Op-Ed
Several years ago, before I really knew them, some friends of mine bought themselves a first-generation Prius, even though the technology was still a little buggy, the power output not great, and the automotive industry was still blindly and blithely fighting the reduce-fossil-fuel-consumption movement on many fronts. In their minds, it was the best way they could think of to support change, and encourage the marketplace to seriously consider alternatives to Doing Things The Way Things Have Always Been Done.
With cars becoming an exorbitant luxury and an ecological enemy, fewer people were buying them, and as sales dropped and Motor Corporations tried to trim their bottom lines everywhere they could, they ran afoul of Unionized Labour who, fearing for their job security in the face of an ever-changing market and new corporate dietary budget requirements, held to their own self-serving needs and held the corporations hostage until some kind of compromise could be reached that at least temporarily abated the fears. Gradually the automotive industry is coming around to embracing new technologies for their products, but increasingly the consumer market is driving itself into looking at alternatives that meet their own and global needs. Discussing alternatives, and not why they won't work but how they might be made *to work*, has become a consuming passion for many people with an activism bent. Alternatives that turn away from Big Corporation and Unionized Labour are actively sought, encouraged, nourished. Alternatives are good.
Now replace "automotive industry" with "Canada Post Corporation", and suddenly it seems like discussing alternatives is profoundly unwelcome. I made an op-ed comment in my FB this morning with a link to an article whose opinions on the union shenanigans I wholly endorse, and the blowback has been interesting to watch (I can't get to FB from work but I get email notifications of commentary arrival).
Unlike owning a car, postal service is considered essential. I would argue that, with a few exceptions, it need not be. Granted, not everyone has access to the easy technology that simplifies getting away from reliance on any particular service; rural areas are a good example of that, where dial-up is still slow and expensive to those who have it, and not everyone does (hell, even in urban centres not everyone does). I grew up in farmland; the farm on which I spent a large chunk of my childhood, and my grandparents' property for many years thereafter, still used party lines for phone service. When we moved into town, for several years our section of town was between postal routes, because there weren't enough carriers to cover every area, so we had to go downtown to pick up and mail whatever needed to be picked up or mailed. It was a bit of a hike to do on foot, but not undoable, so in good weather, I often got tagged with that errand. On the farm, the nearest postal drop was a 15 minute drive from us, in Bond Head, or 20 minutes to Beeton. When delivery service couldn't get to us (as often happened in the winter) we had to go get any backlog ourselves.
The point is, it was inconvenient, but we did it and we didn't think about it. It wasn't until much, much later that things became easier enough to take for granted, and I think that's where culturally we start to slide down that slippery slope toward feeling entitled to anything that makes our lives easier. I'm reasonably sure that, had there been viable alternatives to relying on Postal Service in the early 1970s, my father would have been all over that. When we finally *did* get home carrier service, the idea of going downtown for mail became abhorrent to my parents, and out-bound mail still got handed off between them or to me at every available opportunity. Convenience is great, but it suddenly made doing the thing we used to do without thought a Hated Thing. Nowadays, it *still* seems like we're willing to give up our oil-consuming cars and take to foot, pedal, public transit, or alternatively-fueled personal vehicles... but don't make me walk any further than my mailbox to get my mail, dagnabit!
The growing pains of making significant infrastructure changes are no-one's idea of a good time, so - as FB proved to me today - we're willing to invest a lot of time and energy poo-pooing alternatives or justifying why things can't or won't change. But, just as the automotive industry had to change to keep up with new demands, I personally support the idea of changes that move us away from a dependency on a unionized postal service, especially if it's government-deemed to be "essential". Is it going to take a lot of push to, say, increase the number of public-access terminals in places easier to get to for those who don't have connective devices of their own, or force business models to adapt to online payment methods that will certainly change their accounting methodologies? Absolutely. Is it going to suck for those people who have to wade through the slings and arrows of outrages pressure to not change or change back, or simply lament about how much easier things were in the Good Old Days, when all we had to worry about was a union strike bringing an entire system to its knees? Heck, yeah!
Just because change is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. And just because, individually or as a society, we may not like any (or all) of the alternatives on the table doesn't mean they're not viable, nor that they are the *only* alternatives. Dissatisfaction is normally what opens the dialogues for change, but the suggestion that we should maybe consider migrating away from a dependency on a monolithic entity such as Canada Post got most of the respondents up in arms at the very idea of Doing Something Differently. Some of the biggest anti-proponents in the FB thread today have been businesspeople who depend on receiving client payments through the very postal service that is currently under siege. You'd think we'd (and yes, I put myself in that category, as my freelance clients currently pay by mailed cheque) be the first ones to the front of the line, advocating for different options. A comment thread showed me otherwise. So I'm left wondering, do we feel entitled to our perception of the plausible convenience provided by the current system? Or is there something else going on that prevents us and others from standing up and saying, "No, I won't do business through avenues that can dramatically interfere with my business, and if you don't have a way of meeting me in that space, let's find a solution that will." Or let's find another client (yes, I know... client denial is a luxury many entrepreneurs cannot or choose not to afford).
