Monday, November 16, 2015

Loving Paris more than the rest of the world

I understand why some people complain about the outpouring of support and solidarity with the victims of terrorist attacks in Paris in comparison to the trickle directed toward the victims in Beirut and the long list of people around the world who suffer from violence that they did nothing to deserve. The ubiquitous French flag filter on Facebook profile pictures can make it seem like some people’s lives matter and some don’t.

We’d live in a better world where people care most about the most serious problems, less about the less serious problems and so on down to the trivial—however we determine seriousness. But most people act on issues that touch their hearts and some places, like Paris, have made heart-touching a specialty. Many people around the world have had special moments in Paris; many more dream of having special moments there. Its long history as a beautiful, affluent and peaceful place (with its own upheavals now and again) have helped it worm its way into books, movies and songs which have added to and expanded  the city’s appeal. We think we know Paris even before we even set foot within its boundaries. Visitors often have their expected magical experience there, even if the city itself plays a supporting role to their imagination in providing it.

Places and cultures that have had rougher histories have not had the luxury of being able to brand so brilliantly, to extend their reach into the imaginations of citizens of dramatically different and far-flung cultures. Which isn’t fair. Those who have had a rougher history deserve more TLC a empathy, not less.

But people cannot turn off their emotions so easily. The fall of the World Trade Centre in New York overshadows the rest of the trauma of 9/11 in part because so many of us had been to or wanted to visit those buildings. When we hear “attacks in Paris,” most of us in the west can immediately conjure a visual image, even if it’s grossly inaccurate. It’s harder to do for places which need to be described to us in a sentence or paragraph or article before we can accurately place them on the map in our heads. Feelings hit faster and stronger than facts. Memories or fantasies of walks by the Seine overwhelm body count numbers.

Berating people doesn’t rewire this fundamental type of emotional connection. Often it makes the person more entrenched in their beliefs. Nobody wants to think that their “special person/place/thing” is an arbitrary fluke of history, something born of bias and hurtful to those who have not wormed their way into their attention with charm and good looks. We love who we love. We don't want to feel bad about our affections.

How do we make people care about people whose suffering they are not so familiar with? Those bonds need to transcend and probably predate the suffering itself. I visited Mumbai decades ago, loved it and was appalled when the city was attacked in 2008. Without thinking about it, my heart went out to those who were killed,  or merely terrified. I loved the city first, cried on its behalf it later.

Logic and argument rarely make a dent in people’s affections. Those who learn to appreciate the best of different cultures and different parts of the world are more likely to feel empathy with them when the worst happens. Not when they're distraught about some other place. 

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The travel budget was not as big as it first may appear

Pearson's AWAY magazine kept me busy this month for its business travel issue, covering destinations ranging from Columbus, Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Austin to Cape Town, South Africa.



Tuesday, September 08, 2015

Seven mistakes the movie Minority Report made about the future

When making the 2002 film Minority Report, about a policing system in the future Washington, DC, that use psychics to stop murders before they happen, Stephen Spielberg famously invited a group of experts to speculate on what the United States would look like in 2054, technologically speaking.

Certainly, the gesture-controlled screens used by Chief of PreCrime John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) were right on the money, even though the witnesses to Anderton’s swiping skills seem a little too impressed, considering the technology would have been around for more than 40 years by then. It’s like today being agog by someone’s effective microwave use.

I love the movie and rank it up there with Spielberg’s best and most philosophical. But with the hindsight (or foresight?) we have in 2015, it’s clear that many of the movie’s guesses are a little off.

  • Where is the geopositioning technology? PreCrime gets the names of victims and potential killers, and the time of the crime, which is very convenient. So most of its work is finding and getting to the location of the future crime. The widespread use of geopositioning in smart phones, coupled with the increasing use of drones, means that, by 2054, finding someone might be the easiest part of any criminal investigation. In Minority Report’s opening scene, the investigators work their asses off to figure out which Howard Marks is about to kill his wife and her lover. Even in 2015, they could have used Facebook to quickly find which Howard Marks was married, where he lived, whether he hung out and which had signs of unhappiness in his life. Getting to the crime? Gotta love jet packs. Waiting for them to be sold at Canadian Tire.

