Personal Coffee

"Anything from the specialty bar, sir?"

I looked around. I was pretty sure I was in a Starbucks, looking for coffee. The "specialty bar"? Maybe I was wrong. But no, the ubiquitous green and white stripes...the glass case full of carefully over-priced confections, the annoying choice of talle, grande and venti...it was all there.

So what in the name of God is a "specialty bar", and why would I want anything from there?

"No, thanks," I said.

"No PROBLEM- EXCELLENT!!" replied the barista, as she fixed her eyes on the next customer "The usual?", she perked.

The woman in the sensible power suit behind me stepped up to the plate, drew a deep breath, and took a mighty swing. "Not today, thanks. Today I want....okay, I'll have a grande...no a venti...a venti half-caff...Himilayan...soy...extra hot...no whip, no lid."

There was a slight pause. Tiny beads of perspiration appeared on the customer's upper lip. Had she hit it over the fence, or was this a swing and a miss?

"EXCELLENT!!" smiled the barista, as she leaped into action. "I need a personal venti half-caff Himalayan soy extra hot no whip no lid!!" she shouted to the person standing approximately right next to her. The instructions were repeated back with the precision of a submarine fire control officer preparing to launch a volley of Polaris missiles. Large, highly pressurised pieces of coffee-making machinery were pressed into service. Hisses issued forth. Gauges fluttered, buttons were pushed.

Power Suit Lady relaxed, smiled. She headed for the Special Section reserved for those who order "Personal Beverages".

Meanwhile I ordered a large coffee, dark roast. No special section for me. Naturally I had to have the mandatory "I'm sorry sir - I don't understand "LARGE" " conversation, which resulted in me (as always) pointing dumbly to the middle-sized cup on the Starbuck's cup decoder display. Then I forked over my $2.05, dumped in a load of half-and-half, twiddled it all with a wooden stir stick, and found the correct cup lid.

With a firm grasp on my coffee cup I headed for the door, stepping carefully around the area inside the velvet rope where Personal Coffees are prepared, checked, and ceremoniously delivered. Power Suit Lady was pacing nervously. "Would they get the "hot" right? Was the "no whip" a mistake? Could she get retroactive "whip"? How would her personally designed coffee beverage go down with the baristae? Had she checked her bank balance? Is "Himalayan a no-no...or was that Tibetan...or Ethiopian? DAMN! She forgot to say "fair trade!" DAMN, damn, damn....

As I reached the exit, the personal coffee exchanged hands, its arrival signalled by a loud "I have a personal venti half-caff Himalayan extra hot no whip no lid here..."

I looked back. Power Suit Lady had pulled it off. Her beverage - her personal beverage - had been prepared to order, following her instructions. She glowed. She looked ready to strut. And then....it came apart.

"Will there be anything from the personal accompaniments bar, perhaps?"

Power Suit Lady was stuck. She hadn't prepared. Hadn't scrutinized the offerings. Hadn't done ANY sort of beverage/accompaniment matching. She took a shot.

"A no-wheat no-egg yolk thigh pressed steel-cut oatmeal kamut hotcake?"

A hand snaked across the counter, snatching back the personal beverage and disdainfully flinging $7.38 in loose change in one practiced motion.

"Perhaps madam would be more comfortable at Second Cup? I hear they offer free coffee at the "Y" - just down the street...it comes with a cookie."

In Three's

What just happened? One minute I was vaguely worried about the situation in Iran, but that was pretty much eclipsed by worrying over the fact that I can't find time to strip the old wallpaper off the walls of my new old house.



Then Ed McMahon died.



I never really watched Johnny Carson, and McMahon was in his 80's. I was mildly sorry that he had lived out his last years fighting to keep his own home. For all the escapist amusement that he has provided for millions of TV viewers, one would have thought that the President could have absolved him of his financial sins. But Ed McMahon didn't touch my life, and I went back to worrying about wallpaper.



Then Farrah Fawcett died.



Farrah Fawcett was the big-haired, tight-bodied, gleaming-toothed poster girl of my early university years - until she was replaced by a scantily clothed Cheryl Tiegs. Farrah went on to amuse us as one of Charlie's Angels, although in that role she was stacked up against Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson - both of whom held more appeal for me than Farrah and her big hair. Not that I ever watched "Charlie's Angels" - I think I avoided it with the same degree of disdain that made me perhaps the only person in the Western Hemisphere who has never seen a single episode of "The Love Boat." Farrah Fawcett was a very ill woman when she died. She had struggled privately and ultimately in public with a rare form of cancer. Somehow she largely avoided the ghoulish tabloid death-watch to which most stricken public figures are subjected. Her death was untimely and sad, but not unexpected. Farrah Fawcett had not touched my life in any meaningful way. I shrugged it off and went back to thinking about Iran.



Then Michael Jackson died.



Michael Jackson died.



He died.



Michael Jackson - the frenetic, Afro-headed micro-star of late nights with Ed Sullivan, when I was so glad that, tonight, it was the Jackson 5 and NOT the dweebish Osmond Brothers. Michael Jackson, who roared into our 20-something lives with "Thriller" - an album that changed everything about pop music, and made modern pop culture what it has become, set a standard for sheer innovation and excitement that every "So You Think You Can Dance" hopeful, every "American Idol" aspirant, every performer on the stage of popular culture only dreams about meeting.



