Telling off a noisy customer

Many years ago (decades in fact) when I was a teenager I was working in a store and trying to serve a customer. I say trying because I could not hear over the racket another customer was making.

You see we had this old customer who would come into the store and try to scam the people at the checkout line by claiming they gave him the wrong purchases and/or the wrong change back and that he wanted his money back. And he did it all the time, at least once per week.

It got to be so annoying that my boss even put up a sign, just for him, saying that all sales are final after you leave the store.

The old guy would complain very loudly until the manager came, and then the manager would talk to him until he eventually gave up his scam and left. But he would be back next week trying to pull the same scam all over again.

So this one time I was trying to help this nice elderly lady who spoke almost in a whisper. I simply could not hear her over the racket the old noisy jerk was making...

So I yelled at him. "Would you shut the hell up! I am trying to help a customer here and I cannot hear her because you are making all that noise."

And then the most amazing thing happened. He was quiet.

And he avoided me from then onwards.

And when he did come in to pull his scam, he was quieter about it.

And eventually the old jerk stopped coming to the store. Maybe he died. I don't know.

But what I do know is that my boss talked to me after the incident. She didn't punish me or anything.

If anything I saw something in her eyes that showed her true feelings.

Pride.

Is my neighbour schizophrenic?

How would I know if my neighbour was schizophrenic?

It is an interesting question.

It isn't like I can just ask him, he might take that as a grave insult. (What if becomes even more paranoid and thinks I am watching him?)

I think I would have to look at his symptoms and behaviour.

While moving into our apartment my girlfriend and I learned that our neighbour was a bit of a jerk. (I am paraphrasing here, the other neighbours we met described him using a word that starts with A and ends with hole.)

So I found a list of schizophrenia symptoms...

• Social withdrawal
• Hostility or suspiciousness
• Deterioration of personal hygiene
• Flat, expressionless gaze
• Inability to cry or express joy
• Inappropriate laughter or crying
• Depression
• Oversleeping or insomnia
• Odd or irrational statements
• Forgetful; unable to concentrate
• Extreme reaction to criticism
• Strange use of words or way of speaking

So social withdrawal and hostility fits the jerk description. But what about his insistence that he hears banging noises (see my previous post on this topic) coming from our apartment?

Schizophrenic people sometimes hear voices. But noises???

So I tried googling that and found the following page:

http://www.schizophrenia.com/family/delusions.html

Which had this written on it:

"In the acute phases of schizophrenia, patients are likely to insist they are hearing voices that no one else can hear. Sometimes they hear noises, clicks or non-word sounds. On occasion they are disturbed by seeing, smelling or feeling things that others do not."

So... yeah. Apparently acute schizophrenia can cause people to hear noises. Like banging for example.

I know for example that I can sometimes hear music in my head. I know there is no actual sound there, but I am thinking about so strongly it feels like I can actually hear it.

But banging noises? Nope. That is crazy talk right there.

So as far as I can tell my crazy neighbour is suffering from acute schizophrenia and is delusional to the point that he is hearing sounds that are not really there.

Noisy Neighbour? Not Me!

I just accused by my neighbour of making loud banging noises for a large chunk of today.

Which is bizarre, because for a large chunk of today I was outside shopping and was not even home. When I was home I unpacked the things I purchased and then sat down to work on my blog. So the loudest things in our apartment was my girlfriend listening to music and me typing.

So as far as I am concerned he is barking up the wrong tree. He should be bothering some other neighbour with his complaints.

After my neighbour left my girlfriend joked:

"That couldn't have been us banging, we haven't had sex in days."

The Toronto Poetry Club - Should I join?

I recently learned that someone has restarted the Toronto Poetry Club on Meetup.com.

I am not much of a poet, but I am very tempted to join just so I can hone my poetry skills.

Two years ago the Toronto Poetry Club was an ever growing presence in Toronto's poetry community and then the president of the club (who had some serious issues that made him difficult to deal with) forced out the vice president. After that incident the club faltered without the leadership skills of the vice president and the president, unable to cope with stress fell off the wagon and let the poetry club slide into oblivion, which led to the Meetup group being deleted in December 2013.

But there is good news. Several poets from the group has convinced the old vice president to come back and restart the group from scratch, becoming the new president of the Toronto Poetry Club.

With these changes the group is now back on track with strong leadership, but is low on members since the old group (which had 300+ poets in it) was deleted and all their contact info was lost.

The new president also is bringing back the old Poetry Circle Meetings, which was far less intimidating for people who were too shy to stand up on a podium. Reading poetry aloud in a poetry circle is much less stressful for people who have difficulty with public speaking because the circle is more of a social atmosphere and welcoming.

One of the failures of the old president was that he was so focused on trying to make money off of the poetry club. He was trying to turn the poetry club into events where he could charge people fees for attending. The new president is having none of that. Every meeting is free to attend and there is a donation jar that goes towards supporting the website.

And all these factors tell me that this is a club that I would like to join. It makes me happy because a group like that needs strong leadership that is willing to put in the extra hours to make the group a success and isn't going to become a greedy jerk who wants to squeeze every member for their money.

As if poets weren't already poor enough.

But things are looking up. New leadership, new poetry meetings, a more comfortable / less formal meeting environment. These are positive changes.

So my feeling is that the Toronto Poetry Club has my vote of confidence. I will be signing up for the next meeting for sure.

My Rant on Playing Dumb

On Sunday I had an argument with my girlfriend on the way to an Oscar party.

At stake was the Toronto Escalator Rules, which I shall repost now for everyone's benefit so you don't have to click and visit the other page.

What happened was a crowd of us was going down the stairs, my girlfriend walking beside me and we were holding hands. On the left was an escalator going up, which means people at the bottom of the stairs who wanted to go up had two choices:

#1. Take the escalator up, and not block anyone coming down the stairs.

#2. Make the illogical choice of coming up the stairs and blocking the crowd of people coming down.

And lo and behold two morons with their baseball caps turned backwards decided to be jerks and go up the stairs, blocking people on the way and slowing everyone down - meanwhile there was a perfectly EMPTY escalator going in the direction they wanted to go.

They could have - very easily - got on the empty escalator, gone up it at whatever speed they felt like going, and got to the top very quickly and easily.

But no, they decided to block the people coming down.

So I decided to complain very loudly about it.

"Wow, some people are just too stupid to know when to use the escalator."

And then when I got to the bottom of the stairs my girlfriend decided to play dumb and pretended not to know what I was talking about. She even tried to claim that it was not a crowd of people going down the stairs. (There was a pack of 15 people at least on the stairs when I said it.)

And then we got into an argument about what constitutes a crowd.

And she tried to claim that there was only 1 person ahead of us on the stairs when there was at least 6 people ahead of us, not counting the two jerks blocking the stairs.

When I realized she was doing this all deliberately, playing dumb and making me very frustrated I told her off for doing that to me. It was really frustrating. There was no reason for her to be arguing with me and she was trying to make me feel stupid by pretending to be stupid herself.

ARG!!!!!

I get frustrated and angry just thinking about the incident.

Basically my end point here is DO NOT PRETEND TO BE DUMB. You are only annoying people unnecessarily.

It is one thing if your name is Rob Ford and you are just naturally stupid (and annoy people with your sheer dumbness), but it is another thing entirely when you pretend to be stupid as a gag just so you can frustrate your fellow human beings by pretending you don't know what they are talking about.

I swear if she ever does that again I am going to switch the sugar with the salt so she ends up with a spoonful of salt in her coffee. Then we shall see who has the last laugh.

---

And then of course there are people who are just plain dumb. I blame our education system that places too much emphasis on looks (drama class, seriously?) and not enough emphasis on simple things like English writing, math, geography...

