Brenda Schultz: The Challenge and the Progress

      I have posted about Brenda before.  Her accident occurred a year ago today. she has written a very powerful post telling about all aspects of the past year.
 
     Please follow the link and read her post.

More Bureaucracy and Age

     I have mentioned in several posts that I spent five years in the Arctic as a teacher. At one very isolated settlement I was teacher, principal and Local Administrator. To say the least, I was a very busy boy. I had a mechanic and caretaker to supervise as they ran a little diesel power plant. I looked after everything that pertained to government business in that settlement. It was very interesting but very much work. 

    Two of the problems I spent time on dealt with age. The Dept. in Ottawa, that looked after family allowance, kept asking me if I knew were one certain child was. I would go to the family and ask them, "Where is this child? " They would get a very puzzled look on their faces and say they didn't know what I was talking about.    Three months later I would get another letter and ask the family again. This went on for about a year. One time I had their eldest son as an interpreter. Lukasi was a very good interpreter. They began talking among themselves and finally Lukasi told me that it was a baby that died out on one of the islands when they were  hunting. Somehow the death had not been reported in the community by one of my predecessors. The person may not have ever known of such a child as there were changes in staff. However, someone in the upper bureaucracy knew that the child was missing and pursued it until they got an answer. The family were a little disappointed as the money they had been paid for the deceased child would have to be taken back.

    So my point is that some bureaucrat did his/her job in spite of the difficulties of distance and language.

    The other problem was much simpler and resulted in getting money. A local lady had applied for old age pension. She had been born in the days when very little government operations were present so she didn't have a birth certificate. How was she going to prove her age? It was simple. Her daughter was getting old age pension! End of story. She got her old age pension. 

    These were two of the situations that I had to solve while I was there. It was interesting but I didn't have an awful lot of time to work on it.

Bureaucrats Get a Bad Rap

       I got some rather interesting comments on the post I did about my Dad and his birth not being recorded. He did not feel any displeasure with bureaucrats. In fact, he thought it was  pretty funny. He particularly liked the line , "Mr Kline we have never heard of you."  In my post I was not upset with bureaucrats as this happened a long time ago when all records were kept by hand. Most readers and commenters could see that the best was done at that time. 

      Some of the comments seemed to hint at bureaucrats being the cause of such a problem and they were. However, one bad apple does not mean that all the others are bad apples. Most govt. workers work hard and do what they are supposed to. 

     I have had some direct experience with this issue as when I taught in the north I was a civil servant. I had to take an oath of some kind which all Govt. employees had to take. Now some employees were a waste of time but not very many. It was easy to pick out who pulled their weight and who didn't. Many went above and beyond what they had to do to get the job done. In my experience I found that information was lacking due to people filling in information incorrectly or incomplete.

     I also know that many private companies have their dead wood employees too and in a way they are protected by company bureaucrats. My daughter worked for a large oil company and was amazed at how politics were played out. 

     So my main point is that we should not judge all bureaucrats by just one who messes up on the job. It's like racism where we label a whole group by what we see one or a few doing and so label all the others as having that fault. We have to put the responsibility where it belongs and that only belongs to the one with those negative characteristics and behavior. 

    I suppose I have a fault that I root for the underdog and don't like to see people unfairly treated. I would also hope that I respond in a clear fair manner when I comment on ideas presented in my blog comments. To me comments are always interesting and make me think about my post.

Tomorrow Dad Would Be 100 Years Old

      My Dad was born August 31,1912 and died Feb. 8, 2008. So he was a little over 95 when he died. He was a large strong healthy man but Parkinson's took its toll towards the end of his life.

Dad with some of his grandchildren and great grandchildren. Parkinson's had taken away all facial expression.

     A couple of funny things happened with Dad's age throughout his life. I have to work backwards on this one.

      When Dad turned 65 he very proudly applied for his old age pension. The government department wrote him back and said , "Mr. Kline, we have never heard of you." This really shocked my Dad. His birth had been registered . He'd gotten married and he paid income tax from the time he started earning money. 

     So you don't argue with  the government. He found the necessary documents to prove how old he was. He found an old school register which had his date of birth. He found his baptismal certificate and something else that proved he was born in Canada on Aug. 31,1912. In due time he received his pension.

     Now Dad thought that his Dad had forgotten to register him at the local office. He thought his Dad was busy with harvesting and just forgot.

     In 1939 when WWW II started most young men in Canada received a form letter inviting them to join the armed forces. Dad never got  a letter and when the pension issue occurred he just thought that since the govt. didn't know he existed they didn't send him a letter inviting him to join the armed forces.

     When Dad told me his story I came across some information on the registration of births , deaths and marriages in Saskatchewan in 1912. Apparently all marriages and deaths were recorded accurately. Some how the births were not recorded for two years. So this is why the Govt. did not know that Mr Kline  existed. It was the government's fault. It wasn't because Grandpa forgot to register him.

