes in the assignment description. So I dropped the course again.

The U of B has a rule that if you postpone studies for 5 consecutive semesters you will be forcibly un-enrolled. My last chance was a couple of months ago and the teacher again refused to give me her interpretation of what I was expected to do. She defended the school's description of the assignment stating that it was fine but would not discuss the glaringly UNfine details I brought up in an email to her. I even told her a friend of mine put the description through AI and asked how to write the assignment. AI said it was a primary research study. My friend said no it isn't and AI argued with her saying that YES it was! This started smelling fishy to me. 

People are somehow finishing this assignment I think. It makes me think that THEY are using AI to get it done and that maybe the school WANTS the assignment to be impossible to do without AI. But what could the purpose of THAT be? Is it possible that the teachers (who ARE paid but not as much as regular university teachers) are accepting only the assignments obviously created with the help of AI, busting the students, then saying that if they don't give the professor a little for his/her efforts they will be reported? Have the teachers purposely hijacked this course to get paid more than the non-profit, tuition-free, humanitarian, Yidan Prize winning, accessible higher education for underserved population, egalitarian university wants to pay them? Are they making things difficult, nay impossible, out of the peculiar "initiation" mentality? 

Is this how low our education systems have fallen?

All I can say is I've given up after spending 3 years, thousands of dollars (because it's absolutely NOT tuition-free), and a helluva lot of effort achieving straight A's then being forced to capitulate right at the finish line. 

I've paid money to learn a lot of stuff. It hasn't been wasted money. And apart from the capstone course, the courses and the majority of teachers were good. But as the old saying goes, THAT AND $3.25 GETS YOU A RIDE ON A SARNIA BUS.

That's where I am now. Sarnia, Ontario. Pursuing a career change at the age of 59.

This should be colourful. <---- Now that I'm back in Canada I'm USING that U red wavy underlining notwithstanding. 

Maybe next post I'll tell you the details of how bad the last "school" I WORKED at was. A "school" that makes the claim of having the highest graduate employment rate of any school in Korea. Like most people, you'd think they mean former students finding employment after graduation in the fields in which they had studied, but that's not what they mean. They simply mean that while studying their students get jobs near the school. Shitty, 3D jobs that pay less than minimum wage, but they get jobs gutting fish on the midnight shift for example. Then they have to try to stay awake in class. That's how this university with by far the highest "graduate employment" gets a ranking of 167 out of 193 Korean universities. This is the kind of thing that has burned me out folks. It's the reason this post took months to finish. I think I'll post about something other than the education racket next time.

A Personal Rule of Thumb

 When I was young I had lots of friends. School is good for that. But I had some friends I didn't meet at school. When my Mom had my sister (the youngest) there was a family that helped us out a lot. The Zurwicks lived down 6th Ave. from us right beside the public pool that is now condos. There were two boys in the Zurwick family I thought were cool. Dean was older than me and Robin was younger and during the summer of my sister's birth I hung out with them sometimes. My mom was friends with Donna, their mother. I don't know how they met but it sure was a good thing they did!

Anyhoo, one day Dean and Robin were lighting firecrackers in the open field outside the swimming pool. Their dad Marian was a millwright and he worked at the Celgar pulp and paper mill. He could fix anything. I didn't see him much or get to know him well but my favourite thing about him was the way he swore. He was not a native Canadian. He spoke with a Slavic accent and overused what might have been the first two English words he ever learned. To be precise, they were more than two words that over the years he had transformed into two more tactile words of his own making. These words were Godam and Snbitchin. Almost every sentence included them. For example, "Donna and her Godam, snbitchin coffee!"

Marian Zurwick made a good living. Because of this, Dean and Robin had stuff. Stuff that I didn't have. REAL equipment for playing street hockey; awesome records and tapes; tools for fixing things like bikes; Marian could even sharpen hockey skates. For free! And, of course, they had firecrackers. Aside from the danger, the noise, the fire, and the all-around coolness of blowing shit up, firecrackers were even cooler because I don't think they were LEGAL at that time. I don't think I ever had any of my own and wouldn't even have known where to buy them if I could have. So when my brother Jeff told me he was going to the Zurwicks' to blow off some firecrackers with Robin, I invited myself along. 

I have already turned a short story into a longer one than intended... to arrive at the climax of the story, one of the firecrackers was a dud and Robin threw it away. I said, "Hey, I'll take that and before Jeff could pick it up, I got it and put it in my pocket. Normally the fuses on these little red bombs were three or four inches long, but this fuse had burned down to less than half an inch without igniting. It was fun to watch Robin blowing up his string of firecrackers and coming up with interesting things to blow up with them, but having my own was even better. I figured I would lengthen the fuse somehow, light a fire and throw the firecracker in, or maybe open it up and light the powder on fire later. But when all the other firecrackers were gone, Robin and Jeff asked me where the dud was. They convinced me that if we threw the firecracker as soon as we lit it, we could do it safely. I was far too easy to convince of things like this when I was young. So I held the firecracker between thumb and forefinger with arm cocked and ready to throw it while one of them stood behind me and lit it. I think it was Jeff. Whoever it was managed to light it and get out of the way, but I didn't have quite enough time to throw it and it blew up in my hand. 

I'm not sure why but my thumb took the bulk of the blast. It was an instant of pain-free impact that I felt while hearing the "BANG" followed by increasingly intense pain that quickly passed anything I had felt before and continued. I was shaking my hand, jumping, squeezing it between my thighs, shaking it again, and yelling, "GODAM SNBITCHIN GODAM SNBITCHIN GODAM SNBITCHIN," for what seemed like 5 minutes but was probably only 15 seconds. It felt like my thumb had been blown off but it wasn't quite so bad. There was blood coming from underneath the thumbnail but I only lost the upper-inside corner of it. The rest of it went black for a month or so.

