Open Letter to Dominion (aka Metro)

Dear Dominion, who I'm not going to start calling Metro:

I know that the thing with charging five cents a bag is municipal by-law and your hands are tied. And while I do resent being inconvenienced even though I came up with a better solution, I get that it isn't your fault.

However, your pratice of having to ring in the number of bags before you ring in the groceries is ridiculous. I can't always tell how many bags I'm going to need just by looking at the groceries, and it's more important to have everything bagged well for the walk home than to save a nickel or two. I suck at 3D spatial estimation like that. Just bag my groceries, charge me for however many bags were used, and let me get on with life.

Update: I've taken to answering the question of how many bags do I want with "Whatever it takes." I'd recommend doing the same if you feel similarly.

Open Letter to GO Transit

Dear GO Transit:

As you know, on trains travelling westbound on the Lakeshore West line, not every car can disembark at Appleby station. You address this situation by reading out the numbers of the cars that aren't going to open their doors at Appleby and asking people in those cars to move towards the middle of the train .

These instructions are not helpful. First of all, not everyone who gets on a GO train knows where they are relative to the middle of the train. If the train was already on the platform when you got there and you walked out of the stairs directly onto a crowded and narrow platform, there isn't an opportunity to step back and take stock of the whole train. You just think "Oh good, I didn't miss the train."

Second, the order in which you read out the numbers of the non-Appleby cars gives the impression that people should move towards the back of the train. I can't articulate exactly why it does this, but there were three other people on the train - all competent adults and native speakers of English - who got this impression as well, and waiting for the train home I met two more who had had the same problem on their outbound train. We all found ourselves at the back of the backmost car, staring through the inter-car door at a locomotive, entirely uncertain whether we'd ever be able to get off this train. There then followed a frantic sprint back towards the front of the train, through four moving train cars (and some of us find walking between moving train cars kind of scary), me in dress up shoes that I didn't expect to be sprinting through a moving train in, entirely uncertain whether we'd a) ever make it in time and b) were even running in the right direction. We did make it, but if there had been luggage or reduced mobility or small children, someone would have been left behind.

The people most likely to misinterpret your instructions are those who don't travel that line or that station on a regular basis. These are also going to be the passengers least equipped to find their way if they end up getting off at the wrong station. You get it wrong for these people, you've stranded them somewhere completely unfamiliar and likely ruined their day (and interfered with the plans of whomever or whatever they were going out to a strange city for).

So what you need to do is:

1. Instruct these passengers to move towards the front (or, if applicable in other situations, towards the back) of the train even if their ultimate destination is the middle, giving them the number of the first safe car so they know when to stop. It's better to have people wandering a car or two past the middle in the right direction than to send them off even further in the wrong direction.

2. Read out the numbers of the non-Appleby cars in the opposite order of what you've been doing. Just do it. If six people that I encountered yesterday were confused by it, others will be too.

Sincerely,

The girl who now has blisters

Open Letter to "Need Help" in today's Dear Ellie column

From today's Dear Ellie:

I've been married for three years and am increasingly frustrated with my mother-in-law.

She has a gambling problem and often cannot pay her rent, or her basic bills. She has major health problems, yet smokes and is extremely overweight.

My husband and I help her financially when she needs it, but it's more difficult for us lately. I'd like to arrange an insurance policy for her, to help with the cost of her funeral expenses should she pass away. I feel that due to her careless lifestyle and health problems, she may not be around very long.

No other relatives are in a secure financial position to assist with final expenses. Or they'll refuse, since we're always bailing her out.

How do I bring this up to my husband? How do we talk to my mother-in-law about signing a policy for funeral coverage?

I cannot take one out on her without her knowledge. I feel my husband should be the one to talk to her. When I've mentioned this before, he got very angry and didn't want to discuss it. I'm just trying to avoid a disaster, not looking to make any money off her.

Need Help

First of all, broach the subject with your husband by talking about funeral planning/wishes for after death in general. Do your own wills and plan your own funerals if you haven't already. Bring up Baby Kaylee who was recently in the news to steer the conversation towards organ donation. Then once you're on that, ponder whether you know your own parents' wishes (aging parents, you know) and ask your husband if he knows his mother's wishes.

Then your husband can use the same technique to find out his mother's wishes.

Allow some time to pass and price her wishes to find out whether you can afford them. Then, at a calm and neutral moment, have your husband say to her "BTW, Mom, remember a while back you said you wanted to be buried in a solid gold tomb? Today I just happened to stumble upon how much that costs and there's no way I can make that work. Do you have insurance or pre-planning or anything?"