Michael Jackson - the admirer and confidante of Elizabeth Taylor, the increasingly weird, shape-shifting hob-goblin in his oxygen chamber, a real-life Peter Pan surrounded and consumed by ghosts and demons, always trying to fly, sometimes succeeding - that guy. He died.



I didn't think that it would matter. At least, not to me. Why should it? His music was great when it was good, but it was never more than a diversion for me. I didn't watch him on television unless he happened to be on. I didn't intentionally follow his press - although at times it was hard not to. At most I occasionally shook my head in response to some news article, some photo of the King of Pop looking more like the Invisible Man in his surgical mask and fedora, or, mostly, I looked on in wonder as the star-maker machinery dissected the man before our eyes, as the smug entertainment media hypocrites who really run all things mainstream decided that Jackson was now a road-side attraction to be treated as such.



It was the newspaper covers that got to me.



Michael Jackson - 1958-2009.

Michael Jackson was a month younger than me.


Thanks for doing something with you life, Mr. Jackson. It was by turns weird and wonderful, disgraceful and uplifting, bewildering and enlightening - but at least it was something.

End of the Transit Strike

With scant hours to spare before the Federal government was scheduled to hold an emergency sitting of Parliament to deal with Ottawa's record-breaking transit strike, it was over. Looking like Larry, Curly and Moe, Ottawa's Mayor Larry O'Brien and the two senior union bosses for the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279 (the drivers, mechanics and dispatchers who have been on strike against OC Transpo for over two months) emerged to announce that they had agreed to send the entire mess to binding arbitration, without any conditions attached.

For THIS we have been schlepping around the world's coldest capital city, in the coldest January in recent memory? For THIS we have wasted untold hours sitting in traffic, burned untold extra litres of fuel, paid untold parking fees, missed untold numbers of appointments, endured the wrath of an untold number of pedestrians, drivers, employers, shop keepers, appointment secretaries, wives, husbands, children, hockey coaches and hair dressers? What is there about this "solution" that could not have been achieved within 24 hours of pickets going up?


Oh, and then there is the little side bonus. We will probably get to pick up the $15,000,000.00 tab for the privilege of NOT having a transportation system available to us as the world economy crumbled, as Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year's came and went, as university exam schedules went into spasms, as retail workers who rely on the extra cash from the Christmas season spent it all and more just getting to work.

And when they say the buses are running again, of course they don't really mean it. As the buses sat idle in their sheds, or outside in the freezingness, their safety certificates expired en masse, requiring inspections and maintenance before they could get back to the business of missing their stops, breaking down, and being late as usual. we're being told it could be "many weeks" before the system is running to full capacity. I thought that OC Transpo operated buses - not space shuttles. (Although there are drivers who would disagree with me, judging by some of the rides I have had).


I don't even use the bus system on a regular basis. By the time I calculated the cost of bus passes for myself and my wife, and factored in the inconvenience of making a couple of transfers to drop off and collect our son at daycare, it became pretty clear that it was cheaper for us to just drive to work and pay for parking. That's the great irony of the whole thing, actually. Even when it's running, OC Transpo is an over-priced, under-achieving system that fails to impress. The fact that the city touts the system as being world-class strongly suggests that no one from the Ottawa city council has even been to Toronto, much less some of those cities on this Earth where transit actually works. So to be ham-strung for half the winter by an impasse between the owners of a crap transit system and the people who bring us that crap every day, was frustrating to say the least. And to think that, in the middle of a world economic meltdown, the Parliament of Canada was going to convene a special emergency session to get the buses lurching along once more simply defies the imagination. The business of the COUNTRY is being interrupted to deal with a ......BUS STRIKE?


Give us all a break.


First step - get this bus system under the control of the Ontario Government. It is ludicrous that a Federal Minister, let alone the Federal Government and Parliament as a whole, had to be called upon to get involved with this debacle.


Second step - give very serious consideration to making transit an essential service. Cities all over the country are telling residents to leave their cars at home and to take transit. Traffic patterns have been deliberately configured to favor mass transit over automobiles in many cities, Ottawa included. That may be quite proper. A good transit system can deliver tremendous benefits to a community, both in terms of convenience and environmental responsibility. But when cities tell us that we can and should rely on these systems, they should expect us to take them at their word. When we rely on transit, we choose not to have two cars - maybe no car at all. We arrange our lives with access to transit as a "given". We support infrastructure and planning initiatives that favor transit over private cars. We buy in. Fire fighting services and policing services are essential to our health, safety and well-being. And yet the average citizen relies far more heavily on transit than on fire fighting or police services in the run of the average day. Watching ambulances and fire trucks trying to negotiate the clogged Ottawa downtown during the transit strike made me wonder how anyone could think that transit, with its ability to so drastically reduce traffic congestion, is not an essential service.


Third step - get the city out of the business of providing transit, and put it in the hands of the private sector. Naturally, there would have to be regulation to ensure that routes are designed to provide service and not just generate revenue. That is clearly within the city's authority. But take the politics out of running the buses.

Fourth step - city and union, hope for forgiveness, even if you don't deserve it.