The Classroom Conservative

Tipping On The Tax

On a stormy Friday night, we took my parents for dinner at one of their favorite chain restaurants.  There were more people there than expected during inclement weather, and the place was understaffed.  Still, the service was not bad: they were a little slow, and they forgot to bring my soup, but we had no complaints.

The young woman waiting on our table deserved the standard 15% gratuity.

The Canadian media has recently been abuzz with stories of restaurants in Toronto adding an automatic 20% tip to all bills, regardless of the experience its customers have had.  Proprietors argue that it is perfectly acceptable to opt out of this gratuity, but the distinction is far from subtle.  The assumption now is that the service will be exemplary, and it is the responsibility of patrons to signal any displeasure by actively removing an expected bonus.

I understand that wait staff are underpaid, and I accept that we are asked to supplement their incomes.  However, it is important to be able to signal okay service (15%) from exemplary service (20% or more).  One night, years ago, a friend and I used an excessive tip to compensate a young woman whose other table ran out on their bill.  The restaurant we visited with my folks last week sought to help us out by providing three gratuity options, chosen from a menu on the credit card console.  Again, there is an assumption that a tip is warranted, but one can choose 15% or 20% or 25% -- or, presumably, some different amount altogether.

If one chooses the automatic 15%, this number is unlikely to be a whole number.  For awhile, I used to tip, even on credit cards, in order to achieve a round number.  Say, for example, that the bill came to $24.22.  I would tip $3.78, so that the total was $28.  A friend pointed out that no one wanted my 78 cents; I should just tip $4.  Whether the cash is kept behind the counter or tallied electronically, no one wanted pennies.  But, of course, if one chooses to let the credit card console do the calculation, there is no chance to round up.

For some people, calculating the gratuity is often a hassle.  When GST was 7%, folks in Alberta would double the tax and round up to determine the tip.  (If the service was great, we could triple the tax.)  Now that GST is 5%, we triple that tax to calculate an average tip.

So, spare some thought for me as I sat in that restaurant in St. John’s.  Is tax there still 22%?  No?  It is 13%.  (When did that happen?)  That will not help me.  I find it simple, of course, to calculate 10% in my head, and, if I add to that amount half as much again, I can find 15%.  But wait.  The number is not adding up to the 15% recommended by the credit card console.  The subtotal is $80.  If 10% is $8, and half of that is $4, then a 15% tip is $12, right?  Why, then, is the recommended tip actually $13.56?

The answer, math fans, is that before recommending a 15% gratuity, this large chain restaurant first added the HST.  They wanted me to tip on the tax. 

We were happy that we did not order alcohol, as one traditionally does not tip on that amount, either.

Remembering Fred Gamberg

On a summer night in 1995, Fred Gamberg drowned in Flatrock, Newfoundland.  Because I was away at school, I did not hear the news.  I did not know Fred well; when I worked at Sam the Record Man in the Avalon Mall, he was a frequent patron, looking -– as anyone who knew him at all will attest -– for Dead Kennedys imports and encouraging us to give punk CDs their own section.  When I moved back to St. John’s after graduation, I was confronted by this mural while walking downtown.

Now, obviously, had Gamberg been a friend, I suspect that I might have known about his death.  As it was, it was quite a shock to see an old acquaintance thus depicted on a retaining wall next to the LSPU Hall.  Peter Evans painted this commemoration quite spontaneously.  It was graffiti, strictly speaking, but I always thought that it fit well with the surroundings.  It also generated a lot of debate, I have heard, as Gamberg was far from a public figure in the city.  Those of us of a certain age were aware of him, and his short life underlined for me the fragility of our existence: he died at a time that few of us were even thinking about death.

Part of the debate about the mural had to do with the city’s tolerance of it.  It was not removed; it was, unquestionably, a work of public art, in the way that some graffiti clearly is not.  I observe, for example, that much of the highway across Newfoundland runs through small bluffs where one teen’s love for another is spray painted for all drivers to see.  Some of these proclamations, passed frequently, fill me with nostalgia, but they cannot be called public art in terms of their composition and execution.  Whether you think that a young man with a small circle of close friends deserves a public memorial in a Canadian city, you cannot question the efficacy of what Peter Evans created.

Over time, however, the mural began to disintegrate.  To my mind, as the next generation of downtown youth painted over Gamberg, they added to the mural, even though the face of the original subject was eventually obliterated.

