Nicaragua

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The only thing you assume at my company, is the sale.



I called my boss on Friday to see how big a class I would probably have today, and she said things had changed again, and she had big news for me Monday.



So I got in, and she made me wait until late in the morning, even going so far as to make me go downstairs and get her an iced cappucino from Tim's before she would spill (no hardship, I am on record as saying I would walk on water for her).



It turns out that my company is about the enter the big wide world of "nearshoring", or outsourcing a very small portion of our calling activites to...Nicaragua.



And of course, we will need someone to train all the new reps in Nicaragua....I think you see where this is going.



So I am getting audio books on how to speak spanish for my IPod, and have reserved Lonely Planet Nicaragua/Costa Rica from the library. We will see how it goes.



I will be trying to pack a 6-7 day training program into 5 days (their training program is supposed to be 3 weeks, but my boss knew better than to even ask), along with a good understanding of American Culture, as seen from an outsider's point of view.



Of course, what got me the trip was my experience training teams in Manilla and Mumbai.

'You realize that was over the phone," I asked my boss.

"It still counts."



So I get a nice fat CV, although my company, because it is a US company, doesn't give references, but it will look good nonetheless. It's all grist for the mill, until my pet project pans out.



I'll send lots of love and kisses from Managua.



Oh, and don't worry, the civil war ended two decades ago! It is actually one of the two safest countries in central america (according to the economist).

It has begun...
In the last few days, a new sound has begun to ring out throughout the Allen household...

No, it's not Isaac asking Auntie Sib to read him the horribly establishmentarian Richard Scarry book for the umpteenth time...

It's what we call in the sales training business: Open ended questions.

Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

With the most popular being "Why?"

Questions for the last three days have been, well, constant.

Years ago I babysat a little girl who lived three doors down, and one night I went over to watch her for the evening, and her mom and dad (Roxanne and Rick, as I recall) said, "Oh, she's full of questions tonight."

I distinctly remember every sentance out of her mouth starting with why, and my answers just leading to even more why questions.

I also remember that by the end of the night, I needed a good stiff drink, which for my 12-13 year old self was probably Lemonade.

So I know what's coming. I know the questions are going to start going from morning to night, with every answer just prompting more questions...We're bracing for it.

But today I managed to stump him twice.
"Why is Auntie Sib taking a shower?"
"Why not?"
No reply, and he changed the subject, that was promising.

"What colour are the grapes?"
"What colour do you think they are?"
"Greeeeeeeen." with a big grin. But no follow up questions. I was waiting for "why are they green?" and then having to explain photosynthesis. I think he's ready for it.
That's the most frustrating part, though. Most of the questions he knows the answers to, he just likes making Mommy and Daddy do his bidding by answering them all the time.

The key will be to indentify the questions he really doesn't know the answer to, and answer so thoroughly that there will be no need for a follow up question...

Which brings me to coming into the living room the other evening, and hearing Sib say "...and there are hundreds and hundreds of neurons in there, and they all go zap zap zap and fire at once, and the energy bounces around..." rubbing his head vigorously here..."...and that's how we become conscious."

"Your teaching my son Neurochemistry?" I ask in disbelief.
"No," she replies. "Metaphysics. For some reason I was explaining the seat of consciousness. I'm not really sure how we got on the subject."

This led me to two observations.
1. They key to stemming the flow of questions is to absolutely baffle him with the answer, and
2. Even so, he won't stay baffled for long. As he processes it slowly over the course of the next few weeks, the follow up questions will come. Unfortunately, I think I know what's going to happen. He's going to be at the Day Home, and look up at Laura and say "La-la. Are my neurons firing?"

And after she has picked her jaw up off the floor, she will have to say, "Yes, Isaac. Constantly."

The Bronx Cheer
So I reported a while ago that Sam had taken up Shouting as his preferred method of communication.

Well, apparently he's working his way through the entire human Phoneme library, because now he is on to what What to Expect in the First Year euphemistically refers to as "...a wet, razzing sound."

Yes, Sam has mastered the Bronx Cheer.

He has not, however, mastered timing. So he does it all the time. Kind of like he was with shouting.

He'll be lying down, minding his own business, hosing down his stuffed elephant, his big triangle 'developmental toy' (you know, the ones that are supposed to make kids smarter, but probably contain tons of Bisphenol A), or the cat.

So you pick him up, and he continues his little trombone recital on your shirt, or if you're mommy, into your hair.

Speaking of spraying mommy, the most inopportune moment came the other night when Noelle placed a fairly large serving of the very popular brown rice pablum into his mouth - which he responded to with a noise of joy and happiness. Which sounded alot like "PBBBLLLPPBPBLT!"

