Die Hard Three

When someone talks about a seemingly great deal I believe it’s important to ask the good followup questions – especially if the person is a politician. If the deal being presented is part of a complex system you might need an expert but if it’s an everyday thing that lots of people do, you can try and handle it yourself – but you have to know the right things to ask.

Here for you now is an example:

I’ve gotten a lot of joy talking about my flight to the happiest place on Earth, but was it really $505?

Let’s dive deep.

Best way to analyze something like this is through the lens of the good and bad question.

Right off the top I said I FOUND a flight for $505. But is that what I paid? Nope, the $505 was from some dumb-ass reseller I’d never heard of. It was $45 more to buy direct from the carrier (which is safer) so I paid a little more.

What airport was I flying out of?

Excellent question! 

I had to get my ass down to a city called Hamilton Ontario. This cost me $68.93 (inter-city train to Toronto) and another $11.56 for the commuter train (to Hamilton) and then another $3.80 to get to the airport. Now, the first train was late so I had to run to catch the commuter train and I ended up on the train without paying. There was no ticket checker – so I saved $11.

What about the way back?

This is where things really start to suck. Landing in Hamilton early in the evening makes it impossible to catch a bus or train back to Ottawa that does not get in at 5 am. I found this thing called MegaBus that runs from Hamilton airport to Union Station (Toronto’s giant train station) $5.64 plus an $11 train to the airport and flight to Ottawa for 9,800 pts and $50.24.

$555 flight (Hamilton-Berlin return)
$ 68 train  (Ottawa to Toronto)
$  5 city bus (Hamilton)
$  5 intercity bus (Hamilton to Toronto)
$ 11 train (to Toronto airport)
$ 50 flight (Toronto to Ottawa)
————
$694 CDN

So is this a good deal?

Well the only other flight in the same ballpark I’ve been able to find was $560 from Ottawa to Frankfurt (WestJet/Condor, return, via Toronto) plus another $128 for the ICE train FRA-BER return. So money wise they’re almost identical albeit for different travel dates.

How long did all this take?

This is where things got effed up. It took me 24 hours from wake-up to check in to my apartment. I was flying via Iceland so there was an extra four hours over a direct-to-Germany flight from Toronto.

This other flight has a 10 hours layover in Toronto and leaves Ottawa at 06:00 AM. So it would be a 30 hour travel day to get to the apartment in Berlin.

Long travel days means you’re buying food on-the-road (so to speak – some of the meals are actually in-the-air) 

Was it comfortable?

No. Not at all. All airline travel is terrible all the time but on these flights I wanted to die several times. This cheap-ass airline packed us in there like HERRINGS! No power ports on the seats. Water was $3 – my cousin would have been so upset.

I flew WestJet/Condor in Nov 2023 to FRA from YEG via Calgary and it was way better but the train right after from FRA to BER was a literal nightmare. So with a couple days to visit Frankfurt before going to Berlin, the WestJet/Condor journey is probably more comfortable. I also like to visit FRA so it saves some money getting there from Berlin. 

Anything else?

The only other thing I can think of is defeating jet lag on the way to Europe. WestJet/Condor lands at 7 AM in the MORNING. Good luck not going insane trying to stay awake until 9 pm. The Iceland route has a noon arrival which is lightyears better. 

Note: I don’t consider sleep on an airplane (outside a pod) to be healthy/natural. More like terrible/awful. It does not count.

And with that, I’ve made it to 4 pm – five more hours to get over my jet lag!

Four days ago in Ottawa I was walking down the street by my place (sidewalk, daytime, clear, residential, 40 kph) and I came to a four-way-stop intersection I’m crossing and a motorist was going straight through the intersection and he came pretty close to me. I was about one metre from his driver side door. He totally saw me at the last second, cleared the intersection and immediately stopped, then turned around caught up to me and apologized.

Respect.

Just now in St. Albert AB, I was walking to get my coffee and I had to cross a road (dark, minimal street lights, marked crosswalk, flashing lights, 40 kph on the street, 60 kph on the road). I’m crossing in the green and he’s turning right from a feeder street. It’s 6:45 AM so not a lot of traffic. It’s dark so I’m being very careful.

I was in his target lane and he saw me at the last second and abruptly slammed the brakes. A tiny squeak from the tires of his stupid truck. A classic case of “motorist turning right and only worried about the car traffic in his target lane”. His phone beeps at that moment: I’m fucking dead.

That’s why (after almost killing me) his response to my “Dude, wtf” expression as we passed each other was so odious. He stopped, rolled down his window and said “Seriously, f-off”

No respect.

There’s so much I could write about this situation. The black, urban motorist acknowledging his mistake and apologizing. The (sort of) rural driver prioritizing his feelings over the fact that he almost murdered someone via negligence and NOT apologizing. That I was wearing a black jacket would have kept this a-hole out of prison with his drivers license still valid, burdened with only a small fine and the hassle of having to go to court.

Truck vs. car. Black vs. white. Urban vs. rural. ON vs. AB. Motorist vs. pedestrian. Left vs. right.

In October 2023 the Richmond BC Police released a PSA for this EXACT scenario. It’s so awful it’s *almost* funny. The community notes, my God.

On some level I can understand what’s going on here. I’ve been in many a discussion where I make a bad comparison. The problem here is that the bad comparison

• cost at LEAST $15,000 of public money
• survived multiple levels of review by management
• no one recognized the problem
• or when it was pointed out it was ignored

It wasn’t a poorly thought out tweet, conceived and published in under ten seconds by an unpaid intern at some local police service.

It was a video production with a script and budget and meetings and discussions and approvals. The core idea of the video was based around a fundamental concept of their profession (a profession that yields an enormous amount of power in society) made by trained members of a country’s NATIONAL police service. The problem with the video was so obvious it identified by untrained civilians about six seconds after it was uploaded.

And the video is still up!

This whole thing suggests to me that the people charged managing an important aspect of our society – safety from crime – a) don’t seem to know what a crime is and b) appear to be incapable of admitting (or at least correcting) when they make a mistake. And the stakes here are super low! How do they behave when they make bigger mistakes?

You know the mistakes I’m talking about.

The only good thing I can see about the Richmond BC police keeping this video up is that it’s a place where people can go and see a real-world reminder that the hero-worship our society bestows upon cops might not be warranted. And also as a manifestation of that famous Dril tweet.

Five months ago back on May 18, my new best friend here in Alberta was hit by a truck that was turning right. Tossed ten feet (three meters) off his mobility scooter. Ken was 100% in the right. The motorist was taking the turn way too fast, didn’t stop immediately after the crash, and then claimed to the cops that Ken was crossing against the light. There were fifteen witnesses. What a moron.

This is all to say that it’s experiences like that that convince me that it’s time for us to get rid of ANY kind of rolling righthand turn and to put to bed this reactionary impulse to claim the victim when one is clearly in the wrong.