At this point she should either agree to insurance or take responsibility for pre-planning. And if she doesn't, she has been duly informed that her wishes cannot be fulfilled without some action on her part, so you're off the hook for not doing more than you can afford.

Open Letter to the City of Toronto recycling program

Dear recycling people:

Thank you for that very useful flier showing me, with pictures and detailed instructions, exactly what can and cannot be recycled. I didn't realize just how extensive our recycling program is (milk cartons! styrofoam!) so now I've put the flier up on my fridge and I'm recycling much better.

However, next time you make a flier, would you mind also including those recycling numbers that are sometimes found on plastic products? I can't figure out which category this plastic bag falls under. The manufacturer has very helpfully labelled the bag with a number 4 inside the recycling symbol, but I can't figure out which of the plastic categories on your chart that corresponds to.

P.S.: If you start collecting organics from my highrise building, you'll get like 90% diversion out of me. My building has a tri-sorter and everything, we're ready whenever you are.

Open Letter to the wife whose husband lost his religion

Dear lady who posted this on PostSecret:



Even if he does see the connection, he can't just start believing again. Yes, he could go through the motions, but he'd just be attempting to trick you and your god. He wouldn't actually believe in it. Religious faith is not something you can turn on and off on a whim; as you know from your own faith, you have to truly believe in it.

Think of it this way: could you truly stop believing in your god if you thought it would bring you luck to do so? Could you truly believe in, say, Allah or Ganesha or Athena or Gitche Manitou? You could go through the motions, sure, but would you actually believe in it?

Open Letter to my hair

Dear hair:

I will braid you for sleeping. That is non-negotiable. Your last-ditch attempts to look gorgeous and sexy when I'm getting ready for bed despite being limp and apathetic all day will not change this. So why not be gorgeous and sexy earlier in the day, then get limp and apathetic at night when you're about to be braided anyway?

Open Letters

Dear plasterer eating fruit on the subway:

If you're going to leave the pips on the train, at least drop them on the floor instead of leaving them on the seat next to you.

Dear mother of twins:

I see that you have two babies, most likely through no fault of your own, and I get that you need a stroller that can hold two babies. The problem is that your stroller is so wide that it doesn't leave enough room in the supermarket aisle for a shopping cart to pass. When the store is crowded like during evening rush hour, this messes up traffic flow in the whole entire store. When you are in an aisle, no one can get past you in either direction. You're going to have to either a) get a narrower stroller, perhaps one that has the kids one in front of another instead of side by side, or b) leave the kids at home or with a sitter while you do groceries, or c) go shopping during non-peak times. Seriously. I get that strollers and childcare are expensive and you have shitloads of things to do on very little sleep, but you're inconveniencing literally hundreds of people with that behemoth.

Dear Flash fetishists:

If you present the content of your website as image-based Flash only rather than as text, it won't get indexed by Google. This means that when the translator working on your annual report thinks "Surely all this shiny happy stuff about their history and mission and values has already been done in carefully-crafted English by their talented corporate communications people" and then goes googling to save herself some time and you some money, she will get zero hits. At this point she would be perfectly justified in translating it herself, which means you will be paying the translator to do what you've already paid your communications people to do, and the translator might (perfectly rightfully) make different choices along the way. However, if your translator is a stubborn little shit like me, she won't take zero google hits for an answer and will plow through your sea of flash until she finds the information in question. However, since your Flash is image-based instead of text-based and therefore can't be copy-pasted, you are still paying the translator's hourly rates to retype all this stuff when it could have been done in 30 seconds of copy-pasting. It's essentially advertising copy about how awesome your organization is, why not make it easy for people to find it and repeat it elsewhere?

Dear CBC, you're embarassing us

Dear CBC:

Yes, it is news that Barack Obama is visiting Ottawa. However, devoting literally 50% of your top-of-the-hour world news spot to that fact is kind of excessively fangirl. Be cool and do your job instead of going all asquee.

Sincerely,

Someone who learned that lesson in high school

Open Letter to all journalists writing about pay equity

Apparently there are parts of the recent federal budget that would be detrimental to pay equity for federal employees.

Problem: we don't know how pay equity for federal employees currently works.

I know one thing that a lot of commenters don't seem to know: it isn't individual, it's by profession. So it isn't that Jane catches a glimpse of John's paystub and sees that he's earning more than her even though they both went through the same university program and graduated at the same time and were hired at the same time. It's that female-dominated professions are not being paid the same as male-dominated professions who do work of equal value and difficulty that requires equal expertise. Apparently (this was told to me several years ago by someone who is in a position to know, so any inaccuracies are the fault of my misremembering or misunderstanding) what they do is they reduce the difficulty and skill and education and stress required to do every job in the federal public service down to a mathematical formula to quantify the value of the work, and then compare the female-dominated jobs with male-dominated jobs of equal value. If the female-dominated profession isn't being paid the same as the male-dominated profession, they increase the pay for everyone in the public service (male and female) that's doing that profession.

