Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Rabid Transit: The Cold War Between the TTC and its Customers

Before I Begin, Credit Where Credit is Due

Walls of the TTC's College subway station

On Saturday night, the Ginger Ninja and I were trying to catch a southbound subway train at College station. The train doors had closed just a half-second before we got to them. Suddenly, the conductor stuck his head out the window and said “C’mon in!” and opened the doors quickly for us. Thanks, dude!

I thought that this random act of kindness made by a TTC employee was worth highlighting before getting to the meat of this article.

The “Sleeping Collector” Photo

There’s a cold war between the TTC – that’s Toronto Transit Commission, our rapid-transit system and the third-most heavily used one in North America (New York City and Mexico City hold first and second place) – and its passengers. It all started with this photo of a sleeping collector that Jason Wieler snapped shortly after 9 p.m. on a Saturday night:

TTC collector's booth, with a TTC collector sleeping in his chair

The photo was posted to TwitPic a couple of weeks ago (and has since been deleted) with the caption “Yup, love how my TTC dollars R being spent…”. It drew all sorts of attention on various social media outlets as well as in the traditional media. A new online forum, Trash Talk the TTC (an incendiary name, contrary to their stated intent of fostering constructive discussion) has since been created.

To add some fog to the storm of righteous indignation over TTC slacking just after a fare hike (as of January 1st, the adult fare is CDN$3.00), it turned out that the sleeping collector is a hero, having saved the life of a rider fifteen years ago.

Whether you consider this act to be “citizen journalism” or “being a busybody”, other people, inspired by the act and always at the ready with their cameras because they’re in just about every mobile phone, followed suit. Soon after, this photo appeared online:

Another TTC collector's booth, with another TTC collector sleeping in his chair

Then came the deluge of reports from riders: drivers stopping an in-service vehicle to go on coffee break or get money from the ATM, and so on. It’s been a regular TTC shame-a-palooza ever since the “sleeping collector” photo, and since it’s a mayoral election year, it’s a sure bet that “What are you going to do about the TTC?” is going to be one of the big issues.

The Union and Management Respond

The first response on behalf of the TTC was made by Bob Kinnear, leader of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113. Bob worked his way into public demonology with a couple of strikes, including an illegal strike in 2006 and one in 2008, where they stopped working at midnight after a Friday night after giving the public a mere 90 minutes’ notice. In a statement about the sleeping collector, he shifted the blame to the customers:

Whatever the outcome of the enquiry, it is very discouraging that the picture taker and, apparently, other customers, made no attempt to determine if there was anything wrong with this TTC employee. A simple knock on the glass might have determined if the Collector was, in fact, asleep, or whether he was unconscious as a result of some medical problem. The reports that passengers were laughing at him as they passed by the booth makes this even more disturbing.

It’s this sort of blame-shifting from their organizers that makes people think that unions, while instrumental in creating many of the rights that we enjoy in the modern workplace, have slowly devolved into safe havens for the lazy and sub-par.

The PR nightmare grew so bad that Chief General Manager Gary Webster issued a strong memo to all TTC staff, which I present below in full:

Our Customers Deserve Better
February 6, 2010

I don’t know about you, but I am becoming increasingly tired of defending the reputation of the TTC; tired of explaining what is acceptable and what is not; and tired of stating the obvious: that much of the behaviour being reported is, indeed, unacceptable.

You have heard me say that I am proud of the TTC. I still am, but I am not proud of what we have been dealing with over the last several weeks.

Two weeks ago I said that the vast majority of TTC employees care about the organization and do a good job, but we can all do better. I asked everyone to respond well. Some of you did. Clearly, some of you did not.

We all have to accept responsibility for allowing the TTC to drift into a culture of unacceptable operating discipline. In other words, we have deemed it acceptable for some employees to not do all aspects of their jobs.

We have two choices. We can continue to react to issues, deal with individual employee problems, and hope that the rest of our employees get the message, behave themselves and not get caught doing something they should not be doing.

