Tag Archives: business

The Other Side of the Vagrancy Coin

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By Jason Menard

It’s all too easy in our politically correct world to simply label people who express concerns about vagrancy as insensitive, elitist, or ignorant. The one idea we are reluctant to embrace the fact that they may be right.

We all want to do and say the right things, but sometimes it’s hard to reconcile what’s right and what’s real. Such is the case with the issue of vagrancy in the downtown core.

I do not spend as much time downtown as I would like. Or, more appropriately, I don’t spend as much time downtown as I think I should. For me, more conveniently located stores and lack of time have been the greatest factors in this reality. And the one excuse that many use always seemed false to me – until this weekend.

Fear.

We have reports from store owners saying that the presence of vagrants scares away potential clients. And I, like many others, were quick to dismiss these complaints as an indication that some people just aren’t sensitive to the needs of others. These vagrants are down on their luck and simply trying to survive. For whatever reasons or demons that drove them to this state, the fact of the matter is that vagrancy is the state in which they now find themselves.

It’s too easy to hold onto our left-wing, love everyone mentality when we’re looking through the green-tinted windows of our ivory towers. It’s when you get on the street level that the complexities of the problem truly reveal themselves.

Driving downtown on a lazy Sunday, I was struck by the sheer volume of down-on-their-luck men hanging around the corner of Horton and Wellington. It’s understandable due to the mission tucked in a little down the side street there, but to see the number was a stark reminder of how lucky we are.

But just as telling were the empty storefronts and depressed area that served as a backdrop for this collection of people. It’s a reminder of the impact that vagrancy can have on a region.

As one who loves to walk – and I spend as much time as I can walking the downtown streets, whether here, in Montreal, or Toronto, I take note of my surroundings. And looking at the collection of people standing around there, I thought to myself that this would be one path that I’d avoid.

Now, I’m a 33-year-old male. I’m about six-feet-tall and find myself wavering between the good and bad side of 200 pounds. And I was given pause to stop. What about my wife? What about my young son and daughter? Would they be comfortable walking through that environment? By extension, would an elderly couple, or group of young girls feel secure in the same situation? Can we not see that this may have an impact on people’s decisions on where and when to shop?

Obviously not everyone that’s a vagrant is violent. But there are some – just as there are in all walks of life – who can be violent, or who may be unstable. Are you willing to risk that type of encounter when there are malls and other shopping venues scattered throughout the city?

So what’s the solution? Simply shuffling vagrants off and putting them out of sight is akin to putting a bandage on the arm of someone who has cancer – it’s ineffective and eventually the patient dies from within. The issue of vagrancy is one that we have to tackle on a societal basis. We need to come up with programs and services to keep people off the street and help them either get the support they need, or reintegrate them into society. Now that’s easy to say, but seemingly impossible to do. The fact of the matter is that there is no fast and easy solution to homelessness here.

But the most important thing we need to do is stop being so quick to condemn those who are speaking only their truth. The idea of a storefront owner complaining about the presence of vagrants may appear to be callous, but it is their reality. Shoppers have choices and will stay away if they feel uncomfortable.

That may not represent the best that humanity has to offer, but it’s a truth nonetheless. Only listening to the truths that make us feel good while ignoring the realities that may not be as politically correct or uplifting doesn’t help us solve any of the problems that we face.

When you actually take a moment to walk a few steps in someone else’s shoes, then it’s a little easier to see that the path isn’t as rosy as we’d like to believe. And maybe by putting foot to pavement and getting a first-hand view of the problem, we can find some better solutions along the way.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

A Formal Look at Dress

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By Jason Menard

Looking for a way to attract attention at your workplace? Nowadays, the best way to stand apart from the crowd is to wear a suit!

Save for lawyers and a few other choice professions, formal attire has gone the way of the dinosaur. Business casual is the style of choice and most places will even allow jeans on casual Fridays – or, in some locations, all the time.

Working in a business casual environment, my workday wardrobe largely consists of Dockers pants, button-down Oxfords and shirts, the odd polo, and the even odder sweater (odd in terms of frequency of wear – not the fact that they have little bunnies or kitties knitted on them). And while I like to inject my wardrobe with a little colour – a little pink here, a touch of lavender there, a splash of burgundy to round it out – many other guys in my situation seem to prefer to alternate between shades of drab.

In the end, we’re pretty homogenous in our attire. A dress shirt, unbuttoned at the top, casual slacks, and black shoes (because, as Frank Zappa once said, brown shoes don’t make it…). Today’s business casual can be summed up as functional, more-or-less fashionable (at least nothing that will bite us in the Dockers-clad ass 20 years from now), and comfortable.