Result? 'Pablum on shirt'. 'Pablum on face'. 'Pablum on Glasses'. And 'Dad who should have been on Oxygen' he was laughing so hard. We managed to avoid 'Dad on couch for the night' as it was so funny, Noelle had to laugh too.

Isaac, on the other hand, is mastering increasingly complex phonemes.

The other day in the car, Isaac was in the back seat, but really he was in his own little world. "And then I'll get in the ambulance, and I'll go and rescue Diego, because he's stuck in the mud. And I'll help the sick and injured people because I'm an emergency medical technician."

I didnt' know what to say. He learned the terms from a Tonka book about various emergency and construction vehicles he has, but I didn't think it would stick. Or at least if it did, he would go with EMT, rather than Emergency Medical Technician. Oh well.

Finally, my favorite trick right now is to ask Isaac, "Are you a silly monkey?" At which point he will look coyly to one side and reply "No, I'm a funky monkey."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Things that made me laugh today
1. I went to the post office this evening to mail Jess's present (yes, it will be late), and popped next door to Fortinos, the big grocery chain here in Hamilton.

I love shopping at the closest Fortino's to MacMaster University late on a Monday night, 10 minutes to closing to be exact. It's not just the sorority sisters saying things like "We'll just buy our food together and share it"not knowing that three months from now they'll be saying "If that bitch finishes my mustard and doesn't replace it one more time, I'm going to use her lung fluid as a condiment", it's more the 275 lb 6'6" linebacker dude who was wandering around the store like he had just had a lobotomy, carrying:
1 1 litre container of skim milk, and
1 oh....say.... 6lb or so bag of bulk smarties.
Can you say, Munchies? And when a guy that big gets the munchies, it means trouble to the local candy population.

2. I was watching Monday night football tonight, because I am tired of watching my two favorite teams, the Stamps and the TiCats get their asses whipped, week in and week out, so I thought I would watch my 'heart team', the San Francisco 49'ers, get their asses whipped.

I say Heart team, because that's the only NFL team I can really be expected to a) care at all about, and b) cheer for year in and year out, not matter how badly they stink. Which for the last half a decade or so, has been at an advanced level of ripeness.

They are, in fact my heart team, because one of my fondest memories of growing up an Allen, was watching SuperBowl 16 (the last interesting one) where Joe Montana, with about 4 minutes to go in the game, systematically dismantled the Cincinati Bengal's defence to win the game. It was a great game, and I felt like I was starting to really understand football for the first time, and in a funny way, I was starting to understand my Dad too, and really bond with him, not so much Big Adult to little boy, but more as two guys jumping up and down on the sofa and screaming at the TV. Of course, I was all of, what, 10 or so? But it is a great memory nonetheless.

So, during the halftime show (which I should mention was on ESPN), the commentator shows a very firmly thrown, and accurate pass by the San Fran quarterback, and says, and I quote, and I wish I was making this up:
"He really knows how to hurl that spheroid."

It was so obviously stupid, that the other colour comentator, started teasing him.

And that, my friends, is the problem with the NFL, and indeed with pretty much the entire American sporting-industrial complex. It just takes itself too damned seriously.

3. While flicking channels, because, hey, I'm a guy: I saw an ad for a Green Tea infused fingernail strengthener for women who have trouble growing their nails. It in fact came with an iron clad guarantee. "Longer nails in 5 days, guaranteed."

What they fail to mention is that you could get the same results sitting on the couch watching Oprah reruns and drinking Cosmopolitans, or sitting as a juror through a long and complex corporate fraud trial, or eating your body weight in ants. The list is endless, and includes pretty much every activity you can think of...yes, even that one...except for "trimming your nails". The only other forbidded activity would be "biting your nails." And of course "hitting the ends of your fingers with a ball pein hammer." Which of course wouldn't make sense at all, unless you were Gordon O'Connor's press secretary trying dull the pain of what was going to happen tomorow, when your boss's boss, the erstwhile Prime Minister, hung yet another cabinet minister out to dry.

But I digress.

So those things made me laugh today. For those of you wondering, Isaac was really good today. Sam just cooed alot.

Just a quick survey - How many of you wanted to be Solid Gold dancers when your grew up? Reply to comments please.

Cutometer
So, Noelle and Isaac and Sam and I are at the table the other night, and Isaac starts singing 'Scarborough Fair'. Not a normal song for a two year old, I'm impressed.

Then he starts on the second verse. Now I'm really impressed.

"Have her make me a cambric shirt.
Parsley sage, rosemary and thyme..."

Last night I ask Noelle, "Do you think Isaac has any idea what Cambric is?"
"Be serious," she replies. "Do you even know what it is?"
"I was hoping he could tell me."

So now we have a casette recording of Isaac singing Scarborough fair, Frere Jacques (in french), and a few lines from the Beatles "All Together Now."