 

As the paint began to peel, the work became an eyesore to some.  It had never been commissioned by the city, of course, and so did the city have any role in maintaining it?  Eventually, St. John’s stepped in and made a great decision, to my mind, in having it “renewed.”

I can imagine that the old work was beyond restoration, but -– by repainting Fred Gamberg -– the city's committee on murals has affirmed the contribution of the original piece.  I will miss the old one, certainly.  Had it been my decision to make, I would have liked to have had it redone from old photographs.  But this new mural is a work of art in its own right, the interpretation of yet more people embodying the spirit of downtown St. John's.

Ebert Presents: At The Movies

I teach my students that the greatest failure of modernism was its penchant for drawing attention to the differences that divide us while offering no effective strategy for overcoming them.  My complaint with contemporary culture, on the other hand, is that it often imagines away our differences.

One sees this in all manner of relevatism.

For resisting the tide of its culture, I have become a big fan of Ebert Presents: At The Movies, the worthy successor of programs Roger Ebert hosted, first, with Gene Siskel and, then, with Richard Roeper.  Disfigured and left unable to speak by a well-publicized, decade-long battle with cancer, Ebert appears in short segments where other people, usually Bill Kurtis, voice his reviews.

The bulk of the air time is devoted to dueling reviews from Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, in the time-honored format.  The two critics have an acceptable chemistry, developed further as they have honed their on-air personas.  By now, we have concluded that the more populist Lemire prefers movies with pace; Vishnevetsky leans towards foreign films with subtitles.  Thirty-year-old clips from Sneak Previews remind us that lengthier and more detailed discussions of the art were once more common, and Ebert Presents toys with the format in defiance of contemporary culture’s predilection for short, snappy sound bites.

But it is Roger Ebert, himself, who most persistently challenges the new status quo.  He has lamented how much time we waste hiding illness, and his appearances on camera never hide the limitations imposed upon him by his cancer.  To be clear: illness has not blunted Ebert’s critical acumen.  All that has changed is his appearance and his ability to speak.  To work around a handicap, he has enlisted able collaborators, and that – for me – is the lesson.  Roger Ebert’s cancer altered him; it did not diminish him in essence, but it rendered him different, without doubt.  While I would wish for him that it was not so, the grimly practical fashion in which he confronts his difficulty accomplishes something that one often encounters as a postmodern cliché.  His program is actually better for the contribution of all the people who seek to help him mitigate the differences he must confront.

Ebert Presents, on PBS, is on a summer hiatus, showing clips from the work done through the eighties with Gene Siskel.  These are well worth your time.  Here is hoping the program is back and stronger than ever in September.

I Will Be Back In Fifteen Minutes

... is a sign I encounter frequently in offices and stores where one person is working -- and that person is taking a break.  The problem, of course, is that I cannot know whether that person has been absent for thirty seconds or for thirteen minutes.

Listening To The New Yorker Poets

A few weeks ago, I saw one of my retired colleagues in the local bookstore.

“Do you know what I miss about the university?  The only thing?” he asked me.  “I miss reading poetry aloud to people.”

I had to admit that the ability to speak in rhyme in front of people is a unique feature of professing literature.  There are not too many other jobs in which this is permitted, let alone encouraged.  I do not suggest that you try it, say, on a sales call.

The importance of hearing poetry was reinforced for me, once more, as I explored my New Yorker iPad app.  Recently, I wrote in this space about how canny is Conde Nast by including a digital subscription as part of its packages.  Simultaneous subscriptions will help wean me off paper where weaning is absolutely necessary.

But, as many of you will know, the digital New Yorker includes some very interesting additional content, including audio files of contemporary poets reading their poems.  As I read and played the poems, listening or following along, I enjoyed the poems more and, I feel, got more from them.  After all, as my retired colleague would attest, hearing a poem is how the work should be encountered.  This takes us back to the roots of the oral tradition in literature.

Again, I have described my approach to technology as “conservative,” in the sense that ideally it should help us recapture something that we have, for various reasons, lost along the way.  I have no interest in having things read to me so that I can put less effort into concentrating on them – like those condensed books-on-tape marketed to executives who are, supposedly, too busy to read but must have content to drop into polite conversation.  But I acknowledge fully that we have lost the ability to sit around reading poetry to each other – outside the classroom, at least – and so I take some solace in my digital subscription as I hear, in delicious accent, how things are meant to be spoken.