However, I don't understand what the current changes would do, because I don't know what's going on currently. I see media saying that the proposed changes would be detrimental, but I don't know why they're detrimental because I don't know what the current system is.

I don't like to just blindly take people's word for things, I want to understand them properly. If you give me all the information I'll probably be on your side, but if you don't give me all the information I can't form a proper opinion, and therefore am going to take no action and express no opinion because I'm insufficiently informed. Help me out here, okay?

My campaign promise

Dear Canadian politicians everywhere:

I have decided to walk the talk.

If you can create a situation where my employer is able to promise me that my job is safe, I will spend an extra $1000 in the next year. That's right, $1000 above and beyond what I would normally spend, and above and beyond my New Year's resolution. I will actively seek out things I would never have thought to buy otherwise.

What's more, I will spend all this money on Canadian-made, environmentally-friendly, ethical products, either that I can make good use of, or that the person I give them to as a gift can make good use of. If these products end up replacing any perfectly good items in my home, I will make sure the superceded items are donated to someone who can make good use of them. Nothing will end up in the landfill, nothing will go to waste. And, just to make everyone happy, I will buy them without using plastic bags (even though we all know that doesn't actually change my footprint).

You give me what I need from you to get through this crisis, I'll give you what you need from me to get through this crisis.

Open Letter to the Coalition

Dear Coalition:

You know that history-making resurgence of idealism and hope our neighbours got going on? You can make something similar happen up here. You're already talking a good game, all you gotta do now is walk the talk for a little while. You don't have to walk the talk forever, you might not even have to walk the talk for the timelines you set out today (although it would help if you did.) All you have to do is walk the talk for two consecutive quarters of economic growth. De-recessionize us, play at being grownups for a while, give everyone a chance to look good. Then, if you still miss the old ways, once everyone has had a chance to make any leadership changes they need to, you can allow an election to be triggered. I don't think we'll mind so much.

That's all you have to create hope and make history. It's really not that hard. You can do it!

The City of Toronto wants to ban biodegradable plastic bags!

According to today's Globe and Mail, the City of Toronto wants to ban biodegradable plastic bags. Let me repeat that: ban biodegradable plastic bags! You know, the kind that we really should be using for our garbage?

Here's my email to the mayor and my city councillor:

I was shocked to read in today's Globe and Mail that Toronto is thinking of banning biodegradable plastic bags.

As I'm sure you know, most plastic bags end up in the landfill because people use them as garbage bags, to line their trash cans or wrap their green bin waste or clean up after their pets. And, as I'm sure you know, environmentally optimal behaviour would be to use biodegradable garbage bags for this purpose.

Every time a retailer bags a consumer's purchase in a biodegradable plastic bag, they are making environmentally optimal behaviour literally effortless for the consumer. The consumer makes their purchase, gets it bagged as usual, uses the bag for garbage as usual, and that's one less plastic bag in the landfill. The consumer would have to go out of their way to be less environmentally friendly.

By banning biodegradable plastic bags, you would not only be making environmentally optimal behaviour more difficult by requiring consumers to a) purchase biodegradable garbage bags and b) carry reusable bags with them all day every time they might want to pick up a couple of things at the store after work, but you would also be making it ILLEGAL for retailers to show good corporate citizenship by simplifying environmentally optimal behaviour for their customers.

Please do not allow this ridiculous proposal to pass. The last thing you want to do is make environmentally friendly behaviour more difficult.

You know, I'm starting to get really frustrated with having to write to politicians about things that are so bloody obvious.

For the person googling for the definition of "stanaist"

"Stanaist" is a typo of Satanist. :)

Dear Google: You might want to add this to your autocorrect thingy.

Open Letter to Rogers

Dear Rogers:

If you're experiencing higher than usual volumes that mean it will take nine days for you to respond to my email, you might want to change your autoreply so it no longer promises me a response within 24 hours. A realistic timeframe would be nice, or just have the autoreply tell me you've received my email and it will be handled in the order received. I wouldn't be disgruntled at your response time if you hadn't promised me 24 hours.