I don't remember where I first encountered the human-interaction rule for dealing with nay-sayers: Don't invest time talking about why things can't or won't work, come up alternatives and strategies for change that *can* work; don't shoot down someone else's idea unless or until you're prepared to come up with a reasoned and reasonable suggestion of your own. And just because an idea seems unpalatable on the surface, doesn't mean there's no merit there, but when a nay-sayer jumps automatically to "That's a dumb-assed idea, Arnora, what the fuck are you smoking *today*??", odds are good there hasn't really been any effort to understand where the suggestion is coming from or what relative merit someone else might see in it.
If you're not willing to engage in the dialogue, that's cool; don't engage. But I strongly believe there is plenty of room to have a very lively dialogue about change that, hey, we could actually have as a *dialogue*!
Or, y'know, we can stay entrenched in our wallowing entitlements (and yes, I put myself in that category regarding a number of issues; have you *seen* my car??1 :) until we stop receiving client payments at all or have our utilities cut off or houses foreclosed because we can't receive statements or mail in payments, or whatever other dire predictions seem relevant. we're being held over a unionized barrel, and while I'm all for the power of collective bargaining, I don't see continuing to support a unionized Postal Service as being the right answer. And with the advent of all kinds of alternative technologies supporting varying forms of business and personal connectivity, even knowing what it's like to live in a world where inconvenience was just part of the day's errand schedule and no-one thought it a problem, I don't think leaving the Postal Service listed as an "essential service" for much longer is the answer, either.
...which is to say, when I get home I'm going to see what bill statements I still get mailed in hardcopy, and start transferring what I can to e-statements. Sure, there are still bugs in the process, but if I don't support the changes I advocate the way my 1st-generation Prius-driving friends did, then I'm just one more cog keeping the monolithic corporation and its union in place, and I'd rather do things differently, thank you very much2.
1 - Don't get me wrong, as soon as there's a hybrid or electric car on the market capable of consistently generating and maintaining enough torque to operate under the kinds of loads my workhorse vehicles MUST be required to manage, I'm totally jumping off the fossil-fuel train and into something far more ecologically sound. That day is not too far off from the sound of things, but as that day is not today, nor tomorrow, nor really as soon as I need it to be, I'm not giving up my car just yet.
2 - I guess it's time to bug $FREELANCECLIENT about options for electronic billing and payment, then. I don't hold out much hope, in the same way that my other entrepreneurial friends do not, of effecting change, but at least if we start putting the bug in enough ears, and asking for e-payment support often enough, the gears will turn; slowly, but they'll turn.
With cars becoming an exorbitant luxury and an ecological enemy, fewer people were buying them, and as sales dropped and Motor Corporations tried to trim their bottom lines everywhere they could, they ran afoul of Unionized Labour who, fearing for their job security in the face of an ever-changing market and new corporate dietary budget requirements, held to their own self-serving needs and held the corporations hostage until some kind of compromise could be reached that at least temporarily abated the fears. Gradually the automotive industry is coming around to embracing new technologies for their products, but increasingly the consumer market is driving itself into looking at alternatives that meet their own and global needs. Discussing alternatives, and not why they won't work but how they might be made *to work*, has become a consuming passion for many people with an activism bent. Alternatives that turn away from Big Corporation and Unionized Labour are actively sought, encouraged, nourished. Alternatives are good.
Now replace "automotive industry" with "Canada Post Corporation", and suddenly it seems like discussing alternatives is profoundly unwelcome. I made an op-ed comment in my FB this morning with a link to an article whose opinions on the union shenanigans I wholly endorse, and the blowback has been interesting to watch (I can't get to FB from work but I get email notifications of commentary arrival).
Unlike owning a car, postal service is considered essential. I would argue that, with a few exceptions, it need not be. Granted, not everyone has access to the easy technology that simplifies getting away from reliance on any particular service; rural areas are a good example of that, where dial-up is still slow and expensive to those who have it, and not everyone does (hell, even in urban centres not everyone does). I grew up in farmland; the farm on which I spent a large chunk of my childhood, and my grandparents' property for many years thereafter, still used party lines for phone service. When we moved into town, for several years our section of town was between postal routes, because there weren't enough carriers to cover every area, so we had to go downtown to pick up and mail whatever needed to be picked up or mailed. It was a bit of a hike to do on foot, but not undoable, so in good weather, I often got tagged with that errand. On the farm, the nearest postal drop was a 15 minute drive from us, in Bond Head, or 20 minutes to Beeton. When delivery service couldn't get to us (as often happened in the winter) we had to go get any backlog ourselves.