The Old Curiosity Shop

I was in Halifax recently, very briefly, to attend to some sad family business, but I was able to take an afternoon to explore the downtown, a place that reminds me so vividly of life’s successes and life’s failures, a place that, itself, is struggling to reinvent itself one more time.

Its business plan, as far as I can tell, is designed to sell coffee to tourists.  The results are mixed.  The area around Pier 21, once a concrete wasteland that would have been threatening if encountered in any other city in North America, is now bustling and pleasant, at least when a tour ship is in.  On Barrington Street, many places are shuttered, and even the ghost of Sam the Record Man has been banished through a partial renovation of a whole city block that has left untouched only the facade of that once-great location.

(I will not hassle you again about record stores.  I get it: you do not care.  You do not want to buy an import copy of Pat Metheny’s soundtrack to The Falcon and the Snowman in order to secure David Bowie’s “This is Not America” because you can download the song from iTunes.  Strike that.  You do not know David Bowie, thinking “Under Pressure” is only the intro to a Vanilla Ice single.  Wait: you do not remember Vanilla Ice, thinking popular music is the fifteen-second sample that is the soundtrack to your life, unearthed through your iPod shuffle.  I despair, but privately.)

Anyone who can run a French press and buy Costco cookies thinks it is easy to run a coffee shop, and it shows.  You could spend an evening drifting from one location to the next, looking for a table for six that is not tied up by one pimply teenager checking Facebook through rented wifi (and stolen electricity) on the pretence of nursing a single cup of hot liquid.  Where you cannot find a good coffee shop is Spring Garden Road, ironically, where the jewel of the street has been taken over by a pet shop, a store so ridiculous in its relative incongruity that it almost distracts you from its neighbouring bookshop.  Bookmark is delightfully reliable, but it is Halifax’s used book stores that get all the attention, and it is in these establishments that I found most frustration.

On the flight from Calgary to Halifax – fly direct, if you can – Air Canada offered a documentary on the Greeley Expedition, 1881-84.  Having watched the program, I was interested in buying a book about the explorer Adolphus Greeley.  (Odd, I know: television was not enough; I needed the printed page.)  Setting foot in what is probably Barrington Street’s most famous used book store, I was struck – again – by the sense that the stock had exploded all over the store.  I love the thrill of exploring such a space, but in this case – with a specific topic to search, if not a specific title – I was frustrated by the double-shelved volumes, the covers strewn about the floor.  Businesses are brought to their knees by overhead: imagine what happens when the overhead is underfoot?  I had a leg up at the second location, a store in which I have spent many, many hours over the years.  Abebooks.com told me that they had a copy of a book about the expedition.  On my first, brief visit, I had a conundrum: “nautical” book or “Canadian history”?  Canadian history was organized well, but this subject fit poorly amongst the few subheadings by which the shelves were divided.  Nautical books had volumes that were similar, but I had no time to search over the shelves and the floor.

On my second visit, I had time to ask the clerk.  I wondered if, because the book was listed in its stock on the internet, it might be at hand.  He could see it online, could confirm that it was selling for $11.50, but he did not know where it was.  The owner drifted over, confirmed that it was “nautical,” but could tell me only that it had a black spine.  After a little rummaging on the shelf behind a first row of competing books, we found it: priced at $20.  I have written, before, about the foolishness of Chapters competing with itself online, but I do understand that they have two businesses.  Not so with the alternate distribution offered used bookstores by Canada Post and the internet.  The difference between the internet price and the price in the store, it was explained to me, had to do with the original price put on this book when it was first acquired – in 2002!  But rather than honouring the internet quote and getting rid of something that had been sitting around for nearly a decade, the store wished me to pay a premium of almost double that price.  I declined.  That evening, I bought the same book from a store in the United States for $7, including shipping.

I also poked around a used goods shop in Halifax that day.  It was described by its owner as an old-fashioned “curiosity shop.”  It was indeed not all furniture, though it had a little.  It had lots of bric-a-brac, but much of it was usefully organized.  If you wanted something for your desk, there it was; if you wanted an old pipe, there was a display of them.  I was struck by the similarly between this establishment and my beloved used book store.  Both seem quaint, but neither is particularly practical.  If you happen to come across something of interest, at either, you should grab it: for only at the curiosity shop are you likely to locate, satisfactorily, a specific item that you have set out to find.

Digital Or Legacy Media? Why Choose?

