i@m.fm

I would like to expand on Jason Slaughter’s The Slack Bus :: What’s all this white stuff!?. As he calls it the winter amnesia.
And yes, this is how it seems. The cold and the snow hit the town and
everybody is surprised and un-prepared.
I know, I shouldn’t be complaining. Especially as an immigrant.
Otherwise they’ll probably send me home, or call me a “European Snob”
again, like a co-worker did recently (jokingly, I am assuming/hoping).

Maybe I should really speed up the process of becoming Canadian, so I
am officially allowed to complain But I guess that won’t quite hide
all of my foreign ‘qualities’, especially the audible one (accent).

It’s actually funny however to see how the people that were born in a
certain country (and this is not exclusive to Canada) have more ofa
right to complain/influence their living conditions than the people
that join the country at a later time. But this is a whole different
topic….
So let’s get back to the winter and how surprised people are by it.

Unfortunately I also have to plead guilty. Guilty of the
un-preparedness to deal with an entire street (we live on a nice quite
little court) to deal with the snow on the entire street before
attempting to drive to the Go Train
to get to work. This time we just managed to get my wife to her work
(which is in the town of Oakville as well). So I just drove home and
decided to work from there (thanks to my employer for being fine with
this).

But the story does not end here. It continued snowing that day, and I’d
say that we got about 30 cms of new snow. After I made it out of our
driveway (after about 10 minutes) with the help of my neighbour, we
realized that there was no way that I would make it through the barrier
to the main street. The main street had been plowed, but of couse that
also left a huge wall of packed snow at the entrance of our court.
While I was trying to get out of our driveway several other cars failed
at their attempt to get into the street.

Hence I just pulled back into our driveway (which didn’t take as long
as getting out) and then we drive with our neighbours 4×4 pickup truck
to pick up my wife. It was so kind of him to help us out. Kim still had
to cancel her doctor’s appointment though.

Now back to the Go Train, which it seems can’t cope with any change in
weather at all. Of course they can always easily blame the railway
operator if something goes wrong. But why apologize at all?

Now even the Transport Minister asks GO to explain lateness – I guess someone on his staff is communiting as well . And here’s what the Readers have to say.

And there’s another thing that I want to mention, but not dive into at
this point: The houses. Hello, you live in Canada. It gets cold in
Canada. You need good insulation against the cold. It doesn’t matter
how cheap the energy/heating is, insulation still makes sense.