  • Much has been made of Minority Report’s depiction of personalized advertising, where ads call out the names of consumers from digital billboards. Again, smartphones have changed the course of marketing. Marketers don’t shout at us in public now and they likely won’t in the future. Instead, they whisper to us with flashes and beeps and vibrations from our phones, fitbits and maybe our watches or glasses. And the messaging will likely be much less hamfisted than a GAP hologram calling out, “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the GAP! How did those assorted tanktops work out for you?” Through social media and other relationship-building interaction, retailers will likely know exactly how things worked out before a consumer returns to the store again.

  • The GAP in 2054? Try H&M.

  • Cars won’t have steering wheels. When pods are travelling along tracks, the most unsafe thing is to give somebody the sense they can control it, as we’ve already learned from Google’s Self-Driving Car project. Spielberg obviously thought things out and figured that cars would drive themselves on special roadways in high-traffic areas, but would be handled in an old-fashioned way in more rural areas. Again, geopositioning technology made such a two-pronged approach unnecessary.

  • Moving pieces of plastic around to put images on screens. The transparent-hologramy plastic discs that John Anderton inserts into his home video projector are certainly cool, and the way he scrambles for them evokes pathos around his obsession with his dead son. When detectives pull larger plastic plates out of one screen-machine and stick them into another one, it conveys urgency and seriousness. But even today, we mostly move data through wifi, cellular data connections and, in a pinch, cables. In 2054, getting data from one place to another will be faster, less labour-intensive and require even less material—our concern about reducing waste should be manic by then. All John Anderton’s memories will clog up landfill.

  • Newspapers and paper photos. The paper photo is already a dying species, yet they abound in Minority Report.  Spielberg does make newspapers and magazines interactive and updatable, but doesn’t really account for the fact that each periodical will eventually consumed on a single object like a tablet. It’s true that future tablets may look and feel like paper. But the art of newspaper design will have changed by then. Periodicals of the future, whatever form they take, will not emulate the typography and layout of today’s newspapers because they will be an adaptation of tablet content and use Internet-style layouts. Traditional newspaper design will be long dead.

  • The need for psychic mutants to predict human behaviour. Big data, drawing from all the information we share about ourselves online, will make the world of Minority Report possible without a supernatural element (or the slavery element—those poor precogs!). Algorithms will interpret our posts and our pictures, using predictive patterns to figure out who’s going to go off the rails and, perhaps before the police are called in, subtly nudging possible perpetrators back from the edge of criminality. The law won’t have to storm in to stop crime; it will manipulate our online reality—increasingly becoming our primary reality—to change our mindset, reschedule encounters and warn potential victims of what may happen.

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Fully Furnished

I met David Furnish at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto's Yorkville and staff seemed to have no idea he was something of a big thing--we got bounced around a bit trying to get seated and had to firmly ask for a corner table even though the inside of the hotel restaurant was mid-afternoon empty.

Furnish was honest and humble. I think being chosen as parade marshal in his hometown had made him reflective about his life's journey from Scarborough to LA/Windsor/Etc. But I would say that our interaction was pretty formal until my prepared questions ended and we started talking about the cult Canadian musician Jane Siberry. I had interviewed her in 1996 for a Vancouver magazine I was editing; he had interviewed her the same year for Interview magazine, when her album Teenager came out.

We both agreed that she has cleared the way for the commercial success of the many female Canadian singer-songwriters who had followed (especially Sarah McLachlan). Even though Furnish had already talked to me in great detail about how he and Elton John parent their two kids, it seemed like his enthusiasm for Siberry was our first totally unguarded moment.

When you're married to one of the world's most famous men, I suppose, you probably welcome moments where you can speak about something with passion, where that passion won`t likely end up in the tabloid headlines.

Read the exclusive IN magazine here.
interview

Friday, May 15, 2015

If you don't like the political script, why not do a rewrite?

When people say they don’t think Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is up to the job of being PM—that he’s a lightweight or gaffe-prone, for example—I always think about how, even if they have formed this opinion on their own, it feeds into and is shaped by the Conservative party’s preferred narrative. Running the country is about competency, it goes, and Stephen Harper, whatever his other faults, is surely more competent than Justin Trudeau.