However, despite the prevalence of business casual, there are still times when we have to dust off the old suit and put it on for the more formal occasions: awards brunches, business dinners, and the like. And the person then returning to their normal work environment is greeted with, “So, you have a job interview today?” or “Wow, you’re all dressed-up today.”

Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic for a time that never truly existed, but I find it sad that the suit is such an anomaly in the business world. I may be odd, but I like wearing a tie. I enjoy getting dressed up once in a while. Far from being stuffy and rigid, I find that sometimes formality helps you feel more professional and, by extension, more important. There’s really nothing wrong with being dapper.

Now, I’m saying that as a 33-year-old man who has grown up in a world – and worked in corporate environments – where business casual has been the norm. My suits have traditionally been reserved for weddings, funerals, job interviews, and the odd business-related function. And when I’ve traded my corporate hat for the old press cap, sometimes the clothing standards have seemed to get even worse.

But I was never forced to wear a suit and tie every day. While the generations before me may have felt that the liberating advent of business casual was an emancipation from the shackles of formal wear, for me there’s still the excitement of dressing up. I enjoy tying my own tie and ensuring that the knot is correct and the length is just right. I appreciate some of the smaller details, occasionally breaking out an antique tie clip and positioning it just so. To me, due to its relative infrequency, dressing up is an event – not an imposition.

That being said, perhaps the novelty would wear off if I was mandated to wear a suit each and every day. The conversations I have with my peers where we revel in the special joy of playing dress-up, adult style, simply wouldn’t exist. Collars that seem so prim and proper would quickly become stiff, constricting, and suffocating. The liberating feeling that formality provides would rapidly be replaced by an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia.

And even if I wanted to dress more formally, I couldn’t realistically do it in my environment. Even on the odd day where I’ve worn a tie to work – usually due to an after-work, media-related engagement – I’ve attracted comments and stares. But yet I still yearn for the days of yore.

I’d love to wear a fedora each and every day: tipping my hat in respect to women passing me on the street; and brushing snow off the brim as I hang it on the suddenly useful hat rack. Wearing an overcoat, a suit, and a tie – a product of a previous generation being reborn in today’s more casual confines.

But that’s the 33-year-old talking. The one who has never been forced to wear a tie. The one who looks back at old photos and imagines a time that may never have existed. And the one who is able to yearn for a periodic return to formality from the comfortable setting that business casual affords.

The good old days are never as good as we remember them. And maybe they’re not as good as we’d like to imagine them to be. But still, sometimes, I wish formality wasn’t just reserved for formal occasions.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Home for a Rest

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By Jason Menard

The Canadian band Spirit of the West once penned a rollicking pub anthem recounting about how their bar-hopping vacation travels often leave them more exhausted than when they left. Married with two kids, pub crawling is no longer a part of our vacations, but the sentiment is still the same. Although our current lifestyle is more akin to the Spirit of the Mid-West, these so-called vacations do leave us in need of coming Home for a Rest.

Due to the fact that a majority of our family and friends live in Montreal, our vacations consist of heading back home, staying at the in-laws, and using it as a base from which we can do our daily forays throughout la belle province to catch up with old friends, revisit old haunts, and re-clog arteries at favoured restaurants. Compounding the itinerary is the desire to visit other family living in the Ottawa region.

What it amounts to is a lot of time behind the wheel, a lot of wonderful times and delicious meals, a lot of packing and unpacking, and – of course – a long day of travel home culminating in a scant few hours before waking up and going to work the next day (or that same day, as the case may be.)

Now, while I may be able to leave the day-to-day office job behind physically, mentally the separation is a different matter. Not only is there the multiple-day hustle before you leave to ensure that everything runs smoothly once you leave, but there’s also the knowledge that there’s going to be a stack of work waiting for you upon your return. And that lovely invention known as e-mail only makes it worse – and many of us count our e-mails in the hundreds on a good day.

And for those of us with our own businesses, vacations rarely are actual vacations. There’s still the matter of keeping up with clients, meeting deadlines when the mind would rather be elsewhere, and sneaking a few minutes of work time here and there during the day.

Getting back to work is like trying to merge onto the Autobahn from a dead stop. Everyone else is in fifth gear moving with the flow of traffic, and you’re stuck trying to get back into the game while your mind would still rather be playing. In fact, the stress of picking up where you left off is often worse than whatever stresses you were trying to put behind you in the first place! The first day is overwhelming, so many things needing your attention, so little capability to get moving, and so little desire to tackle anything. Eventually you just have to start somewhere and chip away at the pile.