That said, a reply saying nothing more than that my issue needs to be handled by phone is unacceptable. I sent email in the first place because I don't like the phone, so you need to give me a good reason why this has to be done by phone. It only takes like 30 seconds to do this. If that channel actually isn't part of my package, as my readers have worked out faster than you could, you can tell me that in an email. If it is part of my package but for whatever reason you can only activate it by phone, you need to tell me that in the email. Ideally you should put some note on my file so when (if) I call, the phone person will know right away why I'm calling and I don't have to go through the whole story again. (If you want to be really awesome, set up something so that people who have contacted you already by email only to find that they need to call get bumped to the front of the queue.)

In any case, waiting nine times the promised wait time only to be told I need to call is unacceptable. You could very easily do better.

Open Letter to the grocery store customer satisfaction survey people

Dear grocery store customer satisfaction survey:

If you're going to ask how much of my total household grocery spending is spent at your store and ask for a response in dollars, you also have to specify over what period of time.

Could Google possibly be listening to me???

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Google Blog Search should index blog entry contents only.

Now they do.

Dear Google, if you're listening, thank you and I love you! If you're interested, here is the rest of my wishlist:

1. Don't localize search results to the interface language, or at least give us the option to turn it off. (Example: compare the search results for éléphant in the English and French interfaces of google.ca.) Localizing to interface language makes life difficult for people who work multilingually, especially since you are accent-blind (which we love and adore and appreciate more than you can possibly imagine!)

2. Make iGoogle a separate thing rather than simply an alternate interface.

3. Let me mark messages as read from Gmail Notifier. I can see from the notifier that it's just the email telling me I've made an ebay bid. I don't need to read it, so I'd like to be able to make the notifier stop telling me I have a new email rather than having to go all the way to my inbox to mark the email as read.

Edit Nov. 12 6:30 p.m.: And now it's giving me results from tag clouds again. Dear Google: WTF?

Open Letter to lexicographers everywhere

Dear lexicographers, especially lexicographers of multilingual dictionaries:

You need to include profanity in your dictionaries. Why? Because if you don't, people looking up those words who honestly don't know what they mean aren't going to learn that they're profanity. If you don't know a language's profanity, it's very difficult to tell by googling whether it's profanity or just slang.

Helping non-native speakers catch these nuances before they make an ass of themselves is far more important than denying 12-year-olds an opportunity to giggle.

And please, whatever you do, don't put the literal meaning of the word but fail to mention that it also has a profane meaning! Unless, like, you want people walking around the dog park going "Hi you little bitch!"

Open letter to everyone who thinks profanity is uncreative

If you think profanity is uncreative, I want you to sit down and translate a court transcript of a case that involved profanity-filled threats being uttered by two very angry people, where every nuance must be properly captured to ensure that justice is served.

You find yourself walking around having conversations like this:

"So is this one like asshole?"
"Stronger than asshole"
"Piece of shit? No, I used that one earlier...fuckwit? cocksucker?"
"More than fuckwit, I think. You don't really want to use cocksucker because there are no homophobic connotations in the original."
"More than fuckwit...dickhead?"
"Is dickhead more than fuckwit?"
"I'm not sure...dickwad? Is that in common enough use?"

Open Letter to the three ladies speaking sign language on the TTC southbound at Lawrence around 6:20 p.m.

Mesdames,

I did see you all there signing at each other (don't worry, I wasn't eavesdropping - I don't understand it well enough), I did hear the announcement on the speaker, I did realize you probably couldn't hear the announcement and would probably need someone to explain it to you, and I was going to go and try to help even though all I have is finger-spelling. But I got swept up in the tide of people leaving the subway, and by the time I was able to stop I couldn't see you anywhere. I'm sorry for not helping you and I really hope you all got where you were going all right.

Sincerely,

The girl who kept foolishly gawking at your sign language like she's never seen sign language before.

John Fluevog broke my heart

See these babies?

They're on sale for like 65% off.

They had them in stock.

They had them in a size 11.

And they were too narrow.

That was the first time in my entire life that a pair of shoes has been too narrow.

I have freakshow skinny feet. All my shoes need to be horizontally adjustable, or they fall right off. I can't wear regular pumps without straps because they fall right off. I can't wear flipflops because they fall right off. And yet these awesome purple shoes were too narrow.

Dear Mr. Fluevog:

I do see that you are incredibly epically cool, and therefore might not want to make shoes that just anyone can wear because that seems to be what the cool people do. But even if you don't want them to fit commoners with normal-width feet, perhaps you could consider making them at least fit people with freakshow skinny feet? Or is this all some conspiracy to torment the proles, teasing us with promises of awesome purple in large sizes at justifiable prices only to tear it all away?