Many, many years later I was working what was by far the best job I have ever had by every known criterion except one - enjoyability - and that same thumb was in danger again. I had a job drilling for Hy-Tech Drilling near Eskay Creek gold mine and we were putting together the drill piece by piece fairly close to the mine camp. Since we were so close we didn't use helicopter like normal, but a crane was used to lift the pieces, which all weighed around a ton. The drill shack and base of the drill with the motor were already set up and we were dropping the mast into the drill shack and attaching it to the base. I was in the shack steadying the mast when it suddenly swung a bit too much crushing my thumb between the mast and the drill shack wall. My thumb literally exploded on both sides of the nail. I'd like to say I was jumping around saying, "Godam snbitchin," but I don't think I was. Oh there was jumping around and there was swearing, but I had since met some smoother slangers to emulate. In Northern Canada where most people are somehow involved in mining or logging, there are folks like Marian Zurwick who have repurposed the Queen's English to suit their surly, salty purposes so elegantly as to qualify it as no shit artistical to my way of reckoning. I probably slipped into some oft-spoken, well-weathered northern poetic imprecation or two. I can't remember. I know you might think I'm exaggerating, but the bleeding stopped pretty fast so I just duct taped it and kept working. That's a northern Canadia poem right there! "Fucking thumb blew up; If it ain't fucked, you got duct; Thumbs up to that, eh?" <------ A northern Canadian Haiku. I thank you.

The reason I had gotten the job on the drill was because one of the drillers, Fraser, had cacked up a hand by getting it caught between a pipe-wrench and the drill jaws or something like that. Long-term drillers all have stories of hand injuries and many are missing fingers. 

To this day I haven't worked for a more honest company or a better boss than Hy-Tech Drilling or Harvey Tremblay respectively. I haven't had a better wage, or a job that is more highly sought after since either. There's a way people in those days used to look at me, a nod of respect, an acceptance that I had... It was an offer to be a member of that northern community and I refused it to start my education career in Korea. 

Who knows if this'd be so easy to type if I hadn't? 

The Cult of Inconvenience Part II

 So, where were we?

I had just tried to do a visa run to Osaka and ended up with a new phone plan. Pretty much. So I called Mr. An at Sokcho Immigration and told him and he was upset. He can't keep postponing and I have to get on this. So I said it might be easier (Now remember the title of this post. "Easier" is more accurate) to get a D-10 looking for work visa. He says, "That's a good idea. You had one recently." I said, "HOWEVER... I checked online and (after great pain and suffering) found that the earliest appointment I could book on HiKorea would be 3 weeks down the road and HiKorea is notorious for not working. Could I get a D-10 visa by going to the Sokcho office and negotiating it there? Well Mr. An had been helpful but this, evidently, exceeded his helpfulness limitations. But I said it didn't matter anyway because my former employer who had already fired me, withheld my dismissal notice pay, and cancelled my visa - ALL illegally - were now withholding my letter of release, which is a key component in acquiring a D-10 visa. I had discussed this with Mr. An before and he'd promised to talk to the uni about this... TWICE! I asked if he had had any luck (trying to persuade them to obey the law) and he said no. I told him I had read that sometimes when employers are being uncooperative, it is possible to get a new job in Korea without the letter of release, maybe it could be waived as part of the D-10 visa too? He said that couldn't happen.

So back to Itaewon to visit my travel agent. I made sure not to go on a Friday this time. He got me the same one-day visa run to Osaka for the same price. However, it came with added inconvenience: I had to land at terminal 1 and transfer to terminal 2 for the flight back to Korea. But since there was 5 hours between the flights I figured that shouldn't be a problem. The steal of the day was the flight OUT of Korea. I had managed to find a dirt cheap ticket from Seoul to Vancouver on March 10th and bought THAT too. It was cheaper than the ticket to Osaka and as such made me feel like I had gained back the lost 300 bucks from the first crack at Osaka - and THEN some. In fact, this would have been a good day all around... if not for another customer missing a flight. Unlike me, this customer had not been late. In fact he had arrived a few hours before check-in for the first flight of a multi-connection trip. Unfortunately for this person, there were slowdowns at the airport (I think it was in Thailand) and HUGE check-in lineups and it was taking people over 4 hours to check in. This caused chaos and confusion and several tickets were being transferred and rebooked by several travel agents and Khawaja was doing what I always do when I try to book an immigration appointment on HiKorea: just when he thinks the ticket is booked - BAM! someone else gets the seat and he has to start over again inputting information. Who knows how websites like airline ticket sites and immigration appointment sites prioritize applicants? I don't know but I always fly low-class and I'm pretty sure that gets minimum priority. The E-2 visas are like low-class so same thing. It comes down to money like most of the ills of this world. The Cult of Inconvenience lesson 3: Have money. 

Have you ever talked to someone who is wearing an earpiece? I remember several years ago the first time it happened to me. I was on base in Yongsan. It was July 4th and the American military base in Seoul was opened for the public to see some of what goes on there. There were tours of tanks and planes, carnival events, mini golf, a concert featuring Hoobastank, and, of course, fireworks. It was a fun time. I had had a few beers and was in a temporary toilet making room for a few more when the guy at the urinal beside me said, "Hey, how's it going?" I said, "Hey not too bad, How are you?" He goes, "Good, good. I'm at the Yongsan military base." I said, "Me too. (weirdo) It's nice that they opened it up today. Have you been in the tanks? It's like a thousand degrees in there! 'Course I was almost too big to fit..." He says, "I dunno. Some guy thinks I'm talking to him." As he went to the sink to wash his hands I saw the earpiece. That was awkward. But a funny story.