At the height of the Canada Post lockout, I received an email from the New Yorker about my magazine subscription.  Because I pay to have the paper copy of the publication sent to my mailbox each week, I was eligible for a free digital subscription.

Not only did this solve the temporary problem presented by the delivery interruption, it will also allow me moving forward – finally – to address the inevitable delay in having a weekly magazine mailed to Western Canada.

Why will more digital platforms not do something similar in an attempt to bring around sceptical adopters like me?

I have an iPad, but I still love my paper copies.  I cannot imagine ever dispensing, entirely, with the physical object of a book, and – for the time being, at least – I love having my New Yorker to roll up and carry.  For that matter, I love having a broadsheet newspaper at the breakfast table.  But I can imagine that, in time, I will come to embrace the flexibility of my iPad.

Now the New Yorker will help me get from point-a to point-b, gradually, without making the same kind of huge leap (practically and emotionally) I must make each time I walk by, say, the Edmonton site of the old Megatunes, converted into yet another sandwich shop on Whyte Avenue.  At least the publishing industry is trying to manage change, in contrast to the obliviousness the music industry demonstrated in the face of its obliteration.

So what now for books?  One of my friends said to me on the weekend that she would happily pay an extra dollar or two for a digital copy of the books we were buying.  And, in fact, that might be the best solution of all.  I can archive a “real” book on my shelf – for practical, commodity value, and sentimental uses – and embrace the flexibility ebooks continue promise us.

Paying For Previews

Back when I frequented the movie theatre regularly, back before ushers turned a blind eye to rows and rows of patrons talking back to the screen, I made sure that my friends and I always showed up in time for the previews.  (That is not true, strictly speaking: I recall as a kid being ten minutes late for Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Imagine going for years without being aware of the opening scenes of that film!)  I still figure that if you are going out, dodging bedbugs and pools of spilled soda, you owe it to yourself to get the full media experience.  As I sat in a dingy art house in Oxford in the mid-1990s, waiting for my weekly dose of kitchen-sink realism, I was blown away by ninety seconds of the upcoming Pulp Fiction.  My head was spinning!  What a reminder of the artistic range of film, itself.  Previews are essential to the theatre experience, much as they were essential to the experience of going to the drive-in.

Previews are not, however, essential to the home theatre experience.  Do you remember when your DVD had, in its main menu, a section for “Coming Attractions”?  If you fancied pretending that your living room was a movie theatre, you could always practice staying quiet…  Or you could choose to watch five or ten minutes of trailers.  Of course, these would be previews of other films from the company that produced your DVD and unlikely to be relevant to you in the same way, say, that the trailers for a horror film in the theatre would also be for horror films.  Now, however, if instead of going to the theatre, you choose not to wait for the movie network premiere, you can plunk down $25 for the Blu-Ray and be forced to sit through previews.  Press “top menu” and be told that “this function is unavailable.”

I accept fully that I have to be told, for the twenty-five thousandth time, that I could go to jail for copying the film I just bought, but I do not know why – for example – I have to be told, when waiting to watch The King’s Speech, that I should see The Fighter.  I saw it last month!

The principle, as I understand it, is that should you choose to take advantage of free (or cheaper) content, you have to put up with some inconvenience.  The free version of apps can have ads.  The free New York Times Book Review podcast should have advertisements: it makes the enterprise possible.  The basic cable version of films on AMC are butchered and bogged down by long segments of ads.  But if I pay a premium, I expect a certain degree of convenience.  My cable and internet bill is well beyond $100 a month.  But when I press display on my cable box, I see all the channels I do not get.  What is that if not an advertisement that runs 24/7?

How much money would someone have to pay to be exempted from the soft sell, that pressure to buy more even after we have been sold?

No, Air Canada, I Am Not A Nuisance

I woke up last Wednesday morning to a heavy snowfall warning for Calgary.  I would not have cared, normally, except that I was in Vancouver, and I had to get back home for the last day of the semester.

No, Air Canada, I am not a nuisance.

I was in British Columbia, on short notice, to attend a meeting at the airport hotel.  Because there are only a handful of connections between Calgary and Lethbridge, I was booked on the last flight of the day: one that did not leave until 11pm.  I picked the 7pm out of Vancouver because I thought that I might as well wait around in the city than in the Calgary airport.  Now I was not so sure.

