11:46 p.m. - 2004-04-23
Perception
Well today has been interesting - in a very weird way. I signed another community relations officer up today - that's all I need. He is a really interesting young guy with a well established career path in community outreach. I'm lucky to have him, I think. Talked with Elections Canada after and shared some concerns I had about the outreach program with the co-ordinator. It is unusual to have someone at that level agree with me, but he did. Apparently, he wrote up a lot of the preliminary instructions and documents with respect to the initiative. Someone else then "edited" them, then sent them out to us without his knowledge or approval. He was having difficulty with the same areas as I. Now I don't feel quite so stressed about it. I explained what I intended to do and why. He seemed fine with that, even though it is quite a departure from the instructions we were sent. He just requested that I send an essay in to him outlining what we discussed. Fair game.
Shortly after I got a strange call from one of my staff wanting to know when to report for work next week. Huh? I explained that it wasn't likely there would be a call until May at the earliest, but she insisted that I give her a tentative date "just in case". Fine.
Next call up was from a voter in another riding wanting me to give information out about the Returning Officer in her area. We aren't allowed to disclose that. "Well your Member of Parliament's office said I could get that from you." Excuse me -it is unlawful to disclose personnel information, including home address and phone numbers, to anyone. What were they thinking? Obviously they weren't thinking at all. The caller in question made statements I could verify weren't true so I had to question what her real purpose was. Sent off an e-mail to the MP's office protesting their behaviour. Some of the political parties are kind of underhanded when it comes to working with us, but putting my family and me at risk, as well as the other Returning Officer, by providing my home phone number to someone where they have no way of knowing their real intentions, is where I draw the line.
Right after there was a panicked call from one of the new Returning Officers. His Elections Canada computer had got the blue screen of death and several tries could not revive it. The support desk in Ottawa closes at 3 pm our time, so he was out of luck there. They are available on weekends, but he has his political contacts meeting tomorrow am and he had just got a call from one of the government suppliers letting him know that they were intending to start delivering election supplies to his office on Monday afternoon. Small problem there is that we are not allowed to lease or open offices until AFTER the Prime Minister calls the election. Yet here is this government ageny insisting that those are the instructions they have been given to follow. His computer crashing meant he couldn't even check his secure intranet e-mail to see if we had been put on notice for a possible drop of the writ. He asked if I had had a phone call from the agency - no I hadn't - ,but it explained the earlier call from that employee of mine, although not where she would have found out about the agency calls. Curious.
Anyway, because our EC computers are on dialup modems and our fax machines are on the same telephone line, I hadn't even opened up my e-mail, because I was leaving the line open for incoming faxes from the recruiting drive I began a few days ago. I logged on to my e-mail account, with the other RO still on the line, and found there was indeed a memo from our local representative. It was very cagily worded so that two or three interpretations were possible, but the last line said it was a test to ensure that plans could be implemented quickly, once Ottawa decided what it wanted to do. Uh huh.
The Returning Officer I was talking with then asked me if I could fax some information to him. No problem. Right. I had been receiving faxes all day and had sent a couple the day before, so I "knew" the machine was working and the line was open. However, each time I tried sending out a fax I got a message saying the number wasn't available. Took one hour and tries to several fax machines to realize that something in my machine's programming was amiss. Somehow the setting for dial out had been changed. Those bad cats. They love walking over the buttons on the fax machine, because it buzzes, hums and beeps when they do. Apparently, several random passes had been just enough to mess the "send" function up royally. Darn cats, laughing up their sleeves at us no doubt.
In my inbox today this was the good, the bad and the ugly. This was fascinating: NASA-supported researchers have developed software anyone can use to fly over Central America and survey its current environmental conditions. Far_Out. Next, I received a short note from my friend in the Middle East. It was a bit odd in it's wording and left me a bit puzzled. Maybe it was just the day. This homepage about countries social development in the southern hemisphere offered lots of interesting ideas to chew on one_world. When the picture doesn't make any sense, turn it another way - maybe it's one's point of view that's the problem, right? This article might give an idea how to reach the hearts and minds of the people trapped in the fighting in the Middle East circus, while this is a blog account by one of the people briefly kidnapped in Iraq this week kidnapped - tough reading, but it also references some of the others who were kidnapped too. Maybe my topsy turvy day wasn't so bad after all. It's all one's point of view, isn't it?
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