1:55 a.m. - 2003-04-05
Cycles
The last couple of mornings on the bus and train have been odd again. This time it's because of the SARS scare - atypical pneumonia - that is being viewed as the next possible pandemic illness. The origin appears to be from somewhere in mainland China. It has taken hold in Toronto - a couple of thousand miles away - carried here by people visiting from Hong Kong. The missing transit riders? You got it, people of Chinese ancestry. The dumb thing is, Calgary has had a component of people of both Chinese and Black heritage as part of our population ever since the beginning of its existence. A donation from a grateful patient of Chinese heritage was responsible for the provision of the land where our first hospital was built. Our big annual fair and community party non-pareil, the Calgary Stampede,was begun by the "Big Four" ranchers. One of them, John Ware, was an emancipated slave from South Carolina who arrived here via Texas. To assume someone is from "somewhere else" because of their colour is just plain ignorant here. Even so a lot of people of Chinese heritage are finding themselves shunned these days even though their families have lived here longer than just about every one else on transit.
Got to work this morning and used my security card to open the door to the library where my work station is located, after using said security card to get on to the floor. Occasionally, it is already open when I arrive if someone else on the team needs access and has arrived before me - rare. Today I walked in and was startled to see C emerging from the row of shelving with some of the most sensitive data in it. Asked her why the door was closed. "I was scared". OK - there are security guards at the entry to our building plus regular patrols, in addition to surveillance cameras and security cards for every staff member that are the only way onto our floors. Who was she afraid of? Well, you know, just people. Hmmmmmm.
More closed doors, off and on, in B's office first thing this morning - looked like a couple of meetings with T2 and D. B called me into her office after that, mentioned that "my friend" A had called yesterday to let her know about me being sick, and then said she wanted clarification with respect to the client service stats I had sent in from home when I was sick. I think her discussion with A probably focussed more on the stats issues since I supplied him with a copy too. Not much to deal with except one typo and, yes I know it adds up to three full working days in a one month period. Add in nearly three full days spent on the library service/training side, a couple of days of document maintenance activities and you've accounted for nearly 30% of my time. I've been trying to convey the amount of time I am asked to spend away from my primary task for about two months now.
I don't mind any work I'm given, but I don't want to hear any criticism about the time it takes then, to get the main work done. What was curious was that the focus was only on the client service stats, not the time I'd spent training C or the department service stats. Seems D had claimed that he had done a significant amount of the work I had done on a couple of projects as part of his stats. The projects in question were with respect to the unregistered properties I had come across, researched and forwarded to the proper department. Not a happy discovery for B. One of the four scenarios addressed in the Ethics workshop D and I had attended together, was not to claim credit for someone else's work. Fortunately, I had a whole series of e-mails tracking that work, including a fairly comprehensive description of the process and people involved sent to T2 over a week ago, requesting direction from her for some of the work, to back up the stats. I had no way of knowing that D would do something like that nor did I intend to make anyone look bad by documenting what I had worked on last month. Those were stats I was asked to keep.
D left early in the afternoon - said he was going away to the mountains for the weekend. T2 called a meeting for the rest of us to discuss the project scope and responsibilities. I guess I must have finally got through to them(or A did)because the tone of the meeting was a lot more respectful of the work I have done. B, C and I chatted for a bit about childhood experiences. Turns out we were all born - well nearly, my parents were on their way into town, I just didn't wait for the city limits - and raised in this city. That's extremely rare. Up until the '70's this was a pretty sleepy town - census around 1960 noted under 200,000 people. The boom in growth began when oil became a major economic driver because of global conditions. Most Calgarians are not homegrown. And so the cycle begun this morning closed in an unexpected way at work later.
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