I interviewed for a shop in Ottawa.

I was working at the time, but it was declining situation so I was Motivated.

So I show up a the appointed time, and I meet a guy who can best be described as ‘a little grizzled’ and ‘a little stressed’. We go over my resume, first off the bat.

“These are the things we need from you,” he said, tapping items on a list. “And these are places you suck,” he said, tapping the same list.

I basically checked out at that point; there was no way I was suitable for this post. I could learn it, but it was a lot. And while I had a lot of other skills that showed up on the job desc and my CV, missing so many important pieces was insurmountable. It wasn’t a super-fun experience no matter how interesting he was - he was a great lead hand - and I left without much fanfare. Great rambling talk about all kinds of things, but it’s the worst I’ve ever flamed out in an interview; and the fastest.

Imagine my surprise when he 'strong-hire’d me. I actually said to the recruiter, “Yeah, you’ve got it wrong. No no, and it’s totally okay, but you’re off by one or something. You mean to call the name above mine or the name below mine, and that guy is probably gonna love this job. But you don’t mean to call me. No stress, all good, but yeah, I’m not the guy you wanted to call.”

It was a great job and that guy was my lead. Brutal honestly is fabulous if you can take it.

check your devices

Go ahead. Open your iPhone. Some things don’t present as being safe to open without damaging the unit, so no one’s going to pop it open for lulz.

Terrorists killing terrorists

These are the terrorists killing anyone standing around people the terrorists don’t like. During a funeral.

I am starting to love them

Be careful whom you worship.

Based

On second thought, you’ll be onto some new fad in a day.

tight-packed schedules

Extra hardware.

Not something sitting there hot and ready to go, but there to take the place of the flight. Maintain a one-unit queue of planes ready to board and launch so that each and every plane sits for 2 hours and is actually prepped.

Or, when that inevitable daily breakage happens and a plane needs to be taken off the line for the day, it allows time to bring in another spare to keep that queue full (of 1) when the rotation loses that active plane.

there was nothing they could do

I’m willing to bet ‘showing basic humanity’ was an available option the flight crew was just unable to consider.

Pierre will tell us we’re still over-funded and his rich friends should pay even less taxes than the pittance they’re paying now.

With no extra airplanes, they probably don’t have time.

Again, the problem comes down to no extra equipment; even when it would give them the lag time to properly clean between departures at no added hw maintenance or aircrew costs.

Agreed. We’ve had just so many experiences of negligence and apathy from Air Canada that we’ve given up on them and also consider them an airline of last resort. We’ll move dates and locations to open up other options before considering them, as well, and even reconsider just not going.

Great news for Air Canada is that Westjet got bought and declined sharply since then, so they’re only much better than Air Canada instead of being in a different category completely as before.

Now do ‘home and native land.’

Not being psychic, I’d be far more reluctant to over-leverage assumptions like that.

The name of the 10th premier of Alberta, who won his party control in the '70s on a platform (featuring diversity in spending and preparing for a post-oil economy) all but ignored soon after, after whom the region is named, is apparently pronounced “LAW-heed”.

Yeah. I’m dumbfounded too. I’ll continue to pronounce it “LOW-heed” so people don’t look at me funny. Bone apple tea.

consider PCLinuxOS for a mageia (mandriva, conectiva and mandrake, both branches from RedHat pre-Enterprise Linux) descendant.

if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it

I miss Cringely’s take on this.

. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.

It’s a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.

But this new one is QUITE the departure. It’s not ‘red hat’ stupid but a little further on the spectrum.

Thank you for this excellent summary. It answers all the questions I had, and it’s wonderful news.

dairy subsidies

Do you mean Canada’s dairy supply management system?

Are we still calling LNG a ‘green’ fuel? Is fracking still a big deal, given the impending water crisis?