Many of the monumental events in my family appear to happen while peeing.

All this talk about working at home got me thinking back to when I was doing my apprenticeship in the Composing Room of the Peterborough Examiner. This was pretty well the only work experience I’ve ever had which took place in a Real Workplace, complete with all the usual workplace rituals (Christmas parties, coffee breaks, co-workers, etc.).

Most of the people in the Composing Room had been working there just short of forever. They weren’t progressive people. They were incredibly generous, patient, kind, funny, compassionate. But coming from working with anarcho hippie freaks to working with these guys was a big shock to my politically correct system. When all was said and done, I loved working there. But it did have its challenges.

The Composing Room was housed on the second floor of the paper’s offices on Water St. While at one point Composing had taken up 3/4 of the floor, the reduction in the size of page production technology meant that much less floor space was needed, and also meant a reduction in workforce from 90 to 9 over twenty-five years. So by the time I arrived, we were all gathered in the corner of what used to be a large open space.

One vestige of the larger workforce was the employee washroom: a vast room with a big foot-operated trough-sink like the kind you might remember from elementary school. There were a lot of rituals associated with the Composing Room washroom: when you could go, how long you could reasonably spend there, etc. And there was a very specific way you were supposed to leave that day’s paper tucked into the stall doors (for the next guy) if you took it in with you.

The best story I ever heard about the washroom was this: Robertson Davies, noted Canadian author, was Editor of the Examiner from 1942 to 1955, and then Publisher from 1955 to 1965. His tenure at the paper overlapped with that of almost everyone I worked with in the Composing Room, and there were many stories about him.

Davies has been described as a “gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.” The story goes that when he was Publisher he arranged to have his office extensively renovated; one aspect of this was rather extensive renovation of his private washroom (including the installation of a bidet, something which, 20 years later, the guys in the Composing Room still thought was weird).

Because his private washroom was being renovated, he obviously needed the use of other facilities, and the Composing Room’s being the closest, this is the one he choose. The kicker was, however, that it was deemed inappropriate for the Publisher to use the same stall as the Composing Room guys, so a particular stall was choosen to be temporarily taken out of general service, a lock was installed, and this stall became the private domain of Davies.

When the renovations were completed, Davies returned to the comfort of his bidet-strewn palace, and the stall was returned to its rightful users.

Twenty years later I came along and used the stall in question every day to do my own peeing and worse. I will leave the osmostic possibilities to the reader’s imagination.

One of the great regrets of my time at the paper is that I didn’t steal Davies’ thesaurus.

The Examiner, you see, had a small library off the editorial offices. This library, with the exception of the morgue, was little-used and most of the books hadn’t been read in years (you could tell from the cobwebs). One night I was creeping around the paper at 2:30 a.m., waiting for the Saturday paper to come off the presses so I could go home. I wandered into the library and picked a random book off the shelf: it was a Roget’s Thesaurus. I opened it up and on the flyleaf was a bookplate printed “Property of Robertson Davies.”

I thought, for a moment, that I should liberate the book for my own library — it wasn’t being appreciated in its hiding place in the library, my thinking went — by my upbringing got the best of me and I returned the book to its place on the shelf. I fear that when the Examiner picked up and left for the suburbs several years later, the book ended up in the trash.

Those were wonderful times.

From Bruce Epstein:

In a physical office, there is the opportunity for non-business banter, a chance to share a game of hearts over lunch, or the possibility of finding a tennis partner. Working in a virtual office is like having a foster child in Senegal. An occasional airmail letter isn’t the same thing as a nightly bath and bedtime hug. Hell, even mail order brides get delivered eventually.

Rings very familiar. You can read the entire piece on the O’Reilly website.

Subsequent to my email from David Carey, Publisher of The New Yorker I received the following email from Jim Mate, VP- Retail Marketing, Conde Nast Publications:

We apologize for the difficulty that you had in finding the New Yorker at Tweels Gift Shop. We looked into this.

We found that Tweel’s normally receives 15 copies of The New Yorker and, thanks to loyal readers like you, sells an average of 7 copies each week. However, I was told that one recent issue was not delivered to Tweels for some reason. (That’s what they mean by being “shorted”.) Tweels did not get the issue with the cover date October 8. If you have not been able to get a copy of that issue please let me know . I would be happy to send one to you.

Regarding your comments about the Mondays that are holidays in Canada , I have found out that on those weeks Tweels gets their copies on Tuesday. That’s because the magazine distributor also takes off on the Monday holiday.

We very much appreciate your interest in The New Yorker. I hope that you will be able to find and buy your copy of The New Yorker each week at Tweels. However, if by some chance you have difficulty finding a particular issue - weather and other things sometimes lead to shipping delays - please let me know and I will take care of it. Thank you and have a pleasant weekend.

It has often been my experience that if you email people, no matter who they are, they will respond. This is not universally true, of course: if you email Microsoft or Air Canada, they will never respond. The same thing goes for many Internet-based businesses. But most everyone else, as long as you write carefully and address your concerns to the proper person, will write back in kind.

As additional proof of this, I attach my response from David Carey, Publisher of The New Yorker:

Dear Peter:

Thank you for this note, and your connection to The New Yorker.

I will pass this on our newsstand operation, who perhaps can answer your question.

Have you ever thought about subscribing, which may prove to be more reliable?

Thanks again…

David Carey

I await new from his newsstand people. Stay tuned.

By the way, this is my second positive experience with The New Yorker in this sort of thing; several years ago we attended the New Yorker Festival and I had a difficult time getting ticket and location information over the web. In my frustration, I left a long a rambling message on their general voicemail box at the magazine in the middle of the night. The next day a very kind and helpful woman phoned me back and told me everything I needed to know.