In fact, last night, I was playing with a little south american looking frog shaped noise maker, and he brought in his tambourine, and started hammering it with chopsticks singing,
"On, two three four, can I have a little more?
Doot, de doot, Sail the ship!
Doot, de doot, Chop the tree,
Doot do doot, Skip the rope,
Doot do doot, look at meeeeeee"
Dragging the 'Me' out way longer than neccessary.
"All together now, all together now!"

That my friends, is the height of cute.

So now Sam is on solid food. Well, if you count brown rice mush as 'solid'. He loves it. In fact, we seem to have totally reset his feeding clock, so that now he doesn't want his 6:00 bottle, he wants mush, and lots of it, and he wants it now.

So he sits in his high chair, with a huge grin on his face, and his arms spread over the side, and his mouth open, waiting to be fed. Yes, he fancies his grub.

Have I mentioned that he is in the 95th percentile for weight, and the...um....er....75th for height?

Yes, he's a chunky monkey.

To the point that in the store when Isaac and I were buying freezies the other day, a little girl looks at him in his stroller, and says, "That's a fat baby!"
I think her mom was a little floored, but I was just a little offended. I think of him as more rubanesque.

Also, speaking of people commenting randomly on my kids, a woman comes up in the previously mentioned Denningers (our Saturday morning donut and yogurt drink stop), and says,
"Is he normally this good, or is he on his best behaviour?"
"No, he's normally pretty good," I reply.
"You must be doing something right."

So that felt good, but to be honest, Isaac was on his best behaviour. When I was away, Isaac had a pretty major meltdown on Friday morning, and was told that he wouldn't be getting the toy I brought back for him from Jersey. I then got home, and showed him the Caterpiller Backhoe, and the noises and lights it made, and told him he had to be good until Sunday afternoon in order to get it.

Bribery is a wonderful tool, and I know I'm not the only one to use it. In fact, I seem to recall a certain cousin who was paying her son a loonie for every night he slept in his own bed.

So I don't feel that bad about it.

We apologize for the incovenience
So, this week, I had what definitely counts as my worst experience flying.
On the flight to the head office in New Jersey, on Wednesday morning, I got to the airport a full two and a quarter hours before my plane was to leave. When I got to the customs preclearance at Pearson, and the lineup was 8 bends deep to the back wall, I knew right then and there it was going to be a long day.

Little did I know.

It turns out, that the computers were down. So they now had three line ups going at the same time. The normal lineup, for those of us who were curteous enough to show up in a reasonable amount of time.

The semi-emergency line, for people who were not quite as curteous, and were somewhat in danger of missing their flights.

Then, there was the super emergency line, of people they pulled out of the other two lines who's planes were practically taxiing down the runway, and they were going to have to rush them there in a ground crew vehicle.

To my credit, I stayed in the normal (read slowest) line until the very end. Until, in fact, nearly 20 minutes after my plane was supposed to have left, thinking, "there's one every hour, I'll just catch the next one."

So finally I snap, and put myself into the super emergency line when nobody's looking, and at that point they get the computers working, and open more than just four screening booths. So I get to security, and I'm taking off my four or five pounds of electrical gear, change, and belts, and I hear,
"This is the last call for Pasengers Blah blah, blah blah, and Allen, on flight 117 from gate 170. Please report to the podium immediately."
I look at the security guy, and say "Can you radio them or something and tell them I'm coming?" He looks at me like I just asked him to extrapolate Pi to 1000 places.

So I manage to avoid having to turn me laptop on, and get to the board where they indicate the gate, yup, it's gat 170. How far can that be? I'll tell you. About one and a half football fields. Canadian football fields. If it hadn't been for the people movers, I would have had a stroke. You have never seen anybody move so fast in leather soled dress shoes in your life.

Then I get to the gate, and the person says "Oh, it's ok, the plane's not leaving for another 10 minutes or so."

Completely spent, I find my seat on the plane, and guess what? The problems with the customs computers have sent the whole airport into a tailspin. Now because all the flights are leaving at the wrong time, the groundcrews are all scattered. So we sit on the tarmack for another hour and a half or so. Did I mention I had already spent two hours in the customs line up? No, I don't think I did.

So coming back, I'm thinking it must be better than going down.

Foolish, foolish boy.

So going back, I get to the airport, again two hours early at - yup, the single worst airport in the country. LaGuardia in New York. So I'm sitting there, and the departure lounge is buzzing, and most of the people there are using the WiFI hotspot to check the actual departure times because the screens at LaGuardia are so famously inaccurate.

Then they announce the cancellation of the Ottawa flight, and there is much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

Then they delay my flight by another hour and a half. I go get a magazine. I'm enjoying reading said magazine, when they announce that my flight, and the flight after it to Toronto, have both been cancelled.