My flight had a weather advisory on it, so – during a break in the meeting – I raced half the length of the airport to speak to a customer service agent.  Apparently, it is no longer the policy that same-day, discretionary changes are allowed when the airline issues a weather advisory.  But I was told that a ticket agent might be willing to help me.  I thanked the agent, assured her that I understood that she was just following the rules, but explained that I had to get back to my meeting.

Then, a colleague who had driven to Calgary made me an offer: get back on his flight out of Vancouver, and I could catch a ride to Lethbridge with him – with any luck, before the storm set in.

As soon as the meeting was over, I returned to customer service, determined to abandon any additional time in Vancouver – I would not set foot outside the airport, it turned out – and determined to forfeit my fare for the last leg of my trip.  I just wanted on the earlier flight, a plane that was half empty, by the way.  I asked the agent if the status had changed for my original flight, and I asked for directions to that ticket counter.  Once more, I thanked her.

By the time I got to speak to the ticket agent, I was less hopeful.  If I was buying a seat on the flight, it would be more than a thousand dollars, even with lots of seats available.  To be clear, I was in no way attempting to circumvent normal Air Canada pricing.  I was simply trying to be proactive.  In fact, if I took the later flight to Calgary and there got stuck, after a weather advisory had been issued by the airline, they would be on the hook for my hotel room, it was explained to me.

So, the ticket agent was quite sympathetic.  She understood what I had been doing.  In the end, for something less than the usual change fee and no fare differential, I did get on the earlier flight.  But there was some red tape, as it turned out.  The ticket agent explained to me why it was difficult to help me:

For asking twice for information at the customer service kiosk, a note had been entered on my file.  I was branded a nuisance.

Shilling For Apple

Between two o'clock and five o'clock last Friday afternoon, I stood in line at Best Buy in order to purchase an iPad 2.  My only similar experience was with Boxing Day sales, where I often go out just for the fun of it.  I remember one winter standing outside Future Shop in Newfoundland in order to pick up a digital camera for next to nothing.  But last week was hard core.  I was an Apple shill.

The lines are contrived, of course.  In spite of the price of commodities and the problems in Japan, there is no real shortage of Apple products.  My issue is that, for a number of complicated reasons, I had to commit to this product by the end of March.  Rather than picking one up at my convenience, I was obliged to be seventh in somebody's line.  I was lucky number seven at Best Buy, and -- as a result -- I got the second of five black, 64GB, wi-fi only iPad 2s.  Number twenty-seven might have to choose between a too-trendy white or a 32GB.  Sucker.

On my way from work, stopping by London Drugs to convince myself that I didn't really want a new printer, instead, I found a small queue inside the store.  "How many iPads do you have?" I asked the pierced and pimply salesman.  "Fourteen."  Math looked good.  "Do you have a variety of models?  What about if I line up for hours and you've got no black, 64GB, wi-fi only?"

"You'll have to get another model."

Best Buy it was.

I could have been tenth in line at London Drugs.  I ran a yellow light.  I stopped at the house to pick up some headphones and a book.  When I reached the big box, there were six people standing outside the door, next to a sign that read "iPad 2 Line Here."  I poked my head inside the door and asked the greeter, "How many?"  I was assured only, this: "There are three people in this store who know: I'm not one of them."  The night before, another salesman told me that they would have lots of stock.

Well, my odds had to be better than at London Drugs.  They would have more iPads at Best Buy than at the little London Drugs, right?  So, outside I go.

Why the secrecy about the number of units?  Well, if there is no reasonable expectation of success, there is no queue.  And if there is no queue, there is no news coverage and less buzz for Apple.  It is for this reason that we were made to line up outside, in temperatures below zero.  Unfortunately, when the Global reporter was by, three hours earlier, there was only one person in line.  They needed a tight shot to replicate a Apple Store frenzy.

By the time we were admitted into the store, the teenaged girl ahead of me had turned blue.  My hands had frozen to the point that I could not read the book I had brought.  We were told that Best Buy was breaking "Apple policy," but I was grateful nonetheless.

I suspect it is destiny.  When I bought my first computer, in 1988, Macintosh was simply too expensive for an undergraduate humanities student.  Slowly, over time, I got an iPod, an iPhone, and -- now -- an iPad.  We will all end up Mac people, I now have no doubt.  But why must they make us, transparently, so complicit in their search for world domination.

I love this iPad.  Would I have loved it any less if I had bought it with warm hands?