Bike Lanes

    Our small city (100 000) has just set up a major system of bike lanes. So bike lanes are a system which puts in a special part of the road for bicycles. Various forms of bike lanes are set up in many cities.

Start of a bike lane

    The purpose of bike lanes is to allow people to ride downtown to their work. The idea is to get people to exercise more and to cut down on the number of cars polluting the atmosphere. They would also like to save some money on roads because with less cars there would be less upkeep for roads. With less vehicles there could be fewer big roads needed.

Typical bike lane

    There was some discussion about the bike lanes. Avid cyclists were involved in setting up the system. I paid some attention but not much because I don't intend to use bike lanes. I use bike trails which take you from one park location to another.

    When the city actually started painting the lines on the roads many people said, "Whoa! Wait a minute! What's going on here?" 

    Major traffic changes were taking place. Four lane roads were becoming two lane roads. Bike lanes started and ended no where. Some bike lanes were on the left of parked cars and squeezed in beside the traffic. Most of the bike lanes are one meter wide. Some bike lanes were put in rather puzzling places. My question is what happens in the winter when snow and ice cover most of the lane markers?  People do ride bikes in the winter with the new technology .

    So I wish I had paid more attention to the bike lane proposals. I want to see more safety and space for bikes. On the other hand vehicle traffic seems to be altered so that it may create traffic jams. 

    We will just have to wait and see how things turn out. There are many cities with a similar system that works well. I hope ours works well.

Technology Sometimes Tricks You.

     Three years ago we bought a fancy schmancy top load clothes washer. We had mixed feelings about the purchase as the previous washer was bought in 1970 so lasted almost 40 years. We are some what technically challenged so you want to keep it simple.

     We read the manual very carefully and got comfortable with the new machine. It was a water saver and supposed to clean clothes better with less wear and tear on the clothes. It did these things.

    One thing my wife washed once a year was all winter jackets. This was highly successful in the two previous years. Now I'm going to remind you that she has read the manual over and over again. This year she thought there was something different. The amber lights on the options did not come on. She checked the book and sure enough there is a diagram showing that amber lights should come on. She was puzzled as she couldn't remember clearly from the last year. She tried to set the washer and it wouldn't go. She read the manual again and found the same thing. 

     So it's it's under warranty and she phoned the company. She told them the problem and they read the book and they said , "Yes, the circuit board is shot."  They would call a repairman to replace the circuit board. 

    Today the technician arrived. He checked the washer. He said I don't think there are amber lights at all and he explained the process. However, he said I have the part so let's put it in and see what happens. Of course, you guessed it , "No amber lights with the new circuit board. "

    What my wife found is that there were two completely different sets of instructions in two different places in the manual. Therefore she was right to look for amber lights even though there weren't any. She was also correct in starting the machine by the instructions and it wouldn't go.

    So maybe it wasn't technology that did the trick to us but it sure fooled the people who wrote the manual.

    We were a little embarrassed when we called a technician and there was nothing wrong. The technician could see how we got into the problem and was not at all perturbed that he had been called.

   Our manual has now been corrected so that mix up doesn't happen again.. 

I Think the Birch Will Win.

       I made a rather rash post a little while ago. I described taking down my birch tree and that my wife had asked that the stump be left long. She wanted to do something with the stump which I thought was carving. Now I had the sneaking suspicion that I would be ordered to do the job. I know that my talent in this area is completely lacking.

The stump was a meter and a half or five feet.

      The first thing I was requested to do is trim the top of the stump in a vee shape. Now chain saws are not at all precise ...especially in my hands. That worked out not too badly and after 4 hours of sanding it looks pretty good.

Not bad for angle but a little rough.

      The next request was to peel the bark off at the top of the stump. Where I started taking off bark I had a surprise as the bark did not come off like it was supposed to. I found out that over half of the tree was dead at that level. Where the tree was living , the bark pealed off nicely.

Peeling the bark took some time.

    Now when I got the bark off and looked I found a surprise. There was a face that had been hiding under the bark for about 40 years. What luck! Maybe I won't have to carve it after all. 

Now I swear that I see a face. Too bad I took the guy's fore head off.

   I showed the face to my wife but she wasn't impressed. Now I found out that her idea was to paint the outline of a house on the stump. I had to sand  the side of the stump as some of the bark had stayed on. Then she prepared a stencil and put it on the tree and said, "Paint this." She gave me brown paint. After some very careful painting when I looked up and the thing was a total disaster. I called my wife to look at the output and she was disappointed too. 

    So I think the birch won on this go round. I might have to crawl on my hands and knees to my friend Bob or maybe talk to Far Side about this project!