We got home early Thursday morning. We unpacked this weekend. We’ve yet to go to the grocery store, preferring to pick up what we need for the day. Vacation may be over, but real life hasn’t yet caught up. Oddly enough, while vacation is enjoyable, the routine of day-to-day may be the most relaxing. There’s a comfort in familiarity, there’s something relaxing about being surrounded by your own things, and – no matter how hospitable your hosts may be – there’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed.

Yes, the key to surviving vacations is that first weekend back. Forget the chores, forget the obligations, just rest. A couple of lazy days are the key to transitioning back to life and making any vacation successful.

Now, there are a few obvious solutions to combating vacation fatigue and the subsequent work re-integration stresses. One, you could forgo vacations. OK, there are a couple of realistic solutions at hand: vacation at home, or head south to an all-inclusive resort.

Unfortunately, both of those, while appealing, miss out on what the best part of vacations is: sharing time with friends and family, in a more relaxed atmosphere, without the pressures of schedules, obligations, or deadlines. Sure, those stressors exist, but getting away from it all – even if means that you’re only able to loosen the tether that’s binding you to the everyday – makes it all worthwhile in the long run.

Spirit of the West had it right all along. And although nights of drunken revelry are long behind me, pub crawls have been replaced by cross-province jaunts to catch up with friends and family, and the only ones having too much to drink and throwing up now are our friends’ babies, vacations are truly just a prelude to the real relaxation – when we get to come home for a rest.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Corporate Verbal Hamster Bane of Commerce

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By Jason Menard

Navigating the murky waters of corporate communications can be an eventful journey – creatures once thought to be extinct in the real world continue to thrive. In fact, there is one creature that does not just ignore Darwinian teaching – it literally defies evolutionary theory by its existence: the Corporate Verbal Hamster.

Those who suffer from Corporate Verbal Hamster Syndrome (heretofore known as CVHS) are amazingly adept at grinding the wheels of commerce to a halt. While the condition is not contagious and – unfortunately – not fatal, it does impact the lives and attitudes of those who are subjected to the corporate denizen infected with this condition.

The Corporate Verbal Hamster is so named because it continuously spews forth a stream of words, regardless of whether or not their opinion has been solicited or is even warranted. In meetings, this is the one person who must insert their commentary – I refrain from saying two cents, because I don’t want to overvalue their input – not just into each and every discussion, but into each and every phrase.

Like a human punctuation mark, one’s sentence apparently isn’t complete without the Corporate Verbal Hamster adding his or her words.

The sad thing about the Corporate Verbal Hamster is that they rarely add anything new or interesting to the conversation. Most often, the recycle or summarize statements that were able to stand up quite nicely on their own, thank you. Due to the fact that their mouths are constantly moving, their brains do not have the opportunity to engage in free and original thought, occupied instead by the need to focus on parroting back what is said.

Although perhaps that statement is not exactly fair. To the parrot.

You see, the average parrot has a little more common courtesy and social grace than the Corporate Verbal Hamster. To parrot is to repeat what someone else has said – thereby inferring that the parrot has at least allowed the original speaker (with the original thought) to finish the statement. The Corporate Verbal Hamster begins the repetition often in the middle of the original speaker’s sentence, preferring to complete it for him or her – and usually getting the idea or concept wrong, due to the fact that CVHS does not include premonitions or psychic ability as a side effect.

So frustrations mount, those who are easily dominated in speech sit back preferring not to engage in a war of uttering words with the Hamster, and nothing gets done. Because the Hamster has no original ideas and continues to utter the same things, pausing only briefly for half-breaths (taking a full one is too long), nothing new gets discussed and hours of potentially lucrative and innovative work time gets sacrificed at the feet of the Hamster’s affliction.

Unfortunately, management is often blind to CVHS, or unwilling to get involved. Putting it out of its – or more likely our own – misery is not an option either. Not for any moral or legal reasons, but rather simply physiological ones. Nay, one cannot starve this vile creature into submission as it feeds upon its own ego. Much as a flower uses photosynthesis to convert light energy into life-sustaining chemical energy like glucose, the Corporate Verbal Hamster is able to appropriate other people’s ideas and words and rehash them, making them their own and sustaining their very livelihood at the expense of others.

Like the Colgate Flip-Top Kids, this nefarious corporate beast suffers from a jaw seemingly on a hinge, unable to stay closed of its own volition. As such, it continues to open and shut, uttering inanities and filling the air with unwanted air pollution.

