02:16 - 19.09.07
Revelations
I met one of the women I worked with exactly three years ago on the train today. One of the nice ones. She lost no time, and needed no prompting, to tell me what had gone on in her company since last I was there. There had been a restructuring of the company because of a takeover. It appears the company took advantage of that takeover to release some of the staff who were, or appeared to be, major liabilities for them while I was there. I needed to hear that justice had been served in some way, but I also felt sorry in some ways too. It is never happy news to hear of someone else's persoanl misfortune - ok, give or take a despot or two. The people surplussed as liabilities received severance packages that are usually pretty generous for permanent staff. I imagine that at least the opportunity to start again - maybe this time without robbing one's own source of income - is present. I enjoyed the update, simply because it brings a sense of completion and meaningfulness to the work I did for those departments needing to locate the source of their losses. If only I was given credit for that enough so as to find more work myself, eh? The irony of being the one having difficulty finding work isn't lost on me and i guess I would even laugh at it if income was arriving to pay my bills from some other source.
Three of my sons called me during the day while I was looking after my grand-daughter. Just a family type of day I guess. My youngest had headed off to Ohio last week and was on his way home. He called from his stop-over in Chicago, just to let me know that the trip was proceeding on schedule. He didn't have much to say about his visit, except that he had had significant practice time behind the wheel of a car. It had obviously made him feel a lot more confident about his next formal lesson. Number five son has called twice in the past two days. He just started his new job in an office setting. I think going from a restaurant atmosphere, where he was managing staff and resources, to a cubicle farm was quite a shock to his system. Even on the first call he was commenting on the office politics and not in a good way. The company that has hired him has a reputation for being extreme in that category. He just seemed to need reassurance - he even called and had a long chat with me last night. Just a major shift in perceptions of reality. Maybe some of my comments from my past assignments are starting to make sense to him now. I just told him to keep his head down and focus on the work. It is a protection even though one is never entirely safe when a power play is underway. Extended family work in other parts of the company, so he may find some resources there too - or not. Number one son just checked in to say that the new employer for his partner had put her in a special training program. He's happy about that except for the fact that he is being expected to find extra funds from his paycheque to cover the extra expenses of the training. He only has the one job right now and the hours for that have been cut, as they are seasonally. I was hoping he could manage to get by with just the one job this winter so that he can put on a bit of weight and get some rest. Don't know how that is going to pan out.
My grand-daughter was really teething today in fits and starts, so it messed up her normally predictable schedule. She was only halfway into her regular mid-day nap when her mom walked in the door. Woke her up I think. That was when I was on the phone with my youngest, loudspeaker in the background offering up-graded seats on his flight. Just distractions all around. My daughter-in-law just said she had forgot something that morning and scooted upstairs as I completed that phone call. The young miss came back downstairs in her mother's arms, generally out of sorts. She was cranky for a while, partly because she hadn't gotten enough sleep and partly because her mom's appearance had confused her sense of "rightness". She couldn't work out what should come next with her. Disoriented I guess. One of her uncles had the same personality type and always needed preparation for changes to his schedule when he was small. He was fine if he knew change was coming, but otherwise he could show a bit - or more - of temper. To distract her I fired up YouTube on their computer and found the funnier and more musical sequences from the Muppet show. She loved the Mahna Mahna skit and the Lime in the Coconut number featuring Kermit the frog. In fact she took to Kermit in a number of vignettes. She loves Sesame Street now - especially Elmo and Grover - but I don't recall seeing the Kermit character played at all. I guess it just isn't reproducible since Jim Henson died.
The big report on provincial oil and gas royalties and the balancing of the tax regime that is part of the financial structure here was released. Amazing how many people are finally acknowledging how deeply the elected provincial government was and is in the pockets of some of the more exploitive oil companies. In fairness, some companies really are and have been great corporate citizens, but there is a whole layer of the most powerful ones - including a couple of front companies set up by said political henchmen for their own pleasure and profit - who have openly been tagged with their fingers in the cookie jar to the considerable detriment of regular citizens of this province. In fact, the more vulnerable the person the greater the damage perpetrated on them since they couldn't fight back. There was heated debate going on in the one on-line newspaper that I receive but I think many of them have missed one gaping hole in the text of the report. It wasn't an oversight of the committee; it simply was not part of their mandate to explore.
That is the creative accounting practices - acknowledged in the report as non-accountable and non-transparent - regularly engaged in by those companies to hide even more of their gross profits in multiple registered sub-companies most of the big players keep hidden well out of sight in their "legacy", "amalgamated". "split" and "bankrupt" accounting programs all set up under various "gift" programs between the provincial government and the federal revenue over several decades. There are huge write-offs and write-downs of actual profits under some pretty questionable manipulation of that coding and number crunching. More disturbing to me are the places where huge sums of money appear to be sent flowing through bankrupt or failing shell companies that had no assets and no product or source of revenue to draw from. That money disappeared into black holes in terms of other shell companies - and one wonders..... The one comment made by the analyst addressing that issue with respect to the report released today was that the staff working for the federal auditors simply didn't have the background or the expertise to catch those shady forms of accounting. Uh huh.
Anyway it's garbage day tomorrow. I guess my youngest and I had better get it out to the alley before the forecasted "maybe" snow starts to fly. Good night dear diary.
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