The other choice, and the one we are going to take, is a much broader approach. Expectations need to be clear, especially for frontline employees. And employees need to be held accountable for their poor performance.

We are in the customer service business, but some of the behaviour our customers have encountered recently would suggest otherwise. Our customers pay a fare and the City provides hundreds of millions of dollars every year to the TTC. This public transit agency belongs to the very people we serve.

As Chief General Manager, I am ultimately accountable to our customers. As employees, you – and you alone – are accountable for your actions. The culture of complacency and malaise that has seeped into our organization will end. I hold all of management responsible to make this happen. Reviews and plans are under way to address systemic issues regarding customer service, but real change starts with you.

Gary Webster
Chief General Manager

The Mayor Doesn’t Respond

Mayor David Miller: "What, me worry?"

At least I believe he hasn’t. I can’t find any news items in either Bing or Google. Hardly surprising, given his popular image as a union peg boy, but disappointing all the same.

(Some) TTC Workers Respond

Here’s a recent screen shot of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113’s Facebook page. It’s since been locked away, but thanks to Google’s cache, it’s been preserved. The latest post on the wall reads “Unite against the passengers, post the BS they give us.”:

Screen shot of ATU Local 113's Facebook page

There’s also a members-only Facebook page – Toronto Transit Operators Against Public Harassment — where TTC employees can share photos of riders behaving badly:

Screen shot of Toronto Transit Operators against public harassment

The Globe and Mail reports that in response to that stern rebuke from management, a member posted this message on that members-only Facebook page:"

Reminder to work to rule on Monday. Check out ATU site.

For those of you who don’t know what work-to-rule is, it’s a protest tactic where you do the bare minimum to meet your job description. The idea is to slow things down to a crawl.

I doubt that responding to complaints of half-assery with even more half-assery is going to win public support. Especially after last summer’s garbage strike, complete with obstructionist actions from picketers, which pretty much eliminated any public sympathy for public employee unions.

And so the battle continues online. The National Post’s Posted Toronto blog covers this fight in an article titled TTC Drivers and Riders Square Off on Facebook.

Weather permitting, I think I’ll be sticking to my bike for my runs downtown.

Next: Living in the panopticon!

Categories
It Happened to Me Play Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Marvellous Edibles’ Last Night

The front room at Marvellous Edibles

Marvellous Edibles, one of my favourite restaurants in Accordion City, is open tonight for one last time. Owners Jens (who’s also the chef) and Ayse have decided not to renew their lease, and with that decision, we lose one of the city’s best-kept gastronomic secrets.

Located on Laird just south of Eglinton, across the street from a number of big-box stores, Marvellous Edibles has been quietly but expertly serving delicious and surprisingly cheap meals for years. The dinner menu typically features at least a dozen mains provided in ample quantity along with perfect sides, from basics like a great steak-frites and roast chicken to slightly more exotic meats like chevon and elk. Many of the ingredients used in the dishes came from local farms, sometimes even theirs. The prices were always surprisingly cheap, considering what you got, with prices ranging from CAD$14 to $28. I’ve eaten at places that have charged double that haven’t made food half as well as Marvellous Edibles.

No visit to Marvellous Edibles was complete without dessert. There were always at least a dozen desserts to choose from in the display case near the back of the restaurant’s front room, and they were always good. I’m a fan of the coconut-banana cream pie with shortbread-like crust, which they often drizzled with chocolate sauce. The Ginger Ninja loves the lemon-caramel-meringue cake and their macaroons.

We went for our last visit last week, where we enjoyed a poutine with veal and mushrooms for starters and I had a lamb chop with lamb rollbraten (rolled-up stomach, which was delicious); I forget what The Missus had, but she enjoyed her dinner as well.

