I am a secretary.

In my case, I’m secretary to the Board of Directors of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. In that capacity I do just as the dictionary says:

A person employed to handle correspondence, keep files, and do clerical work for another person or an organization.

I don’t consider secretary to be a pejorative term, and I’ve always failed to see why others see it this way.

Which is why Administrative Professionals Day confuses me. For the unintiated, this is the new term for what used to be called Secretaries Day, and it’s celebrated this year on April 24, 2002.

While I can certainly understand the transition from stewardess to the gender-neutral flight attendant and the utility of their simply being actors, male and female, I can’t understand why a secretary is elevated somehow by applying this hackneyed new title.

While my own secretarial work involves only a few hours a week, I am the beneficiary of of the efforts of many other secretaries who are at it full time. They are, without exception, a hard working and invaluable lot.

So whether by secretary or administrative professional or administrative assistance or personal private executive chargé d’affaires, I salute you all.

I hate Government paperwork.

I never thought I would be the kind of libertarian “let’s get Government off the backs of the small businessperson and cut through red tape” kind of guy, but that’s what I’ve become. I hate the seemingly endless street of brown envelopes that come in the daily mail from some arm of the federal government: income tax, payroll tax, GST, mandatory StatsCan surveys. I simply don’t have the time. Not only the time to fill out the forms themselves, but to learn, each time anew, what each form means, when it is due, and so on.

And as a result I am often late with sending in forms. I blithely operate under the assumption that I “just sent that return in a couple of weeks ago” while months upon months of returns pile up on my desk.

This is how it came to pass that one of the businesses in my ouvre came to have twenty-one outstanding GST returns due.

Conventional wisdom would have it that this degree of tardiness would see the RCMP knocking down the door with battering rams, etc.

But in this case I simply got a call from a nice man named Leo Murphy at the GST office here in Charlottetown. He laid out the situation for me, and told me that if I emailed him the information that would have otherwise been sent in on the GST returns (basically how much we took in, and how much GST we collected), he would enter it directly into their system and that would be that.

He was helpful, pleasant, responded quickly to email, and was generally about as far from what we all imagine to be a GST enforcement guy to be like.

So, hats off to Leo Murphy. Thanks!

Most days the services of my local Credit Union work very well for moving around my money. There’s not much that I can’t do at the Credit Union that I could otherwise do at a bank, and the Credit Union has better hours, friendlier staff and more flexible policies than most banks (interesting sidenote: a Charlottetown businessman of my acquaintance told me he’s going to save more than a thousands dollars a year in fees by moving his business accounts to the Credit Union from a major bank).

There’s one thing that neither banks nor credit unions do particularly well, though, and that’s letting you easily move money beyond their institutional boundaries. Of course there are cheques (or “checks” as I’ve had to learn to spell this word for my U.S. customers), and regular old cash. But while it’s easy for me to transfer $100 from my own TD Bank account to my mother’s TD Bank account, it’s almost impossible for me to transfer $100 from my local credit union account to my brother’s local credit union account in British Columbia.

I say almost, because I was quoted a scheme whereby my local credit union could sent a message to Credit Union Central of PEI, which, in turn, would send a message to Credit Union Central of BC, which, in turn, would send a message to my brother’s credit union in BC. This would take several days, and I would never do it, if only on spiritual insanity grounds.

Enter PayPal.

I thought PayPal was going to solve this problem once and for all, especially once they appeared to do away with onerous fees applied to international transactions.

So we did a test. I opened up a PayPal business account, and sent $700 to my brother in BC using my MasterCard as the vehicle for getting money to PayPal. He opened up a PayPal account, and prepared to withdraw what I’d sent. This looked like it was going to work wonderfully, and only cost us 55 cents to boot.

Then, clang, the idea imploded when BC brother was told that he had to upgrade to a PayPal Premier account to be able to receive the money and, in doing so, would be subject to a 2.9% fee (or roughly $20).

So while PayPal might be good for many things, it’s not good for this. In other words, PayPal ain’t no replacement for Western Union (which is expensive in its own regard).

Eight years ago when we were doing e-cash experiments at the PEI Crafts Council, I imagined that this issue — how to throw cash digitally — would be solved by now. Alas it’s not, and so to fling money across the country still requires traditional banking contortions.

Someday.

Way back at the dawn of time, when I first starting really seriously typing for a living, and started to develop the initial signs of repetitive stress injury, one of the corrective steps I took was to go out and buy a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.

It worked. And I typed probably millions upon millions of words on it, to the point where the labels on all the keycaps were worn off. Eventually I couldn’t use the keyboard any longer; I’m not a one-finger typist, but I’ve got to look at what I’m typing at least a little, and with no labels, I was making more mistakes than I could handle.

So I phoned Microsoft and asked them about buying new keys for the keyboard. They told me new keys weren’t available, and sent me on my way.

And so I want out to buya new keyboard.

But somehow in the years between my first Microsoft Natural Keyboard purchase and my new search for a new same they’d made some design changes that I couldn’t abide, chiefly making the arrow keys really really small. So I was forced to buy a knock-off Belkin keyboard, and that’s what I’ve been using ever since.