Competency is a tough narrative to compete with, especially considering that Canadians are a particular risk-adverse people. But you could reframe the question, “Who would be the best prime minister?” as something like, “Who has the best vision for the country?” Skills can be learned, attracted, appointed, bought or rented; vision, not so much. If Justin Trudeau were able to articulate a cohesive and attractive vision for Canada, Canadians might have confidence that he could call in the right people to make it happen. What does our future look like? Who are we in the world? Can we rise above pure politics to bring the country together? Of course, you can't just ask these questions to articulate a vision, you have to provide some sort of answer to them.

That’s why the Liberal support of Bill C-51, known as the Anti-Terrorism Act, seems particular odd and self-sabotaging. On a spectrum from “Protect Civil Liberties” to “Maximize Security,” the bill leans toward the latter, at least in public perception. And that direction seems to contradict the Liberal values of a country built on trust and reason rather than fear. Trudeau’s explanation of his support for the bill was sharply devoid of any philosophizing or even any real emotion.

“We are hopeful that the government is serious about reaching across the aisle to keep Canadians safe, while protecting our rights and our values. There are concerns with this bill, and we hear them. But we need to do what we can to keep Canadians safe. And I believe that many of the concerns with this bill will be addressed through Parliamentary oversight,” he said in his February remarks. “There are gaps in this bill, including on oversight and mandatory reviews. And we in the Liberal Party will offer amendments to address these gaps.”

Gaps, oversight, review, amendments? These words are absolutely beholding to the Conservative’s competency narrative. Trudeau is claiming the Liberals can be more fussy that the Conservatives if you give them a chance; the devil is in the details; civil liberty is important, but then again, so is security. His words, and even his way of defining the issue, neither build on the established Liberal brand at its best (the country we want, not the best political compromise we can manage) nor offer a new manifestation of the Liberal brand under Trudeau.


There might narratives other than vision that Justin Trudeau will use to get people to stop comparing his level-headedness to Harper’s. But Trudeau has so far failed to present one, so busy is he following the Conservatives script.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Customer service in an information vacuum

Last year when I wrote a little piece for Reader’s Digest Canada about how to get better customer service, one of the key themes was keeping your cool.

In retrospect, I feel a little weird about that advice since, personally, I’ve found that losing my cool—at least just a bit—can work wonders. Especially when most customer service agents are so intent on following a script, they treat anything the customer tells them as a nuisance not to be believed. Getting emotional is risky, but it can be a way to get an employee to abandon a templated approach and listen in order to figure out the real problem—and solve it.

Last week I heard weird sounds from behind my house. I got left the work I was doing on my computer and went outside to investigate. In the dark I could see a family of raccoons, screeching and screaming at the top of a utility pole, as if they had been chased up there by something. They were inching nervously out onto the communications wire that runs along the back of my yard, which butts up against the yards of several of my neighbours. I had never seen raccoons walk on wires like that before. It was quite a drama.

I went back to my computer to discover my Internet was out and that my phone wasn’t working. The next morning the phone was back, though too static-y to have a comfortable conversation.

To me the cause was pretty obvious. My Internet drops out periodically in the fall and spring when the squirrels are in a frenzy, and my phone line gets mildly static-y when it’s raining. The weight of the raccoons seems to be the last straw for a communications line that was moody at the best of times. When a Bell technician visited last year when I changed my Internet plan, he told me the line was in bad shape and should be replaced, though the technician I scheduled to do that never showed up.

But trying talking about raccoons and chronic static problems to customer service people at my phone company, Primus. With each of the nine calls (or maybe more—I stopped counting) I had to make to solve the problem and with each of the two technicians who showed up, it was almost impossible to convince them that my theory—a raccoon-damaged line—could possibly be correct.

Had I restarted my modem? Yes, more than a dozen times. Was the cable to the modem less than three feet long? Yes, for more than a decade. Yes, there were filters on the phone line and, as far as I knew, they hadn’t dematerialized the night of the raccoon drama.