Despite the fact that getting there for us involved driving about two-thirds of the way across town, we went reasonably often and were always glad to do so. Going there was a bit of a treat for us, and we’ve never been disappointed. I wish Jens and Ayse the best in all their plans for the future, look forward to seeing them at farmers markets, where they plan to continue selling produce from their farm, and would like to thank them for all the delicious meals I’ve had there. I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Life Play Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

The Birthday Accordion Jam at Caplansky’s

The Accordion Jam

Caplansky's delicatessen logo: "Caplansky's Delicatessen. House-smoked, hand-cut smoked meat" With all the travelling I’d been doing in the fall, my birthday party back on November 7th was a last-minute affair, but it was a great one. I managed to snag a spot for fifteen people at Caplansky’s Delicatessen. Caplansky’s has been open merely half a year, but in that short span of time, it’s won the loyalty of local deli fans, foodies and celebrities as well as my in-laws, who’ve forgotten more about deli than I will ever learn. The Ginger Ninja and I took them there over the holidays and not only did they enjoy their meal, they also enjoyed meeting the proprietor, Zane Caplansky.

I was enjoying a birthday beer while waiting for the appetizers to arrive when Wendy pointed out that a young guy with an accordion had entered the restaurant. Two accordionists meeting at random in a restaurant is a rare and precious phenomenon, so I introduced myself and told him that I too had an accordion – the little red number that I’d purchased on the very afternoon I signed my offer letter from Microsoft.

His name was Ronen Segall, and in addition to playing at parties and other functions, he plays at Caplansky’s. “I think I’ve read your blog before,” he said as we conversed. “Would you like to do a couple of numbers with me?”

I find invitations like that just about impossible to refuse, and the result – a performance of Que Sera, Sera, Should I Stay or Should I Go and Don’t You Want Me — is shown in the video below. My thanks to Pavel Zaitsev for doing the camerawork!

Caplansky’s

Here’s a shot of Caplansky’s taken from near the front of the restaurant on my phone back in September. Get a good look, because the place’s word-of-mouth has grown over the past few months and I doubt we’ll see it this empty for a good long time.

Caplansky's dining room, as seen front near the front

“We may be witnessing the birth of an institution,” gushes Toronto Life (the magazine for the local Lexus set) about Caplansky’s, and I concur. These days, the place is buzzing even during most other restaurant’s off-peak hours and the queue waiting for a table often goes out the door.

This is the second incarnation of the restaurant, the first one being a little shop operating symbiotically within the Monarch Tavern. With a brand new smoker and a new front-of-house and back-of-house staff, Zane’s raised the quality of his stuff from good to great, added items to the menu and taking on increasingly large crowds.

Here’s a shot of the tasty pickle plate that Wendy and I shared as an appetizer back in September. I’ve made it black and white because my mobile phone camera has a tendency to colour pictures of food in that unappetizing, 1950s drive-in movie theatre snack bar menu way:

Caplanskys pickle plate

For my main, I had the Caplansky’s Combo, a nice plate with a selection of their deli meats served along with a few slices of rye, tomato slices and onion. Back then, it comprised smoked meat, thick slices of grilled versht (beef salami), smoked turkey and chopped liver. I had to hit the gym a little harder the next day, but it was worth it.

Here’s a photo of the Combo, once again converted to black and white thanks to my mobile phone’s inability to take a decent food photo:

Caplansky's combo platter: grilled versht, smoked turkey, smoked meat, rye bread slices, chopped onion, tomato slices, a ball of chopped liver

The question always comes up when I talk about the place: “How does it compare to Schwartz’s?” For those of you not familiar with the establishment, Schwartz’s is Montreal’s legendary charcuterie hebraique, who’ve been doing smoked meat since the Great Depression and their excellent product is considered to be the gold standard. I try to get in a meal there every time I’m in Montreal, and plan to do so again when I’m there later this month for the CUSEC conference.

I like both; Caplansky’s smoked meat has a smokier flavour to it, which I think is a good thing. I’d rather see Zane put his own touch on it rather than slavishly attempt to ape Schwartz’s. It’s the sort of deviation that gets the Montreal smoked meat purists up in arms, but they’re chauvinistic food grognards (who can shove Lucien Bouchard’s missing leg up their collective arses, if you want my honest opinion).

When I took the in-laws there over the holidays, I started with the split pea soup – simple and hearty – and followed that with the salami and eggs, which turned out to be one of the best renditions of this deli classic that I’ve ever had. Wendy had one of my silver dollar pancake-sized latkes that came with the dish and swooned. They’re quite good.

A lot of delis fall down when it comes to dessert, but not Caplansky’s. I believe they get their desserts from somewhere else, but that other place is great! The chocolate cake that I got for my birthday party was so good that I got another slice, and I plan to return for another serving of their dark chocolate bread pudding, which I had during my visit last week.

To sum it up: the food’s great. You should go.

Portrait of Zane Caplansky in a chef's hat and white t-shirt, in the kitchen

Being someone who’s very passionate about his work and his field, I find it gratifying when I encounter someone who feels the same way about his. That’s what I like about Zane – he cares intensely about the food he serves and the restaurant in which he serves it. He obsesses about getting things just right – just read some entries in his blog to see just how much – and he also works the crowd at the restaurant, chatting up the tables and even doing a little order-taking and serving. This is no mere job for him – it’s a calling, and it shows.

If this article has enticed you to give Caplansky’s a try, I’d say go for it – but they’re taking this Monday through Friday off. Caplansky’s will be back open for business on Saturday, January 9th.

Caplanskys posters: "Where knish is knig", "Kickin' it old shul" and "It's firstborn-sacrificn' good!"

Caplansky’s Delicatessen is located at 356 College Street (at the corner of College and Brunswick, a few blocks west of Spadina). They’re open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. the rest of the week.

Map showing location of Caplansky's Delicatessen (356 College Street, Toronto ON)

Links

Categories
Life Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Storefront of the Day: “Ontario Giant Runt Club”

Ontario Giant Runt Club

The person who took this “Ontario Giant Runt Club” photo – who goes by the online moniker “Bourbon Baby” (oddly enough, it’s not a pseudonym for bourbon aficionado David Crow) – did a little research and found that “giant runt” refers to a breed of pigeon; this is a pigeon fancier’s club in Toronto.

In case you were curious, this place is located at 615B Brock Avenue, just off Bloor Street West, halfway between Lansdowne and Dufferin. West End pigeon fanciers unite!

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City) Work

Scenes from TechDays Winnipeg

It’s hard to believe, but the seven-city cross-Canada tour known as TechDays 2009 is over. We had the last one – TechDays Winnipeg – on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. Here are some photos I shot during the event.

The Day Before TechDays Winnipeg

Of all the TechDays venues, I would have to hand the “swankiest speaker prep room” award to the Winnipeg Convention Centre, with its wood panelling, private washrooms, loads of closet space, plentiful tables, very comfortable leatherette couches and all-round 1980s styling. I can imagine a young Flock of Seagulls or Duran Duran hanging out here after a show, entertaining groupies:

00 speaker room

During the holidays, many people like to decorate their storefront and home windows with fake spray-on frost. In Winnipeg, where the temperatures were hovering around –35 degrees C (-31 degrees F), you don’t need that stuff – they’ve got the real thing! Here are the side doors on the ground floor of the Winnipeg Convention Centre:

01 frost

Here’s a closer look:

02 frost

And just for kicks, an even closer one.

03 frost

I must tip my hat to the people of Winnipeg for toughing out those kinds of temperatures, year after year.

The Convention Centre had a secret stash of Christmas trees, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice:

04 decorations

One of the perks of being a TechDays Track Lead is that nobody asks questions when you rearrange the signs for an art shot:

05 art shot

Day 1

John Bristowe, track lead for the green-shirted Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track, just had another baby, so he was tied up with Dad duties (congrats, John and Fiona!). I donned a green shirt took over as acting track lead for his track and recruited D’Arcy Lussier to host my track, the orange-shirted Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track.

The first speaker for Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices was Jeremy Wiebe, who presented the very popular Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio session:

06 jeremy wiebe

How popular was it? Popular enough that people were overflowing out of the rows:

07 green track audience 1

…and we even had to drag in some extra chairs to create a new row at the back:

08 green track audience 2

This was an attentive crowd. There were a lot of “I didn’t know you could do that in Visual Studio!”-type reactions.

09 green track audience 3

The second session of the day was given by Dylan Smith: Test-Driven Development Techniques:

10 dylan smith

Once again, a good crowd.

11 green track audience

During lunch, my coworker, IT pro evangelist Rick Claus and I did a presentation on some of the new features in Office 2010, with me showing off some of the new graphics goodness in PowerPoint 2010:

12 lunch day 1

The sessions resumed in the afternoon with Uwe Schmitz talking about Patterns for the Rest of Us. I was a bit surprised at how few hands went up when I asked how many people had read or even attempted to read Design Patterns by the “Gang of Four”.

13 uwe schmitz

Most of Uwe’s audience was in the same room as he was:

14 inside audience

But one guy, whose back was made sore by the conference room chairs, took a clever approach. We broadcast all sessions’ projections and audio on a monitor outside every room, so he took one of the comfy chairs in the hallway outside and set himself up for some living room-style viewing:

15 outside audience

I told him that with his sunglasses and the way he was seated, he reminded me of the old ads for Maxell tapes from the 1980s:

old maxell ad

After Uwe was Dave Harris, who presented A Strategic Comparison of Data Access Technologies from Microsoft:

16 dave harris

Day 2

The outside temperature improved for the second day: it became a relatively balmy –20 degrees C (-4 degrees F). What a difference 15 degrees makes!

The first session was Practical Web Testing and was delivered by the team of Tyler Doerksen and Robert Regnier:

17 tyler doerksen robert regnier

I stepped out to drop in on the track which I had put together, my orange-shirted Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track. While the Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track typically had big draws on Day 1, Day 2 is when the Platform track brought in the crowds:

18 orange track audience

The session was the popular Introducing ASP.NET MVC, and in Winnipeg, it was delivered by Kelly Cassidy:

19 kelly cassidy

An unfortunate set of circumstances speaker shortages and cancellations means that Rick had to deliver all the presentations for day 2 of his track, Servers, Security and Management. That’s 300 minutes in total behind the lectern. It’s quite fortunate that he knows his stuff and that his theatre training makes him an excellent presenter:

20 rick claus

Meanwhile, back at the green track, Aaron Kowall presented Better Software Change and Configuration Management Using TFS:

21 aaron kowall

During his session, he presented a very important truth: Build automation is not just merely pressing “F5”:

22 aaron kowall

At lunch, Rick hosted a demo showdown between me (representing developers) and my coworker, IT Pro Evangelist Rodney Buike, trying to determine who could do the better Windows 7 demos. I won, thanks in part to my demo of the most obscure Windows features: the Private Character Editor.

23 lunch day 2

Joel Semeniuk needs no introduction. I simply told the audience that “Joel has forgotten more about Team System than I will ever learn. Besides, what I know about Team System can be summarized in the two words ‘jack’ and ‘poop’.” Here’s Joel in action, presenting Metrics That Matter: Using Team System for Process Improvement:

24 joel semeniuk

I love this shot of Joel – he looks like a general addressing his own private banana republic:

25 joel semeniuk

A closer look:

26 joel semeniuk

The most popular afternoon snack was served between the third and fourth sessions of Day 2: Canada’s favourite snack – donuts!

27 donuts

My SD card corrupted the photos of the last speaker of the day, Steve Porter, who did a fine job presenting his session, Database Change Management with Team System. My apologies, Steve!