Today, however, I realized that I wanted to start using my iBook portable more, and to do that required a full-sized keyboard. Fortunately Microsoft has seen the error of their earlier ways, and now has a keyboard called the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. Not only does it have the full-sized arrow keys, but it also has a nice Mac OS X driver and both USB and PS/2 plugs.

So off to Future Shop I went tonight, and now I am typing this on said keyboard. And boy is it wonderful. Its touch is so much nicer than the Belkin; not approaching the original IBM-PC keyboard (which was Selectric-like and wonderful on a plateau that I fear will never be matched), but pretty darned nice. And it just plain worked with OS X, which is great.

If you earn your living at the keyboard, and want to take a small hands-preservation step, I certainly recommend this keyboard.

Here is an interesting page on the CBC website called Frequently Asked Questions about Freelancing for CBC Radio.

After a two and half day stay in hospital, Oliver’s safe and sound and at home. We’re all very relieved, and Oliver is very happy not to have an IV taking away the use of one of his arms. As anyone who’s cared for an 18 month old might imagine, the IV issue was not without its struggles, but Oliver got acclimated quite quickly, and ended up treating the IV like he did the Christmas tree, which is to say he acknowledged it was there, but didn’t bother with it otherwise.

Air Canada is starting up its own online travel agency, called Destina. I signed up to receive notice of the site before it launched, and today I got an email that said, in part:

Please come visit the website at http://prod.destina.ca and use it to reserve and purchase upcoming travel. The site will be available to you from 6:00AM-10:00PM EST daily, starting on April 15.

The Vacancy Information Service is online for 2002. Our sister company Okeedokee Inc. created this telephone and Internet based service for TIAPEI 5 years ago, and it’s been running each summer since.

This year we’ve opened up an XML-RPC interface to the service that allows operators who want to programatically update their vacancy information over the web do so easily. If you’re a tourist operator, or if you maintain websites for tourist operators on PEI, you might want to read about this new service.

I naively expected that when I went in to be colonoscopated on Monday morning, it would be me who would be out of it for the rest of the day, but when I emerged in my “drug they give you so that you won’t remember anything about the experience and are thus more likely to come back and get another one someday”-haze, I received a message that Catherine and Oliver were in Emergency and I was to meet them there.

Oliver’s okay, but he’s had a hard couple of days.

On Thursday when he got home from daycare (only his third day) he had sniffles and a runny nose — we assumed he’d picked up a cold from one of the other kids. Friday was much the same, but Saturday he was really lethargic (didn’t get up until 11 a.m.) and was running a fever of about 102 degrees. We called outpatients and they told us to give him Children’s Tylenol, which we did right away. His fever came down to just below 100, and he seemed to perk up.

Sunday he was up and down — his fever came back, and he was a bit more lethergic, but then he seemed to be picking up later in the day.

On Monday morning Catherine called our family doctor, but she wouldn’t schedule an appointment until Thursday, so at 8:30 a.m., on her way to de-colonscopate me, Catherine took Oliver to Emergency, that really being the only alternative recourse (note to health care system: this doesn’t make much sense).

Emergency was really backed up, and by the time Oliver got to see a pediatrician (who, I should add, was excellent) it was about 2:00 p.m. The pediatrician recommended Oliver be admitted, and he’s been on the children’s ward since Monday afternoon.

What they think happened (in the simple terms that I can understand it) is this: on Monday or Thursday, Oliver picked up a viral infection — a flu-y sort of thing — from someone at daycare. While his body was battling this infection, some sort of bacterial infection (called a “supra-infection”, which we originally heard as “super infection,” which understandably made us worry!) snuck in, and that’s what gave him the fever, the lethargy, and the dehydration. Apparently Oliver is prime age for this sort of thing.

One interesting thing we learned today is that the dignosis of a lot of this type of thing is done only indirectly (for all I know the diagnosis of most types of things is done this way). For example, they test Oliver’s blood for white blood cells (the ones that help to combat infections); if his white blood cell count is higher, then they reason that this is because reinforcements have been called out to rally against an invading infection.

They also take another measure of the blood, called CRP, for “C-reactive protein”. This measurement gives them evidence as to the nature of the infection (i.e. whether it’s bacterial or viral).

Because Oliver’s white count is high and his CRP level is high, this led them to think that he has a bacterial infection, and so they’ve put him on a course of antibiotics.

What’s interesting as well is that they do all this without actually knowing what the bacteria that’s infecting actually is (hence the indirectness); the antibiotics Oliver’s been prescribed will take out (we were told) about 95% of likely bacterial invaders than affect children Oliver’s age.

He’s perked up a lot today — starting to get frustrated by the strange IV tube coming out of his arm — and things are looking like they’re on the mend. White cell count is trending down, as is CRP.

Oddly enough, one byproduct of this experience is that Oliver refuses to eat with a spoon: he’ll only accept food if it’s on a fork. More and more like his father every day.