Dave Andreychuk hoists the Stanley Cup
from the Hockey Hall of Fame
Here it is…this must surely be the final nail in the coffin for our national airline. Air Canada lost the Stanley Cup and the Cup’s handler blew a gasket:
“He told them specifically it was the Stanley Cup,” Goertzen said. “He is just so distraught.”
Fitness gym owner Brent Lock, who had planned to view the Cup Sunday, said he doesn’t understand how Air Canada could have left it behind.
“It’s not like it’s a brown paper bag; it’s the holy grail,” he said.
Here in Canada there is no sport that captures our national imagination quite like hockey. And the pinnacle achievement in hockey is the Stanley Cup. Any self-respecting Canadian knows what the Cup looks like, and knows how important it is. When your national airline loses the Stanley Cup, they pretty much forfeit the title of “national airline.”
It’s a good thing they found it, because Air Canada’s lost and found system is labyrinthine. Coming back from Toronto we left a bag of assorted gear (travel mug, hats and a small camera) on the plane. When we got home two days later and realized we had in fact left it on the plane(“I thought YOU had the bag…No YOU had the bag…”), I checked the Air Canada website for a phone number and, after 25 minutes (I kid you not) finally found a lost and found number. I dialed it and got a series of messages which interacted with my keypad pushing finger until 10 minutes later I got abandoned in voice mail jail. The line went dead.
Bemused, I called back, hoping to speak to someone about the loss of both the bag AND the Air Canada lost and found department. The same thing happened. After an hour of trying to make one phone call, I gave up.
The next day my partner called and got the same treatment. So she called the reservations line and asked to be forwarded to lost and found. That worked (it should be on their FAQ) and she finally spoke to someone who reported that nothing had been turned in. How could that be, you ask? After every flight the cabins are cleared and anything left on board is sent to the gate. God knows where it ends up after that but the lost and found department seems not be in the loop. Either that or our little bag was stolen. For all intents and purposes that’s what happened. The moral of the story is NEVER lose anything on Air Canada.
I have written before about how out of date Air Canada’s ticketing and credit policies are, especially when their main competition, WestJet, lets you transfer tickets in any amount to anyone else with just a phone call. It’s clear from my own recent travel that the spirit is all gone from that airline. I met lots of surly staff and lots of little things are broken on the planes (audio systems, video screens, tray tables) and there appears to be no cash to fix them.
I guess when you’re trading at pennies a share, that’s life. If airlines are about people and customer service is litmus test of that commitment, then it sure doesn’t feel like Air Canada has the willingness to get up off the mat.
The Dalai Lama doesn’t have a blog, but luckily we have the daily mailings from Beliefnet. The one that came today reads simply:
The threshold between right and wrong is pain.
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Imagine All the People
We create suffering for ourselves in the space we create when we take on the world and lose. When I am working with groups I usually make some comment at some point about the use of the word “should.” Any time we use that word we are arguing with reality and when we do that, as Byron Katie says, “we lose, but only always.”
It amazes me how much pain we humans can create for ourselves through judgment and longing. Anytime I find myself using “should” I look at it as a trigger for a question. “Should” is a sign that we need to inquire into the nature of our expectations about things. From there we can create strategy for either changing the world to bring it in line with our vision, or changing ourselves to recognize reality and alleviate our own suffering.
I’ve just discovered Miroslav Holub! Here is a quote from his essay “Slavery and worse“:
Not many victories grow out of moral indignation. The only thing that all ecology, including the remarkably clear and evident ecology of human despair, can rely upon is slow, tedious and lasting economic and civic improvement, an improvement known even to Diocletian and Marcus Aurelius, that great stoic example to civic and ecologic radicals who think they can fight slaveries by becoming slaves to their own neuroses.
More Holub resources:
It never ceases to amaze me how we imprison ourselves.
One of the most insidious forms of colonization is the deference to external authority for self-esteem, confidence and knowledge. We are not aware of our own inner resources when we have been colonized. Our volition is stolen from us and we wander around aimlessly until someone comes to save us.
“The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.
But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.
The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees”
— Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps. TLS, Feb 4, ’77
That’s an amazingly tragic allegory. Soldiers, especially in this most classical of depictions, rely entirely on the command structure for their volition. When the command structure is broken, as it was in the blizzard, the soldiers are lost. When they find a map, a shred of authority that relieves their doubt and loss of confidence, they come home. When it is shown that the map is entirely irrelevent to their situation, the stake is plunged into the heart of their salvation: they are alive, but forever imprisoned in their dependence on external authorities. They are so far gone that they don’t even recognize that their survival was a result of their own resources.
The lieutenant should be proud.
From an essay by Jose Saramago called Reinventing democracy:
True democracy should begin with what is immediately to hand – the country of our birth, the society we work in, the street we live on. Without that, all the underlying reasoning, the theoretical foundation and practical operation of the system will be vitiated. It is no use purifying the water in the taps if the reservoir is contaminated.
Good essay…have a read of the rest.
Thanks to wood s lot for the find.