And finally, to make up for the fact that I did not properly capture D’Arcy Lussier’s hair — an asset in which he takes great pride — in yesterday’s video interview, I now present a close-up shot of his coiff:

28 darcy lussier suave

My thanks to everyone at TechDays Winnipeg – attendees, speakers, staff and organizers – for making it an great way to close out the tour!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
It Happened to Me Life Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

A Bad Experience at Wasabi

 Wasabi Restaurant, 1730 Bloor Street West. The Verdict: Decent food, scatterbrained "service"

All I wanted was my dinner. After an early morning flight back to Accordion City from Calgary and enough work to keep me from getting a decent lunch, I was looking forward to a nice dinner with The Missus at Wasabi (1730 Bloor Street West, at Keele), the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant that had opened a few blocks away from our home.

Wasabi’s menu is not unlike those at other local all-you-can-eat sushi places like Aji Sai. It comprises a selection of sushi, sashimi, tempura, donburi and other things that can be made quickly and cheaply and can provide a lot of bang for your twenty bucks.

It’s the busiest restaurant that’s ever opened at that corner. When we walked in on Friday night, we saw a full restaurant bustling with all sorts of people: groups of young friends having dinner before a night out, many young families with strollers in tow, solo diners who brought some reading material with them, couples out for an end-of-week meal and so on. At first glance, the place appeared to be the next neighbourhood hit.

It took a little while for someone to take our order. We chalked it up to the place’s newness; it often takes a restaurant a little while to work the kinks out of its system during its “shakedown phase” and get a sense of how busy they’ll be. They appeared understaffed, and the the staff they had clearly weren’t used to working in a busy restaurant.

The orders we did manage to get were, for the most part, decent. The seafood tempura was done right, the dynamite roll was tasty and the edamame was well, edamame. After that, no food came to our table for a good while.

After asking around, we discovered that our order had been sent to the wrong table. We were still willing to forgive this mistake and place another order, and the waitress apologized and told us she’d be right back with a notepad. Hey, it’s an all-you-can-eat place, and most of the stuff was the kind that other places can make quickly.

She never came back. A good quarter-hour, complete with a lot of waves to the waitress, has passed without any service. It was clearly time for plan B.

“Enough already. Pizza slice?” I asked Wendy, gesturing to the Pizza Pizza across the street.

“Sure."

We walked up to the front, told the staff that our order had been served to the wrong table and no one had attempted to correct the mistake. Another customer who was standing at the counter said “Yeah, they screwed up my order, too.”

We also told them that we weren’t paying, and walked out. They gave no reply other than confused looks, tilted heads and stunned silence – not even an “I’m sorry". This sort of reaction is the hallmark of complete incompetence and the front-of-house staff treat the place as many similar people do: the restaurant’s just a place that provides a paycheque in exchange for you just showing up.

As we walked towards the pizza place, we ran into our neighbours Chris and Wanda, who were heading to Wasabi to try them out, and warned them away from the place. Consider this blog entry the same warning to the rest of the world: Wasabi is run by scatterbrains, and if you’d actually like some service, go elsewhere.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

“The Bloor”: A Documentary About the Bloor Cinema

Bloor Cinema logo The Bloor Cinema, located in the student-bohemian neighbourhood of Accordion City known as The Annex, has been a city institution since the turn of the previous century. It started out as a vaudeville theatre, became a cinema, then an “adult film” venue, and now it’s a repertory theatre and home to second-run films, Rocky Horror nights, independent cinema, art films, foreign films, film festivals and special projects like the The Pee-Wee Herman Picture Show. I’ve had many nice dates there (contrary to legend, I do have dates that do not end in police action or crisis counselling), the most recent of which were with The Missus.

Local blog BlogTO posted an article today pointing to the documentary film titled The Bloor, which chronicles the life of this Toronto cultural landmark. It’s been posted to YouTube in two parts, which I’ve posted below. It’s good lunchtime viewing.