Yet, instead of simply filtering into the background like ambient noise, the Corporate Verbal Hamster’s words hang heavily around the meeting table, like the Sword of Damocles, weighing people down into submission.

So is there a solution? Should not the Hamster’s aura of intelligence be pierced by those realizing that the ideas and thoughts spewed forth are appropriated and not originated? Sadly, no. That’s not the way corporations work. The work gets done, often in spite of these people. They become isolated from the group, which only serves to feed the beast as the resentment of being ostracized only causes the Hamster to increase its sense of superiority.

Thankfully, with e-mail and new technologies, the Corporate Verbal Hamster is often restricted in its environment – its reach stunted by turn-based communications devices. And in today’s increasingly global and technologically based economy, that’s all we can hope for.

Corporations will survive in spite of themselves. And like groundhogs on a golf course, the Corporate Verbal Hamster is just one rodent that we’ve grown to work around. Until there’s a cure for CVHS, that’s the best we can do.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Oh the Humanity!

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By Jason Menard

Three hours – 40 e-mails. And that’s a quiet day. Anyone else think that’s excessive? Anyone else feel that cubicle-dwellers are just putting up more walls around themselves by trading expediency for human contact?

It’s not a new concept, it’s not a new idea, but our compartmentalized lives are negating the delicate art of human interaction. In fact, in the office environment I work, I can go days without knowing whether or not co-workers that share the same immediate office space as I are even here!

But whose fault is that? Is it a product of some faceless, omnipotent bureaucratic force – or is it the fact that I get so self-absorbed in myself and my work that I don’t make an effort to walk the 20 feet to see who’s there?

We’re only human, so it’s normal that we look to blame someone, or something, else for our trials and tribulations. However, this loss of human contact can’t be blamed on e-mails, Instant Messaging, or the telephone – the blame lies squarely at our own two feet. And it’s time for us to deal with it.

E-mail conversations are increasingly replacing simple chats as the preferred method of doing business. As opposed to actually GOING to someone’s desk and addressing an issue face to face, we e-mail a conversation. But, like long-distance chess, the end result may be the same, but the time between commencement and conclusion can be interminable.

I’ve had e-mail discussions that have lasted all day, when in reality the simple act of picking up the phone and calling someone – or, perish the thought, actually getting up and talking to them face-to-face – would have rendered the entire discussion complete within a couple of minutes.

But today’s employee measures efficiency not in the time it takes to complete a task, but in the number of tasks that they’re able to juggle at any one time. Multi-tasking is simply a fact of life in today’s hectic business environment, so the idea of dedicating a block of time to one topic – and only one! – is anathema to many people. By keeping their butts firmly ensconced in their chair, they’re able to have access to a wide range of activities. However, by walking away from the desk – cutting the electronic umbilical cord, if you will – we find ourselves lost and alone, disconnected from the so-called lifelines that have become so much a part of us.

Remaining sedentary, in the business world, can often be perceived as being productive. And getting up, walking around, and talking face-to-face with people can be perceived by others as a lack of commitment, wasting time, or – to put it bluntly in biz-speak – having too-familiar relations with a member of the canis familiaris species.

Let’s not vilify e-mail completely. Let’s acknowledge that e-mail has the power to bring people closer together and has completely revitalized the lost art of letter-writing (however, it appears to have not brought back a commensurate resurrection of grammar and spelling proficiency). I keep in touch with friends and family living in far-off places much easier than before the advent of electronic communications. Firing off an e-mail, and even attaching a few pictures, is a cheap, easy, and almost-immediate way for people to keep in touch.

But in the business world we have to prioritize networking, communications, and social interaction. Getting up to talk about an issue with a co-worker isn’t just socially rewarding – it’s expedient, productive, and effective. Importantly, it positively impacts the bottom line.

Tone, subtlety, sarcasm, humour, innuendo – all can get lost in the process of e-mailing someone. Real feelings can be hurt by virtual world, and often these are caused by a misrepresentation of the written word reflecting off a cold, emotionless screen. You don’t get that ambiguity to the same extent in face-to-face communications.

In the end, no matter what business you’re in, your end product’s target is human. So why don’t we involve more humanity in the process? E-mail is a tool, that’s it – it shouldn’t be the whole tool box. And I’d rather have a face-to-face with a repairman than a hammer any day – it’s a whole lot less painful.

The next time you go to send an e-mail, consider whether a more personal approach may serve you better. After all, we’re only human, right?

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved