Confessions of An Economic Refugee

A Canadian’s Guide to Winning Friends and Influencing People in the United States

1. After introducing yourself as a Canadian, be sure to end your next sentence with an ‘eh?’  This will invoke the Government of Canada’s Subliminal Pacification Programming* in your new found American friends.
2. Don’t be afraid to tell them all aboot Canada.  Americans always talk of Canada pleasant and cordially entertaining.
3. Remember that Americans don’t have ‘washrooms’.  If you get a blank look from your American friends when asking about the washroom, be sure to ask for the ‘restroom’ or ‘bathroom’ instead.
4. Drive as fast as you can.  Remember the more aggression you show on the road, the more the Americans will respect you.
5. Be sure to compliment your American friends on the quality and sophistication of the media coverage that they get.  Tell them you don’t know how you ever put up that crap called CTV and CBC now that you’ve found Fox News.  "Fair and Balanced" rules!
6. Make sure you can speak at length about cars.  Americans love cars.  The bigger, louder and more gas guzzling the better. 

* For those of you not in the know, the Government of Canada’s Subliminal Pacification Programming is a highly sophisticated propaganda and brainwashing program to ensure the Canada’s ultimate plan of Global Subjugation.  (But don’t tell that to our jovial southern neighbours.)

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This is a repost from my other aborted blog.  It was meant as kick off to my existential stranger in a strange land ode living in America. 

(Well I guess the Bay Area more precisely. Bay Area is probably as far away from America, well the red-state Jesus-land that likes to elect evangelical Republican Presidents from Texas, as you can get.  Nonetheless, we ain’t in the economic hinterland of Lotusland, Canada anymore ladies and gentlemen.  Somewhere, sometime, if I ever, God forbid, decide to run to pubic, excuse me, public office, I am to get my ass nailed to the wall by all the spin doctors for that last comment.)

So what happened? Well, I guess I was too weak-willed and too much of a conformist to really stick with the program.  Somewhere between only having Fox News and CNN to watch, placated by the endless supply of cheap video games (did I mention my XBox collection has infinitely grown since I moved here) cheap Magic: The Gathering Cards I settled into the American Consumptive way of life pretty easily.  In other words, like so many other pple before me, I was assimilated into the great messy mass people call America.  Mind you, I could of resisted, not entirely futily, for a little bit, but really besides for the benefit of my non-existent reader population, who would that have really benefitted?  Welcome to the dark side.

Originally posted Septermber 14, 2004

The Economic Refuge Lands

I touched down in San Francisco about a week and a half a go and I’m finally getting settled in. It’s been kinda exciting, kinda vexing, kinda stressful process as a few of you already know. Still working in ground zero of the technology industry has always been of an adolescent dream of mine, a product, no doubt, of reading too many issues of the Economist and Time from an early age.

I will tell you though, after working at a ‘mid-sized’ company, it’s been quite an eye-opener watching how a ‘middling giant’ of a tech company operates. The level of management maturity is night and day and level of intensity is definitely a few notches up.

Cell phone plans down here are crazy expensive down here! Some marketing genius figured out they can get away with Unlimited "Evenings" starting at 9pm. What’s next, unlimited weekends starting on Sunday afternoon? Overage minutes are 40cents a minute down here.

Well to be fair, I shouldn’t single out the big bad Cellular Service Providers, I mean, after all , I do own Nortel, Bell and a few other telco stocks from some of the dizzying smograsbord of mutual funds I own somewhere. ..

Local phone service is $45.95 a month. They ease the pain by giving you unlimited ‘long distance’ within the region when really, its just a should be free anyways – like not having to pay extra when calling between 416 and 905 in T-dot. Oh, I guess you could get a ‘basic’ land line but they run it like cell phone company – $21.95 for 1000 local minutes.

Basic Cable is okay at $11.95 I guess for all the 10 channels you get with it. I love how try to sell you on ‘cheap’ broadband though. DSL/Cable – now $26.95/$29.95 for first 3 months with 1 yr contract. Regular monthly fee is $45.95. I mean are Americans so bone-headed as to fall for this cheesy marketing. It’s like the banks trying to sell you variable rate, fixed term mortgages with ‘special introductory’ rates. Geez!!!

No wonder the telcos, cable companies are making all the money!

So let me try to sum it up a little: You come to America, you make more money. You a little less taxes (in my case, being in California, I pay more), you pay more in Health Care, get less in social security, pay more in food, rent and basic utilities. Pay less in durable goods like cars, computers, electronics and clothes (though technically they are not durable goods…). It’s really freak’in wierd.

Another perspective is that this might be the first hand effects of America’s bloated current account deficit up close and personal. Exuberant investors fund America’s spending ‘habit’ (as in a substance-dependency habit) inflating the value of the American currency. Tradeable goods and significantly more super cheap because of the current account deficit makes everything cheap and non-tradeable goods such as wages, housing, monopoly services like cable makes everything expensive since there is so much of the currency running around… I wonder what my economics prof would say to that thesis…

Well that’s all for now…

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They say business travel, however glamorous, gets old really fast.

I don’t know exactly when but somewhere, between

1. being squished between two overgrown men in the middle seat with the tantrum-throwing 4-year old his hyperkinetic kicking leg and abusive mother sitting behind me
2. getting 3.5 hours of sleep a might due to the jet lag
3. ingesting the copious pounds of breakfast pork, be it sausage or bacon (with sausages resembling tidy packages of kitty excrement)
4. amusing many and nearly hospitalizing several other airport patrons with my furious 1 mile dash from one side of the airport to the other to in desperate attempt to catch my connecting flight
5. playing 25 straight games of freecell waiting for 3 hrs for my plane to take off
6. turning to the deafening riffs of Green Day’s American Idiot album on m iPod (God bless Steve Jobs) as my final and only refuge from fatigue, irritability and annoyance
7. almost (well, it’s not final yet) getting canned for dropping my company into yet another SEC FD violation by accidentally disclosing prop company info to a wall street shark posing as a  nosy prospect initially tagged as a corporate spy
8. eating maine lobster at 11:40 at night
9. getting figuratively gunned down by the collective stoicism of New England audiences
10. getting dirty looks from all manner of hotel staff for not tipping them to do the job they are paid to do

well somewhere between all that, I aged a few years.

Somewhere, somehow, the more I look around, the more my life begins to resemble Ed Norton’s nameless alter ego to Galtian Tyler Durden in Fight Club, though with the caveat of insomnia substituted with narcolepsy, but still living (at least lately) somewhere on the threshold of reality and unconsciousness.

The first rule of Fight Club is that there is no Fight Club.

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earworm of the day:

"Thiz iz a hobo suit!"

"I never look back, darrrling.  It distracts from the now."

"You are Elastigirl!  Pull – your – self – to -get-her!"

Edna Bird from The Incredibles. (Yes I just got the DVD)

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