What is the moral of this story? Do business, when possible, with people who will phone you back, and avoid, when possible, those who will not. Usually you can tell the difference on first sight.

I sent the following email this evening to David Carey, Publisher of The New Yorker magazine:

Dear Mr. Carey,

I have been purchasing The New Yorker every week for 10 years at Tweels Gift Shop in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

I go there every Monday. In recent years I take my young son Oliver with me. I am a loyal and devoted reader. I enjoy the magazine immensely. It is part of what makes living in this tiny Island province viable — you are my connection to the world at large.

However I would like to point out a small problem in you newsstand distribution mechanism.

For some reason, for weeks where Monday is a holiday in Canada, but not in the U.S. — days like Victoria Day in May, Dominion Day in July, and so on — your magazine never arrives at Tweels Gift Shop. I ask at the counter and they tell me some variation of “we were shorted this week.” I don’t really understand what this means. But it is a reliable and consistent problem, and has been for some time.

I have no idea how the The New Yorker gets from New York City to Charlottetown, PEI. But on those weeks — like this one, where November 11 was a holiday here but not there — when The New Yorker is not available, my entire week is affected.

It’s like a small part of the air I breath is not available to me.

I realize that in the grander scheme of things this problem pales in comparison to others I imagine you have on your desk. But I would very much appreciate it if you could be of some assistance in helping to track down and solve it.

Regards,
Peter Rukavina
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

On last report, there were several gazillion websites out there in the world. And, so goes conventional wisdom, most of us only look at less than a dozen of them on a daily basis.

I can confirm this from my own browsing habits. Pictured here is my Internet Explorer drop-down menu showing the websites I drop in on several times a day. If you kick in CNN and Canoe, and leave out sites I actually create, you’ve got 95% of my browsing life right there.

My television watching follows a similar pattern: about 40% NBC, 20% on ABC, 20% on TLC, 10% on CBC and the balance sprinkled over the dial.

I read the New Yorker every week, Yankee and Toronto Life every month and occasionally read WIRED and Mother Jones.

I pick up the Guardian once or twice a week (I read it online every day), the National Post about twice a month, and the Globe and Mail about once every two months.

I split my radio listening in the car between CBC and Magic 93, the later only because there’s nothing else I can pick up clearly. At home I never listen to “real” radio — it’s Grassy Hill 90% of the time, KPIG on Sunday afternoons, and various others the rest of the time.

In other words, in this crazy world of seemingly infinite choice, I have my tiny little unchanging sliver. And, I assume most people do too. What’s yours?

I hereby offer to spend an $500 extra on Christmas gifts this holiday season, at downtown Charlottetown merchants, if the people behind the Maritime Electric Victorian Winter Festival do away with the abominable and inane Christmas lights that have littered the downtown for the past two years.

If I can find, say, 50 allies, that’s an additional $25,000 more in the pockets of downtown businesses. Which, I would hazard a guess, is significantly more than the light orgy results in. Takers?

Technical bulletin: I can confirm that mounting Samba shares under Mac OS X works once you install the 10.1.1 update. It didn’t work — at least very much — under 10.1, and I had to resort to using Sharity (which worked fine). What this means in the real world (or the less pretend world) is that I can open files on the Linux server in the basement using my iBook. Which is both cool and useful. I now return you to your regularly scheduled website.

CBC unveiled its edgy new current affairs program Disclosure this evening, hosted by Wendy Mesley and Diana Swain. The program shares a lot with ABC’s 20/20: Downtown — it’s a lighter, funkier kinda news, targeted younger than usual. Think of it as “fifth estate” meets “21 Jump Street.”

That said, I watched and enjoyed most of the program this evening.

I’m a fan of both Swain and Mesley: I think they’re excellent hosts, and good journalists. I sang a private song when Swain beat out Peter Mansbridge for the new Gemini last year.

As to the segements that went into tonight’s debut episode, well…

There were regretable (or just plain stupid) segments, like Premiers Travel Challenge where real CBC sports commentators called the play-by-play on a mock hurdles race as part of an essentially content-free “exposé” about travel costs in various by Canadian Premiers. This segment — more appropriate for This Hour Has 22 Minutes if anyone is forced to watch it — went on way, way to long and took what might have been some interesting content and over-packaged it in a fluffy coating.

Similarly, the Disclosure Mission Statement piece, wherein we get a fluufy rendition of what the show’s all about, was over-produced to the point of obscurity. The style of this piece borrowed a lot from Undercurrents, Wendy Mesley’s old show. Let’s hope they leave that style mostly behind.

But Mesley’s interview with Prince Mostapha was well done: she’s a good interviewer, and she established a bizarre sort of rapport with the man. And Diana Swain’s The Beast of Bolzano piece was interesting too, although she could lose a little bit of the Mike Wallacesque moral indignation.

Graphically the show was slick and well-produced. Despite the 20/20 style knock-off of the “hosts standing in weird lighting on the roof,” I like this technique for the introductions.

The Disclosure website certainly seems comprhensive, with background web content for each piece, and RealVideo of each as well. It suffers from the usual crazy “we have to wrap our own cool, unique home page inside the regular CBC look and feel” problem that so plagues many CBC sites; the result is five (yes five) navigational areas: regular CBC bar at the top, regular CBC sidebar, Disclosure bar at the top, Disclosure sidebar, Disclosure links at page bottom. This is confusing, but it’s not really fair to blame the Disclosers for this problem.

I’ll be watching next Tuesday.

Hint for the day: if, after soaping up your hands when washing them, you rinse for an additional 15 seconds longer than normal, you will get a better hand washing with less soapy residue and will generally feel better about the entire experience.