The point is, it was inconvenient, but we did it and we didn't think about it. It wasn't until much, much later that things became easier enough to take for granted, and I think that's where culturally we start to slide down that slippery slope toward feeling entitled to anything that makes our lives easier. I'm reasonably sure that, had there been viable alternatives to relying on Postal Service in the early 1970s, my father would have been all over that. When we finally *did* get home carrier service, the idea of going downtown for mail became abhorrent to my parents, and out-bound mail still got handed off between them or to me at every available opportunity. Convenience is great, but it suddenly made doing the thing we used to do without thought a Hated Thing. Nowadays, it *still* seems like we're willing to give up our oil-consuming cars and take to foot, pedal, public transit, or alternatively-fueled personal vehicles... but don't make me walk any further than my mailbox to get my mail, dagnabit!
The growing pains of making significant infrastructure changes are no-one's idea of a good time, so - as FB proved to me today - we're willing to invest a lot of time and energy poo-pooing alternatives or justifying why things can't or won't change. But, just as the automotive industry had to change to keep up with new demands, I personally support the idea of changes that move us away from a dependency on a unionized postal service, especially if it's government-deemed to be "essential". Is it going to take a lot of push to, say, increase the number of public-access terminals in places easier to get to for those who don't have connective devices of their own, or force business models to adapt to online payment methods that will certainly change their accounting methodologies? Absolutely. Is it going to suck for those people who have to wade through the slings and arrows of outrages pressure to not change or change back, or simply lament about how much easier things were in the Good Old Days, when all we had to worry about was a union strike bringing an entire system to its knees? Heck, yeah!
Just because change is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. And just because, individually or as a society, we may not like any (or all) of the alternatives on the table doesn't mean they're not viable, nor that they are the *only* alternatives. Dissatisfaction is normally what opens the dialogues for change, but the suggestion that we should maybe consider migrating away from a dependency on a monolithic entity such as Canada Post got most of the respondents up in arms at the very idea of Doing Something Differently. Some of the biggest anti-proponents in the FB thread today have been businesspeople who depend on receiving client payments through the very postal service that is currently under siege. You'd think we'd (and yes, I put myself in that category, as my freelance clients currently pay by mailed cheque) be the first ones to the front of the line, advocating for different options. A comment thread showed me otherwise. So I'm left wondering, do we feel entitled to our perception of the plausible convenience provided by the current system? Or is there something else going on that prevents us and others from standing up and saying, "No, I won't do business through avenues that can dramatically interfere with my business, and if you don't have a way of meeting me in that space, let's find a solution that will." Or let's find another client (yes, I know... client denial is a luxury many entrepreneurs cannot or choose not to afford).
I don't remember where I first encountered the human-interaction rule for dealing with nay-sayers: Don't invest time talking about why things can't or won't work, come up alternatives and strategies for change that *can* work; don't shoot down someone else's idea unless or until you're prepared to come up with a reasoned and reasonable suggestion of your own. And just because an idea seems unpalatable on the surface, doesn't mean there's no merit there, but when a nay-sayer jumps automatically to "That's a dumb-assed idea, Arnora, what the fuck are you smoking *today*??", odds are good there hasn't really been any effort to understand where the suggestion is coming from or what relative merit someone else might see in it.
If you're not willing to engage in the dialogue, that's cool; don't engage. But I strongly believe there is plenty of room to have a very lively dialogue about change that, hey, we could actually have as a *dialogue*!
Or, y'know, we can stay entrenched in our wallowing entitlements (and yes, I put myself in that category regarding a number of issues; have you *seen* my car??1 :) until we stop receiving client payments at all or have our utilities cut off or houses foreclosed because we can't receive statements or mail in payments, or whatever other dire predictions seem relevant. we're being held over a unionized barrel, and while I'm all for the power of collective bargaining, I don't see continuing to support a unionized Postal Service as being the right answer. And with the advent of all kinds of alternative technologies supporting varying forms of business and personal connectivity, even knowing what it's like to live in a world where inconvenience was just part of the day's errand schedule and no-one thought it a problem, I don't think leaving the Postal Service listed as an "essential service" for much longer is the answer, either.
...which is to say, when I get home I'm going to see what bill statements I still get mailed in hardcopy, and start transferring what I can to e-statements. Sure, there are still bugs in the process, but if I don't support the changes I advocate the way my 1st-generation Prius-driving friends did, then I'm just one more cog keeping the monolithic corporation and its union in place, and I'd rather do things differently, thank you very much2.
1 - Don't get me wrong, as soon as there's a hybrid or electric car on the market capable of consistently generating and maintaining enough torque to operate under the kinds of loads my workhorse vehicles MUST be required to manage, I'm totally jumping off the fossil-fuel train and into something far more ecologically sound. That day is not too far off from the sound of things, but as that day is not today, nor tomorrow, nor really as soon as I need it to be, I'm not giving up my car just yet.
2 - I guess it's time to bug $FREELANCECLIENT about options for electronic billing and payment, then. I don't hold out much hope, in the same way that my other entrepreneurial friends do not, of effecting change, but at least if we start putting the bug in enough ears, and asking for e-payment support often enough, the gears will turn; slowly, but they'll turn.