At the travel agency I was sitting right in front of Khawaja, face-to-face, eye contact even, and he'd start talking. For a few syllables I'd think I was with him but then realize he was talking in Hindi or Indian accented Korean or some other language so he wasn't talking to me. I'd even ask questions and think he was answering but false alarm, he was talking to someone else. Then during a break in the hectic action of rerouting his other customer he WOULD occasionally talk to me and I wouldn't be ready for it. "What? Sorry, me? Did you ask me?" This is NOT a comfortable position to be in. I was doing this for EASILY 2 hours before I had both of my tickets purchased. This was Jan. 20th and I would fly on the 21st.

I got to the airport (as you can imagine) WELL before check-in time and although the line-up was lengthy, it only took about an hour to do check-in, customs, and... there was no immigration. There was just a station to swipe my passport and press my fingerprints on a screen. No immigration officer to officially end my E-2 visa and collect my alien registration card. Convenience, right? No grumpy immigration officer making you take off your hat and glasses and glaring at you to judge if you resemble your passport photo enough to pass through this port. Well, as is far more often the case than we are socialized to believe, this technology turned out to be the exact opposite of a convenience. We shall return to this...

But I just shrugged and went to my gate and waited to board. Though I was not able to bring my carry-on kimchi, the flight went off without a hitch.

I had to laugh at this tv that flashed some of the various flight rules in sequence while passengers made their ways through passport/boarding pass check, on the way to the luggage x-rays and customs arches.

The booze bottle looks like cologne to me, but the funniest part is the kimchi. Although I get it, kimchi can be a dangerous biological weapon in the wrong hands. 

There was only one part of the transfer that caused me trouble. I hadn't taken much cash with me. I only had about 15 bucks worth of Korean cash in my wallet, but, for convenience, when I got my debit card from my bank in Sokcho (the same day as getting the shitty phone service) they assured me it was international and that I would be able to use it at international bank machines. So I wasn't too worried... I tried to find an international bank machine or even a currency exchange booth. This proved to be more difficult than expected. Fukuoka airport has them everywhere and they were no trouble with my Korean cards in the past, but I couldn't find either in Osaka. I DID find an area for buying transit tickets and started to worry a bit because it said that cards were not accepted there and neither was foreign currency. 

At Kansai International Airport! Come on, Japan! In Korea I find that all too often CASH is not accepted. But you'd think that at an international airport you'd be able to use your card or exchange currency. You know, for convenience. But that would mean it was something given a crap about wouldn't it?

At any rate, if you look at the top pic, it says "Free shuttle bus to terminal 2." So it turned out I didn't need the cash or card. 

There wasn't much to Osaka Terminal two and it was only a short trip around a water reservoir to get there. So I had the majority of my 5-hour layover to kill just waiting for boarding time. I was hungry and more urgently thirsty so I went to the CONVENIENCE store in Kansai Airport Terminal Two to test their convenience. I swiped my card to try to purchase this can of beer and it didn't work. I had to put it back.

There was one complicated phone/cash machine in the terminal so I tried my card there. I got right down to the final step and got the message that my card would not work in the machine. I ended up going through another process on the same machine exchanging my 12,000 Korean won and ended up with about 1200 Japanese Yen. That beer was 480 Yen. I couldn't even get 3 of them and I was hungry too! I'd have to get through the rest of the day on snack food.

Then I thought of something I hadn't thought of in half a year or more: my Canadian card. Would it work? I checked the shelves of the "convenience" store again but there wasn't much that would make for a convenient meal for me.

A guy can't survive on Super Mario, Transformers, and Hello Kitty alone. I found a pork cutlet sandwich and some peanuts and brought them up to the same girl at the checkout counter. I waved my NEW card at her and said, "Canada ca do." She ran it through and YAY, it worked, but BOO I paid the airport "inconvenience added" prices for them. I also had to suffer the worst (probably usurious) currency exchange rate available to man, and I noticed in this month's Canadian bank statement an unexplained 15-dollar service charge that, no doubt, is for the "convenience" of using my Canadian card internationally. So it was about 100 bucks for a sandwich, some peanuts, and a couple beers. How's THAT for convenience? Cult of convenience lesson 4: International banking is nothing but a few keystrokes, so very convenient for banks. They just pretend it's inconvenient and requires additional fees.

So, I got back to Korea on the flight just before things at Incheon Airport shut down. Lots of shops, customs, currency exchangers, etc. were finishing their shifts. I DID, however get into a long line-up for actual immigrations officers. There were a couple of Chinese flights arriving and the passengers illustrated Cult of Convenience lesson 5: If you want convenience, just be an asshole. The Japanese, Korean, and whatever else passengers from my flight had lined up in the snaky customs lines marked by the airport stanchions. The passengers from the Chinese flights were unabashedly unhooking straps, crawling under stanchions, cutting in the orderly lines as bad Chinese tourists have well-earned reputations for doing. I think I might have scared a few to the back of the line with the death-glares I was distributing, but not all of them.