So I get in the line to reschedule, wondering what my chances are of getting home that night, and realize, if I don't get someone at the Head Office to book me a hotel room now, I'm screwed. So a lovely young lady agrees to hold my spot in the line, and I manage through a three way call to the toll free # in Canaada to get a hotel lined up. So I've got my back up plan.

Then I get to the podium, and I'm still hopefull. Until she tells me there are only three more flights out that night, all of them are oversold, and the standby list for the second one - the second, not the first, is 114 people deep.

I head off to the Holiday Inn Hasbrouck Heights (see earlier posts for a description of that place), and prepare to try my luck in the morning.

Sooooo to make an increasingly long story a little shorter, I arrived at home this afternoon, a full 6 hours after I left my hotel. Keep in mind it's a one hour flight. One hour in the air, I guess they don't count the two more hours on the tarmac.

The burn to all of this, is that for me to drive there, is about 8 hours door to door. Next time, I'm renting a car.

Which leads me to the point of this whole sordid story. That's the magical phrase, "we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you."

There is a canadian author who's name escapes me, who has written a book with a title somewhat along the lines of "Your call is important to us, and other Bullshit companies tell us."

Just the phrase, 'We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you."

Inconvenience? Well, that's one way to put it - if you describe costing my company about another $400 in travel expenses for me, while I sat awake most of the night wondering how Noelle was going to get on with the boys on her own for another day, when it turned out that that day was the one that Isaac thought it would be good to assert his independance, and got two time outs - in his room no less - and cost himself the toy I had brought him back from Jersey (at least for two more days, we're not that mean), while Sam spent the entire day fussing from the immunization he had gotten the day before - as an inconvenience, well, yes, I guess that would be what you would call it.

Kind of the same way that the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island meltdowns were "Incidents", or the Korean War was a "Police Action." Yes, I would say it was an inconvenience.

And they whole "may have caused you." That drives me nuts. Who would NOT be inconvenienced (measured, as it may be on the richter scale) by having to sit on the runway for nearly two hours, to say nothing of having had their flight the night before cancelled.

How about "We apoligize for the utter bollocksing this is going to be to your plans." Or perhaps way more accurately, "We apoligize for taking you the customer completely for granted, but then, I guess we kind of have you by the short and curlies, here, don't we? So sit tight, and we'll figure it out as soon as there is anything even resembling competition on this route, at which point we'll start feeding you, being on time, and just generally treating you like a human being, rather than a really inconvenient breed of cattle, just like we used to do in the old days."

As Herr Brudermann is fond of saying, "I'm not commonly known as a bitter man..."
'nuff said.

S.A.M. production to exceed even I.S.A.A.C. levels
Hamilton (LHJ)
Allen Industries Co-President Jason Allen announced today that the company would be exceeding Drool production targets again this year, after lagging behind in the previous 6 quarters.
"Once production leveled off with the I.S.A.A.C. (Immense Saliva Amount Accumulor/Creator) after he stopped teething, we suffered a serious downturn in our Drool production capabilities." explained Allen.

"Add to that the fact that the S.A.U.D.I's (Saliva Accumulation in Underground Deposits Initiative) were dumping drool on the spot market at absurdly low prices, it led to a serious downturn in our fortunes." he continued.

Now, all signs point to a massive ramp up in drool production as the S.A.M. (Saliva Accumulation Machine) ramps up to possibly exceed previous records set by I.S.A.A.C. and T.O.A.S.T. (Totally Overwhelming Amount of Saliva Tank) in the early part of the decade.

"As long as S.A.M. continues to teethe, we know we can expect record breaking drool production. " Explained Allen. "If I were you, I would be investing heavily in Allen Industries. Oh, and also in whoever makes Ora Jel."

Newfoundlanders appeal for aid in Flood relief, name change.
St. John's (LHJ)
Residents of the flood stricken Newfoundland community of Placentia, appealed today for Federal aid in restoring the town due to flood damage, and "changing our godawful name."

Placentia Mayor Bill Hogan told reporters "It's bad enough that most of the roads have been washed away, but how do you think we feel having to go on National TV and tell people we're from 'Placentia' Newfoundland. Oh the humanity."

Residents were at first surprised by the two pronged request from the mayor, but most agreed that it was long overdue.

"I think it's about bloody time," said Mary Pickenstock, a lifelong resident. "The name is bad enough, but when you combine it with the fact that we're downstream from Conception Harbour, it's all some people coming through here can do to keep a straight face."

Placentia was hit particularly hard by the remnants of tropical storm Chantal, which brought a month worth of rain in a single day.

Reconstruction will begin immediately, said one Federal Official, "Just as soon as they decide what name they want on the cheque."