I understand that a lot of telecom customers don’t understand tech stuff. I understand that if I hadn’t seen the raccoons on the line that I wouldn’t have had any idea what might have caused the Internet outage and the phone static—it was an unusual piece of evidence to have. I understand that telecom companies want to troubleshoot simple things before investing time and money into fixing hardware. But to be disbelieved, dismissed and condescended to for the better part of a week was exasperating.

After a couple of days, the phone static became episodic; only 70 per cent or so my calls were inaudible. So I had one customer service agent tell me that my line was just fine because they could hear me just fine, so if I was still having an Internet problem—had I reset the modem? She got angry with me when I interrupted her wildly inaccurate description of my problem. The fact that I had successfully been using my phone and Internet for years, had seen the line being damaged and had talked to several other agents, some of who agreed with me, was irrelevant to her. She had her script and she was sticking to it. By this time, I had realized that the customer service ticket for my problem was wildly inaccurate, failing even to note that I had no Internet service. Yet for everyone I talked to, this ticket was the truth and I, as the customer, was an obstacle to the truth. It was customer service as theatre, not problem-solving. But what a depressing show it was.

Finally a Bell technician arrived. My telecom, Primus, rents Bell’s lines so Bell is kind of the landlord in this situation, Primus is the tenant and I, apparently, play the role of subletter (no wonder nobody listened to me). The technician agreed the outside lines were static-y and in bad shape. Yes, they should be fixed. But he needed to go up a pole in my neighbour’s yard to get to the lines and my neighbour’s yard was locked. I needed to schedule another technician to visit when I would be sure there’d be access. (It turns out the Bell technician hadn’t bothered to knock on the door of my neighbour who was home and would have readily given him access.)

When the second technician arrived the next day, it was like none of my previous conversations or the previous technician’s visited had ever happened. I had to tell him four times that the Internet went out moments after raccoons stepped onto the wire. He didn’t seem to believe me. Had I restarted my modem? At the time of his visit, the phone wasn’t especially static-y. He fiddled with some switches on the hub down the street, took note of the absence of static and told me the problem was fixed. If I was still having Internet problems, which I was, I’d have to call tech support again—the line was fine.

That’s when I lost it. Didn’t the guy from yesterday file a report? Didn’t you read it? If the problem is intermittent, as I’ve said innumerable times, then of course, the line may be fine right now—that doesn’t mean it’s fixed. Why doesn’t my not having Internet and having a static-y phone for days outweigh the 10 minutes you’ve been here? Why can’t you just believe me and fix the problem I’m describing to you? Why can’t you just fix the problem? Why can’t you just fix the problem?

As I was pleading with him, the Bell guy fell silent, walked away from me, got in his van and drove away as I stood there, aghast. Primus called me on my cell to tell me the problem had been fixed. “How would you know?” My Internet was still out and the static had already come back on the phone line. But the technician had already called to close the ticket and the ticket had been closed.

Then I realized what bothered me even more than not being listened to as a customer—that the various customer service agents, tech support people, dispatchers, managers and technicians don’t talk to or listen to each other except to report “Job done, clear the ticket.” Each interaction had taken place in a vacuum, as if no information had previously been collected or changed hand. Today’s technician doesn’t build on the work of yesterday’s; he starts from scratch.

But if companies aren’t going to listen to their customers, their employees should at least be listening to each other. This failure to absorb and share information is not only infuriating for customers, it costs companies money as they chase easy solutions to non-problems even though, after more phone calls and more false steps and more aborted technician visits, they will eventually have to fix the real problem—or lose the customer.

My story has something of a happy ending. After my emotional pleading with the second Bell technician to please, please, please fix the cable, he had driven away. I went back in the housing feeling totally defeated. Who needs phone and Internet anyway?

Fifteen minutes later, I saw the technician up on top of the pole, right where the raccoons had been four days earlier. He strung new cable into my backyard.

The technician had taken pity on a desperate man, had listened to the desperate man and, against all conventional wisdom, taken action.

Less than 15 minutes later, the static was gone and my Internet worked perfectly. The customer who had been dismissed at every step of the way had been right all along.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Up, up and AWAY

Though it came out in December, I just found an online copy of Toronto Pearson's new AWAY magazine now. I contributed features on Mumbai, Mexico City and Bombardier's new luxury jet, and interviewed the "ice queen" of the winter de-icing program.