Soapstone Carving - How To Video

I found the video below very interesting.

The video is a how to video on making soapstone sculptures. I have always wanted to get into soapstone carving, but the tools look a bit intimidating and a huge investment for something that for me would be a bit of a lark. I prefer hobbies that are less expensive to try before getting into them full time.

I suppose if I could find a soapstone carving class somewhere in Toronto then it would be okay, because it would be cheaper and I would have the teacher practically holding my hand while I make mistakes. But getting into stone carving is just too much for me right now.

I will stick with my woodworking projects instead. Wood carving is much easier for me and takes less money to get into.

Plagiarism in Essay Writing

Years ago when I was working on my Doctorate of Musical Arts at U of T when I was accused of plagiarism in some older essay work I had done.

Basically what it was I had written an essay years earlier, before studying my doctorate, and one of my professors thought it looked fishy when another copy of the same essay showed up and tried to prove it was plagiarized.

Fortunately I cleared my name by promptly showing all professors and university staff involved my rough drafts for the essay (I had gone through 4 rough drafts) which had been saved years ago and I had just never deleted anything from that part of my life.

Basically the fact that I am a pack rat saved my bacon. I don't throw things out, especially electronic documents.

So word to the wise people, save your drafts and keep them for posterity's sake. You will not regret it.

What had happened however is that I had posted my finished essay (the one I was accused of plagiarizing) online and I had posted it without using my name - in other words, I had posted it anonymously.

Someone else (I don't know who) then copy pasted my essay off of the website and then submitted my essay as their own professor.

What the student didn't know was that they were handing in the same essay to the same professor (for the same class no less) as I had years earlier.

The professor reading my old essay felt it looked familiar, as if they had read it before. So they checked their records / refreshed their memory and remembered me.

Yada yada yada, the next thing I know they are accusing me of plagiarism, of selling my old essay for profit and were threatening to take my degree away from me. (Which they can legally do if they can prove plagiarism.)

Fortunately I did prove that the essay was mine by showing them my old rough drafts.

And I was able to show them the old forum website which I had posted the essay on. Still there, complete with the date it was originally posted. (And I could prove it was me who posted it because I still had the login and password to access the forum.)

My name was cleared, but having such a bureaucratic spotlight thrust upon me (especially when I had done nothing wrong) had made me not very comfortable about the whole plagiarism topic.

It took me years before I finally decided to write this post and talk openly about the incident. Now that I have my Doctorate I feel much firmer and safer about talking about the incident.

Universities have become increasingly aware that there is a lot academic dishonesty going on - especially amongst women, who make up 80% of customers for essay writing companies in Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener/Waterloo. It is such a problem amongst female students that it has raised the grade point average of all the women in universities that have essay writing companies near the university campuses.

I think the issue for men is that men are too lazy and too cheap to hire someone else to write an essay for them, they would rather just write a poorly written essay, hand it in and get a lower mark rather than hire someone to write the essay for them.

The companies themselves have also legitimized themselves by also offering resume writing, CV and cover letter writing services. And even online classes on how to write assignments for classes.

Once they have a student hooked on their services it is really just a matter of time before students start paying for essays using their credit card.

The problem is even more prevalent at big universities that have a lot of prestige. The more important the school is the more competition there is from such companies that are offering essay and assignment writing services.

But I do have an important question.

What happens when these people get out into the real world and need to write reports for the company they work for? Are they going to hire someone else to write the report for them?

I have even heard tales of people hiring other people to write / create presentations for PowerPoint.

Back when I was in university we were still using overhead projectors and slideshows during presentations, but now with PowerPoint the information for the presentation can be written down and designed electronically, saved as PowerPoint document (PPT), sent to the person who purchased it... and then that person presents the finished product and utilizes their acting skills at lying.

How is an university professor going to accuse them of plagiarism when they are presenting it in person as a PowerPoint presentation.

I wish they would bring back overhead projectors and slideshows. Just my 2 cents.