By the time I got to the immigration agent I opened my passport to my E-2 page, handed in my alien card and my ticket from Incheon back to Canada on March 10 and said, in Korean, that I wanted to cancel my E-2 and visit Korea until March 10. I don't know why this confused the agent. Maybe the fact that I was speaking Korean, that I know the process, or that I had done a no shit one-day visa run - something quickly becoming a thing of the past because of - now you're getting it - the cult of inconvenience. 

No, it turned out that she was confused because I was supposed to have done all this when I LEFT Korea. Remember? When there was just the machine for immigration? And there was no way I could have done this? Machines causing problems again. It happens a lot, it just doesn't get much publicity. So we fall all over ourselves to voluntarily hand over 100% trust to a lot of machines that cause a lot of problems! This is a large part of the cult of inconvenience. In this way we are bringing it upon ourselves.

I was taken to the main Immigration office and given a number. I waited for a few other people who had some issues with immigration, then I got to the window and the immigration officer started speaking Korean to me. I couldn't understand because when Koreans speak to foreigners who are just learning the very difficult Korean language they don't speak slowly. If anything they speak faster. I've speculated about this before. Is it to demonstrate their superior skill in the language; to make the foreigner envious of that skill; or maybe it's just an added inconvenience. Who knows? So basically, she downshifted into broken English and told me everything I had just done. "You go to Japan. You come back same day. You cancel E-2. You start visitor visa. You exit Korea March 10." I said, "Yes." She said, "Why you can't speak Korean?" I said, in Korean, "Very difficult." I've found that this often appeases people who ask this question, which leads me to further believe my theory about why they speak so fast to foreigners. It worked again. I was done. 

The trip back to my hotel from the airport was as tense as the original trip the other way had been in my last post. I cut it very close, but I made it back just as the Juan subway station was closing up. I am back in Korea and legally visiting on a tourist visa till March 10.

Next adventure: To see if I can overcome the cult of inconvenience in the form of "rigor" (more accurately rigor for rigor's sake) in my pursuit of an online master's in Education. Spoiler alert - the news ain't good. 

The Cult of Inconvenience

 This was going to be my "first trip of the year" post but Fate and my habit of self-sabotage to create blog fodder dictated otherwise. 

There are a lot of prerequisites to the full understanding of this post. You have to know about my long history of being screwed by Korean (and for that matter ALL) telecommunications companies. Because of that and the inconvenience of living in Sokcho, I had a useless phone plan. You have to know about the insane problem we all have settling into Korea nowadays because banks have a rule that you need a cell phone to get an account and most cellphone companies have the rule that you need a bank account to get a cellphone plan. At least a decent one. I needed to get paid so that's WHY I settled for a useless cellphone plan. Yes, although Korea is advancing in banking and cellphone technology, it is regressing in banking and cellphone convenience, at least for foreigners. It's all part of what I am going to entitle this post, the cult of inconvenience and, like so many things, it's not like Korea is alone in this, they just do it more openly and to greater extremes than other places. And the cult of inconvenience, one of the Satanic butt-babies of capitalism run amok, is nowhere more evident than in the travel industry. 

My case against my former employer is still ongoing as far as I can tell. (actually I think it's done so that's why I'm posting this today). I have been awarded my dismissal notice allowance that they illegally withheld for over six weeks and I have been told that the matter of my improper dismissal with zero just cause on the shabby grounds of "this teacher refuses to break the laws we order him to break" has been referred to the appropriate agency, board, or commission. (But I think they lied when they told me that) I have no idea what that means in terms of punishment for the school or damages awarded to me but I guess I'll just wait and see. (It means no punishment for the school and no awards for the hardship this caused me. Basically the government forced the university to pay me what they legally owed me and nothing more after booting me out of my home and forcing me to live for weeks in hotels eating out every meal. I get the punishment, they get the convenience) I also have no idea what that is doing to my immigration status and THAT makes me really nervous. The problem is I have no way of getting ahold of the Sokcho Immigration Office except for waiting for Mr. An to call me. He's the guy who has been extending my stay while this battle has raged on. But since my phone plan includes about 5 minutes of outgoing calls per month, I can't call him. I also can't call the 1345 general immigration information hotline (which, in the spirit of this post, really ought to be toll-free if convenience were a thing anybody gave half a hunk of shit about any more), and, again because INconvenience is IN, the HiKorea webpage and other pages like it where we once had the ability (with difficulty and frustration) to check our immigration status has been purposely upgraded in its difficulty and frustration for the users. Every time I put my information into those websites I get a message back that says, "No information available." From past experience I think this has to do with the creative spellings that are sometimes used for VERY important governmental agency websites. I have sometimes played Boggle and shuffled the letters of my name around and come up with the spelling the agency used, but often it's too hard to do so I've given up. It really sucks when you don't even know if the spelling is the problem and you try and try and try and... the cult of inconvenience 101.

So what I had to do was try to locate some payphones. For a place so phone-obsessed, and where there used to be payphones on hiking trails, they have successfully rid this country of them in a short period of time. They are HARD to find now! But I managed to find a few and even then when I tried to call Sokcho Immigration or the 1345 COLDline I would wait while they played music or told me how important my call was but all agents are currently busy with other callers, and then suddenly, "All agents are still busy, please call back later." This was followed by either a dial tone or a busy signal. I had managed to reach someone using a friend's phone to call 1345 and the person told me I had one month after the date of dismissal to change my immigration status. Since that time Mr. An had been calling me and asking if I was going to get a D-10 looking for work visa or leave the country or what. All I could tell him was I was waiting for the work grievance to be settled so he kept extending. Well now that it was partially settled I wondered if I needed to do something about my status. Both Mr. An and the guy at 1345 had told me that the employer HAD cancelled my E-2 visa shortly after dismissing me. Again, this should not be allowed since this presupposes the university had legitimate reason for dismissal, which, AGAIN again, they didn't. Now that the visa's cancelled, if it is decided that they fired me for any bad reason, I can't go back to work. I don't want to and imagine nobody ever does, but this makes buying out the employee's contract the only solution. I believe the government organizations see this as an extremely extreme thing to do (especially for a foreigner) and since the foreigner probably won't be able to make his/her case in Korean while the employer will, it's a tall task to get an unfair dismissal ruling to say the least. Oh I could do it with a lawyer to argue my case in Korean. In fact I have had several tell me I have a slam-dunk, open and shut, can't lose case here and they guaran-damn teed that I could get my contract completely bought out by the employer. But two of them told me that amount of money wouldn't cover their fee, one offered me his services for 8 million and another gave me an offer of 3 million retainer, some out-of-town expenses, and one month's pay contingent upon a ruling in our favour. My contract buy-out would probably have been about 15 million. But there are no guaran-damn tees in life and if there are, you don't get them from lawyers especially if you are a foreigner making a case in one of the most foreigner-hostile countries on the planet. Believe me, this hostility, or if you want to be more euphemistically PC, this "xenophobia" has represented the largest inconvenience of all for me in Korea and if I just added up all the money it has cost me, I could retire comfortably. 

But, as for my visa situation, I thought that maybe the best thing I could do was make a visa run to Japan. I'd leave the country, turn in my alien card, cancel my E-2 visa for sure, and return on a visitor visa. Sometimes you also need to have a plane ticket OUT of Korea when doing that but I planned on negotiating that once I got to Japan. At any rate, since I couldn't reach anyone I went to a travel agent I had used before named Khawaja at Nishaw Travel. This was Thursday and I wanted a ticket to Japan and back on Friday. He found me one for 7 AM to Osaka. Normally I am the guy who shows up WAAAAAY early for flights just to make sure I don't miss them. For this reason I hadn't even heard of a rule that check-in closes an hour before flight time. Well, that's the rule for Jeju Air, which was the airline for my flight. I guess this is something everybody knows so Khawaja just didn't tell me. Anyway, just to be sure I checked the good old internet. Google AI informed me that I definitely would be able to catch my 7 AM flight by taking the subway from Juan to Geomam then to the airport. Catch the subway at 5 and you'll get to the airport a little before 6 which will give you plenty of time to check in. 

Here's where my self-sabotage kicked in. Why did I trust the internet? Why did I trust Google? Why didn't I think of transfer time which is NOTORIOUSLY lengthy in Korea? Why didn't I ask the travel agent whose job it is to know these things? It all seems like no-brainer stuff NOW. I think I was just panicked about overstaying my visa and incurring a million-won fine. That's a thousand bucks. I didn't want to wait till I was able to get in touch with anyone, I just decided I had to go. But on Friday morning at 4 AM when I was getting ready I wasn't worried so much about my visa situation, I was worried about making my flight and thinking to myself every 30 seconds, "Why do I do these things to myself?" I got to Juan Station at 4:30 and already there were people waiting for the subway. This was encouraging. But we waited and waited while more and more people arrived. Finally at 5ish the train arrived. Well I had looked on the good old internet and discovered that from Juan to Geomam was 23 minutes and Geomam to Incheon Terminal 1 was 27 minutes. So if I spent ZERO minutes transferring between Juan and Geomam, and from Geomam to my flight's check-in counter, I could get there before 6 AM. 

I KNOW, EH? What a dope! Anyway, we got on the train at 5ish and it just sat there till 5:30. It went pretty much the way Google said. It WAS 23 minutes to Geomam then I literally RAN with all the other passengers through the LONG transfer and just barely made the train to the airport, which WAS 27 minutes. I guessed right at the 4-way intersection that I always guess wrong at and I made it to the check-in counter by 6:20. Not bad, not bad at all! The cute, young girl wearing the fake Jeju Air orangish uniform looked at my ticket and said, "Check-in for this flight is over." I said, "Yeah I thought it might be. Okay, what can we do?" She just looked blankly at me. Several other people asked for her help so it looked like she was just helping them before she answered my question, but she never answered my question. She had no idea what could be done. I gave her suggestions like, "Can I get a partial refund? Can I get on a later flight? Can I get my money back for the return ticket?" She just continued to look like she could help, but couldn't and didn't. The best she could do is look at my itinerary and tell me I have to contact the travel agent. Right. At 6:30 in the morning.

So I bypassed her and went directly to the Jeju Air ticketing window. There was a sign on it that said something like "We only take money, we don't give any," so I immediately figured there'd be no refund forthcoming. It turned out I was right. When I got to the window there were three young, pretty girls dressed in the flattering, form-fitting, orangy Jeju Air uniforms. Pretty but useless.

The girl who "helped" me was absolutely gorgeous! I wonder if people are less likely to lose their shit with pretty young girls. I had seen her before. Not HER specifically and not SEEN specifically, but I knew this girl. Oh yeah.... back to my struggles with telecommunications! "Hello I would like to cancel my Telus cable please?" "I am sorry, you can't do that here. Is there something else I could do?" "What else can you do?" "Anything but cancel." "Well how can I cancel? I've tried the place where I signed up and I've tried the website, they both referred me to you." "I understand your confusion and frustration sir, but I regret to tell you that there is nothing I can do to help." IT WAS HER!!! Only she wasn't Filipino this time, she was Korean and she wasn't on the phone, she was in person. But essentially the same person. These are what I've labeled the "buffers." They are middlemen, or usually middlewomen, put between customers and people who have the abilities to HELP customers. They are not actually employees of the actual company, nor do they know any actual facts or have any actual information about the company. They are there to tell you how sorry they are for the inconvenience it is their livelihoods to create. The cult of inconvenience lesson 2: the buffers.

As you might expect, the gorgeous buffers were highly empathetic but just as highly unhelpful. So I got back on the train to go back to the travel agent's office in Itaewon. I got to Itaewon and had Mcdonald's breakfast for lunch. It was about 8:30 but remember I was up at 4 and had breakfast then. Now comes one of my sidetracks. Not quite as aside as my usual sidetracks, but still an aside. Take a guess how many Americans enjoy coffee every day. According to the good old interweb up to 73% of Americans drink coffee every day. The average person has 3 cups a day. Do you know how many drink WATER every day? About 75%. Yeah. Coffee is like water to the American. Now, how many of those Americans drink their coffee black? 20%. The vast majority of Americans "color" their coffee with cream, creamer, milk, or some dairy substitute. And I am one billion percent positive I have had Mcdonald's coffee in Korea with one of these:

But there is a fad that might be more popular than the cult of inconvenience here in Korea and that's coffee. Not REAL coffee but the trendy, expensive, maybe Italian-inspired, environmentally horrible bean juice that comes in the cups that people "on-the-go" think make them look busy and professional so much they sometimes carry empty ones around and pretend to caffeinate like little kids having a coffee party. You can tell what I think of those. I prefer Dunkin Donuts, Tim Horton, drip coffee. That's what it's called now. My music is called classic and my coffee is called drip. But that won't change me. I'm a classic drip. And although Mcdonald's HAS the uppety high-maintenance Americano coffee now with all it's additives, they still offer the drip coffee that's made in a pot with no "tamping" or "frothing" or fluffing or buffing. And they have actual milk that they put in the "lattes." Go figure since latte literally means milk. But I double dog dare you to try to get milk or cream or any kind of whitener or lightener in your coffee at Mcdonald's any more. It's just not done! It's really hard to get it anywhere actually! It just seems wrong to call it "Americano" and not offer milk which 80% of Americans put in it, especially at the most American restaurant in the world. I asked politely and in Korean if I could get milk in my coffee and got lied to. The Mcwench actually told me they don't have milk there. That's all I'm saying about that.

Except that it gave me another thing to be pissed off about on this day. So I made my way up the hill to my travel agent's office for the first time that morning. I had already reached my goal of 6000 steps. My phone doesn't record if they are uphill steps like in Itaewon or running steps like in the airport train transfer so I had more than my fair share of exercise for the day. One positive. Gotta cling to the positives sometimes. Ac centuate the positive e liminate the negative... If only life were a song!

As I am getting to the top of the hill where my travel agent (and damn near EVERYTHING in Seoul) is, I realized something: it was Friday. Being unemployed I lose track of the days of the week. Had I thought yesterday while buying my ticket that the next day was Friday it might have been enough to make me think twice about getting it. It seems like I always have this inconvenience when buying my air tickets. You see Friday is the Muslim holy day and my travel agent is a Muslim. It is not my purpose to start slagging all religion here but religion DOES seem to participate in the cult of inconvenience, does it not? How many Christians would rather be watching football on Sunday than sitting in church? I remember thinking of the absolute rip-off it was being all dressed up and in church during a large portion of my two days off of school per week every time I was forced to go to church. I daydreamed all through Sunday School about tobogganing and street hockey and bike riding and football and hockey card trading and mountain climbing and who would win a fight between Spiderman and Batman... I tell ya I've been inconvenienced enough by religion in my lifetime! But on this day it wasn't even MY religion that inconvenienced me. I got to the shop that Khawaja works out of and the door was locked and nobody was there. It was a cold day but there's a couch outside the shop so I took by backpack off and sat on the couch.

See the sign? And you can see the couch too... directly below the sign. What you CAN'T see are the pigeons that live in the neighbourhood. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. 

I sat on the couch unable to dial anybody with my crap phone plan and unsure if Khawaja had received the text messages I had been sending him since early in the morning from the airport.

Then my first bit of good luck for the day.

They say being shat on by a bird is good luck don't they? Well one of those pigeons landed on that sign, hung its arse over the edge and bombed me. 

I guess I was lucky. Here's how I have to reckon good luck in my life: You can see that the shit hit the steel railing and the corner of the couch. I just got the splatterings on my sock and pant leg, not the main load of the shit so yay, good luck for me! 

I shit you not, this really happened! 

Let me back up. I typed that I was unable to call Khawaja but that's not true. I had changed my phone the day before while waiting to get my ticket to Osaka. Just a couple doors down (or more accurately, UP) from the travel agency is a phone shop. It's run by another Muslim. I don't know where these guys are from but they speak several languages. Korean, Hindi, English, and some others. Probably Russian in there too. I asked the phone guy about it and he says you have to live and deal with folks all day long who speak Korean. That's how he learned. I have never done that or, frankly, wanted to do that. Anyway, he gave me a cheaper phone plan with unlimited calling and data. Friggin' Sokcho crappy phone plan DONE! So in reality THIS was the one positive to come from the whole story.

But it's not over yet. While waiting for Khawaja to get outta church I called the airline to see if I could get a refund for my ticket. I got the erstwhile "Our operators value your call but they value doing nothing just a little bit more..." Then suddenly somebody answered! It was a girl who couldn't speak English. This is Korea. All the English helpline workers can't speak English. I can tell you that in the time I've been here this has gotten worse, not better. They used to at least make an effort. But Korea is becoming MORE protectionist and less global in their own country and they expect people to use their language when they are here. Even if you don't particularly love being here.

The girl told me she'd get an English speaker to call me back. I said, "Sure you will," and hung up. To my surprise - convenience! An English speaking lady called me back! So I explained my situation and actually we had a good laugh together about my shitty day and I DID include the birdshit story you better believe it! She was nice, but not nice enough to give me good news. She said I probably wouldn't get much back, but she wasn't sure because... you guessed it, I would have to talk to the ticket issuer. Is this the way airlines do business now? They relinquish all responsibility for their tickets to the people who sell them? And the people who sell them? Do they get the airlines' refunds if someone misses a flight? And they have a choice of whether to share it with the ticket purchaser or not? Is this how it works? It was getting close to 1 PM. That's when my return flight from Osaka to Seoul was due to take off. Would I forfeit the refund if I didn't locate Khawaja by then? Is THIS why he wasn't answering my calls?

I wandered around Itaewon. To tell the truth I was looking for a beer but nothing is open in the morning in Itaewon. Nothing with beer anyway. I had a coffee at Paris Baguette. I asked politely in Korean if they could put a little milk in it. THEY DID!

The day was looking up. I would have rather had a beer. I would rather have had cream too, but it was a good cup of coffee. I wasn't even halfway through when I got a text from Khawaja that said he was at the shop and I should go back again. But I finished that coffee before doing so. 

It was my 4th trip up the hill to the travel agency but I finally got the deal settled. I only got the taxes back. I don't know if this is Jeju Air's rule or Khawaja's rule. He said the two parts of the trip are considered one ticket so I couldn't get a refund for the return ticket. Again, his rule or Jeju's? I think maybe he pocketed some money for the refund even though I worked just as hard as he did, maybe harder. But, travel agents are not looking out for our convenience either. What could I do? 300 bucks down the shitter! 

By the time I had received my refund - my paltry, insignificant refund - it was past noon. It was too early for supper and STILL none of the pubs were open. It would have been DAMNED convenient to have a place to grab a beer at noon on THAT day let me tell you! But it was probably better that there wasn't, so with my tail between my legs, pissed off, shat on, and fully shitkicked by the world and the cult of inconvenience, I slouched home to Incheon. 

Stay tuned for part two.

First Hike of the Year

 Since early December the majority of my thoughts, efforts, writing, talking, texting, chatting, and stress have been about the whole work situation. Because it is not, as yet, resolved I STILL can't get into it in any detail here. 

Instead, I'll tell you about something I did today that was good. A few things. We'll start this year off on a bright note. I'll do what everybody says I should do: I'll say "Yay," though I walk through the valley of death. But I will fear no evil though I have no rod, staff, or shillelagh to comfort me. I shall hike and it may restoreth my soul. And lo (and high) I didst hike and it was good.  

I have been getting my steps every day since moving into my capsule abode, not just because I need to go out for food, but to keep my sugar down and my spirits up. I haven't hiked anywhere that would get me fresh air or allow me to commune with nature though. And, to be honest, no stairs, no grade, 6000 steps is a cinch. It hasn't really been challenging. Aside from getting me out of the hotel and giving me seen time instead of screen time, the walking has not done a world of good. I have seen a little bit of Incheon but a lot less than I'd like to because I've been so caught up in research, rules, and legalities. During one or two of my outings I noticed a little green on the GPS not far from where I am staying. Today after watching the US get knocked out of the World Jr. Hockey Tournament and watching the Canadian boys dispatch the Slovaks with aplomb, I decided to take a shower and then go for a better walk than usual. 

I almost walked right past it but found what was called Moonlight Park on Naver Maps. I know it 

doesn't look like much but that's what I wanted. I haven't hiked for a long time and it wasn't long before my body was screaming that at me. 

It was just a puny hill with some exercise equipment and I saw a few adults and a few kids playing on swings and exercising on equipment. It was pretty easy to tell that there was a path up one side of the hill that looped over to the other side and came back down again. The side I was on had stairs and as I am always saying, I said today with the whiniest tone I could get away with in public, "Stairs..." But luck was mine and there was a path right beside the stairs. I took that right up to the top. 

At the top I was confronted with my first choice of the day. If you had heard how I was wheezing, coughing, spitting, and sputtering all the way up the puny, little hill you might have suggested I turn around and go back down to the road where there is a hospital. St. Mary's Hospital I think it is. 

Truth be told I had expected to make it a lot farther before hitting the wall than a hill that had about 50 stairs. So although everything in my pudgy, soft, sedentary body was telling me to just pack it in before I cough up a lung or stroke out and die on a hill in Korea like so many of our fallen comrades, I pressed on. But this was no Heartbreak Ridge, this was no Pork Chop Hill, this was no Khe Sanh, Langdok, or Hill 364 where so many of Walter Sobchak's generation gave their lives to die face down in the muck, if this was skiing this wasn't even the bunny hill! I pressed on out of embarrassment not heroism. I chose not to loop back down and be done with it. I saw an opening in the fence and I went through it.

This was what awaited me. "Awwww stairs.... ;-(" I had to get to the top of these stairs without stopping because there was another hiker coming down and I didn't want his to see me stopping like a girl's blouse. I even held my breathing as much as I could as I passed acting like the hike wasn't destroying me like Anthony Joshua did to Jake Paul. My whole body was feeling like Jake Paul's jaw looked the next day. 

I almost felt like I was in prison or the military and I HAD to keep going or get KP or a longer sentence. Maybe it was the cheery barbed wire narrow enclosure. I dunno...

But eventually it DID open up and it started to look more like a hiking trail and less like a tour of Vietnam. 

Although Vietnam never gets this cold. Or has this type of foliage. Or Korean signage. Yeah, bad analogy. 

At any rate, if you notice, the hike leveled out too and I was able to catch my breath for the first time. This invigorated my aerobic ambitions and renewed my resolve. I kept plugging on.

It may sound like I'm well into this hike but I'm sure this was at like the thousand step point. I had a second decision to make. 

Although it has been a while I am an experienced hiker of the Korean hills and I pride myself on being able to follow the trail maps even if they don't have English and my Google Translate camera is not working.

Well, this map had no English and my Google Translate was not working. A lesser man might have turned around at this point being so close to where the hike had begun and almost (but not 100%) sure to find my way back the way I had come. 

But I read the word Byeongweon. That means hospital. It looked very much like I could keep going, get off the green where I was and onto the brown trail, go by the gazebo, then back onto the green trail and down to the hospital. That's pretty much where I started.

I soldiered on. The decision was not made lightly for you see there has seldom been a hiking trail, road, highway, track, subway tunnel, path, or any form of thoroughfare in Korea (in all of my experience) that ends up or comes out where you might expect it to. This could have meant for all the world that I was just making the half-way point farther away since I might have to just turn round and retrace my steps all the way back. Was I ready for that? Well, I actually felt like the worst was behind me. I had hit the wall, scaled it, and Humpty Dumptied down the other side without needing any of the King's men or horses to put me back together again. Nobody? Ever wonder what help the horses could have been putting a big egg back together? Just me? 

If you blow this pic WAAAY up you'll see a lady in full Korean hiking regalia like I described in a previous post. Even the guy in front of me had his fancy boots, pack, and titanium hiking stick. 

Another decision. Should I walk all the way up that graveyard hill or should I turn right where I think the hospital path is? Do I satisfy my curiosity or keep it simple? I bet I know what you think I did. But I was feeling the burn now. The rush of exercise that I hadn't felt since working out at the gym at the university I no longer work at. I also thought it might be a good view.

This was about half way up. It WAS, as it turned out, a good view. I can't tell you what those buildings are. I think the circular one is a coliseum where they take all the foreign workers who have disobeyed the Korean employers who ordered them to break Korean laws and make them fight lions, tigers, and ligers for the amusement of the ruling class. 

But I could be mistaken.

It was a 20% grade and I did it without stopping. Well except to take that picture above. But I wasn't breathing as hard as when I summited the bunny hill. So I was feeling proud. 

When I got to the top, this is what I saw. More graves. I don't know what I was expecting. 

Beyond the path continued and there were even more graves, but I looked back down the hill and saw something that made me turn around and go back down.

By golly it was the Gazebo!

20% downhill? It's a lot easier than 20% uphill.

So in no time I had reached the gazebo. 

Here's where I had to make another choice. Should I use some of the exercise equipment here and make this a full body workout?

There was bench press, curls, twists, sit-ups, pull-ups, flies, and of all things...

Yeah! This machine gives you all the exercise of hiking up a mountain without actually hiking up a mountain although you need to hike up an actual mountain to get that even better than the real thing feeling of the machine that makes you feel just like you are hiking up a mountain. 

It reminded me of those people who go to concerts and film the whole things on their phones looking at the phone screen version of the real thing they are capturing electronically. 

Maybe I should have just watched a few episodes of Hiking With Kevin Nealon. 

I left the gazebo area and immediately found another decision pole with three arrows on it, one of which had the word byengweon on it. I followed that trail.

It got thin and woody. Nobody else was on this trail. I started thinking that maybe this was a different hospital. Maybe it wasn't St. Mary's just down the road from my capsule hotel. Maybe I'd have to just turn around and go back.

Oh well, at least I was going downhill. 

This empty lot is where the trail came out. It was completely surrounded with fence. There were some signs in red that I couldn't understand and STILL Google Translate camera refused to translate for me. 

Luckily I found a hole in the fence and went out to the street.

This was the street. I just walked a little bit along this street and suddenly I saw the byeongweon. It was an angle I hadn't seen St. Mary from before but I was pretty sure it was her.

Before long I got to the main crossroad and saw an E-mart 24. It was the E-mart 24 at the end of my road! The one that's not open 24 hours but never mind. I had come off the mountain ON MY ROAD!

This NEVER happens! And I looked at my step count. Just below 7000. Pefectamundo!

So you can bet I'll be doing that hike again! 

The cherry on top was that I realized I had skipped lunch and I had been craving a sub with some soup for a while. There was a Subway right on the corner. I'd never noticed it before. 

But before I get too excited I noticed while buying my Italian cold cut combo that my alien card was missing from my wallet. I didn't panic because all my cards were there and so was the cash. Nobody would steal a person's alien card. I mean, unless they're lucky enough to look exactly like me.

I then remembered I had been to the pension office in Incheon the day before and the guy had kept my passport, bank book, and alien card. I had to ask him for them back just before leaving. I must have only got my passport and bank book back. So now I have to go back to that office on Monday. That's the kind of hiking I've been doing lately. It's not as healthy.

Hopefully they still have my card there. If not I could be in trouble. 

Tuesday I have a meeting in Gangneung during which I just might need that card. I have no doubt it will lead to some really great content for this blog too. 

Whether or not I'll be able to publish it remains to be seen...

As always, wish me luck.