They wanted your banking information yet you are a retail shopper.  American big box comes to Canada and thinks by tying your discount to your banking information they think they’ll turn you into a customer life.  Well, it’s all back fired for them and their paternalistic marketing ploy has been handed back to them on a silver platter.  Now they think they can still get you back by granting you one month of free credit monitoring because of their security breech.  What are you to think now?  I suppose if you haven’t closed your account by now you’ll take them up on it because you’ll have no control of ever gaining confidence that your information has been adequately destroyed and not disseminated.  However; if you have closed your account – in order for them to offer the credit monitoring service, won’t they be looking for more confidential data from you so they can fulfill this one year free service.  It’s all preposterous to me. 

Imagine all the retrofits across Canadian malls to accommodate this big box and now they’re potentially faced with consumer back lash.  We wanted big box and best price.  What we got has been poor service, bad management, parking gridlock at malls and shopping cart congestion. We put many aspiring business retail entrepreneurs into the driver’s seat of a taxi cab or the kitchen of a fast food joint and in the process produced a banal shopping environment whereby once it used to provide fuel for diversity and cultural distinctiveness. 

If fifty-five to sixty hours per week at work is becoming the norm as Mr. Luke suggests in his article “Longer hours, more stress:  The New Reality in the Canadian Workplace”, it’s time to really examine how this has come about.  There has been no time in history where we’ve had such tremendous access to new affordable technological tools to aid in productivity and efficiency – yet the work week grows.  I ask whose fault is it? Is it a fault?  Perhaps you prefer 60 hours over 40 and absenteeism from your cruise vacation, kid’s concert, second language development, ski trip to Panorama, child school tutoring, reading club commitment, pursuit in volunteerism, guitar class, Seahawks run for the Super Bowl (so excited this year),  is totally okay when making lifestyle compromises for the boss you love so much. 

I suggest if these are the hours you are working it’s because you are operating inefficiently at work or you have not learned to go home for dinner because of a sense of paranoia about what the boss will think.  I was lucky enough to learn in my mid twenties that no matter how much you give, they will ask for more and that “loyalty” in the work place is never reciprocated in a recession when suddenly the pink slips start to circulate.  All’s you can do is all you can do and this means offering helpful suggestions to management on how to work more effectively.  When advice from the production goes unheeded, there are consequences.  Should those consequences be your daughter on stage at recital without daddy in the audience? 

Your employer expects you to respond to a text at 7pm because you did it once before.  Now they know they can get away with disturbing your private time.  Your boss came to learn that you jump when that phone beep goes off at whatever time of the day.  Now in fact you even jump when walking through a cross walk.  It’s hard to blame the employer when folks have so readily compromised their personal autonomy.  Not you though, right?  

USA Today reports that there are now three job seekers for every job opening but with this moderately competitive market and very realistic opportunity to find work within 26 weeks for the unemployed, apparently some still think 26 weeks is not enough.  Since the recession of 2008 particular states offered workers up to 99 weeks to find a job.  If the unemployed cannot find a job, can they not find someone’s windows to wash?  Can the unemployed not find someone’s house to clean?  Can the unemployed not sell the house and take work serving coffee?  Can the unemployed not pick cotton, shovel snow, sell Avon, or perform a temporary project?  Can the unemployed not deliver flyers, drive a school bus or paint the neighbors kitchen?  If unemployed, somewhere along the line somebody did not want you, need you, or you did not want them.  Can you not go out and prove to a community you are deserving of work by working?  The American dream is premised by individual liberty and the rights of the individual to contract for services so why is it that this right is left open ended in lost opportunity? Perhaps your idiotic school system forgot to teach capitalism. 

Could Mitt Romney have been right during the election campaign of 2012 when stating “there are 47 percent who are with him (Obama), who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”  At the time I didn’t subscribe to Romney’s cynicism but I’m having second thoughts.  This endless bantering about extending unemployment benefits is just one more reason why responsible people are left frustrated by the madness in Washington and the climate which continues to perpetuate dependence at a time when debts and deficits are gargantuan, the financial system is in peril, and creditor nations loom like hawks awaiting America’s default.     

My loving parents bought me skis when in 8th grade.  The brand name was Torino and couldn’t wait to try them out on the new snow at the side of our modest duplex on the Sahali hill in Kamloops.  Just to feel gravity work on this new equipment was thrill in itself never mind the absence of a lift or adequate stopping distance before traffic.  It was silly but fun on the most moderate of gradient amidst the ambience of a new winter, low cloud cover and dusk which had Christmas lights starting to glimmer in the background.

It was this memory that I’ve taken an “embrace winter” attitude coming into this ski season.  Throughout the fall, I’ve schemed about purchasing X Country skis, acquiring waxing tips on youtube while gradually acquiring the necessary tools via educational shopping trips to the local mountaineering shop to ensure that the glide and grip match snow conditions.  Tonight it really all came together on my third venture out to my back yard.  Yes….my back yard similar to my venture as a budding teen.  My current back yard has a school ground and very large uninhabited park where nobody goes – not even dogs.  When the snows not great, I can head over to the rink and skate which the city already at this early stage in winter has flooded.  The timing for the “embrace winter” attitude could not have come at a better time with snowfall really outperforming accumulations of past years.  Laying down the tracks simply requires some patience and voila the path is set.  Bring a friend and put on the head lamp for some night time cardio on your home made trails in the fresh air and limit those pesky germs in gyms.