Week 2 of the Alphabet Sufficiency: M. Martin and I agreed to move the Alphabet Sufficiency deadline to first thing Friday mornings.
Let me observe upfront that I am writing a blog entry about a city I have never visited, in a province of a country I have also never visited, whose primary language I do not speak. My husband suggested next week’s word should be ‘anaphora’ (the subject of my honours thesis) in retaliation. But actually I have a good stock of anecdotes about Montreal, and they’re all things that have happened to my husband, who has visited several times (his sister lives there). I don’t often tell his stories in my blog, but needs must.
tl;dr: in Montreal, it is always winter, and never Christmas.
Episode 1: “I would be dead”
Andrew didn’t grow up with what I will call snow literacy. Nor beach literacy, but that’s a different story (moral thereof: not all adults know that if there aren’t any waves, but a bunch of surfers are found in it, it’s a rip current). The first or second time we visited my parents together, he shyly asked if the white frozen water on the ground was snow. It was not, it was frost. (For an Australian, I’ve seen a reasonable amount of snow in my backyard; there’s a very small and fragile snowfall about once a year on average where my parents live.) The first time he actually saw snow was walking out of the train station onto the snow fields at Perisher. And it wasn’t until we were in Prague in 2004 for their first snowfall that he really understood that wearing gloves in winter is not in fact an affectation everywhere and at all times.
The first time he ever experienced temperatures lower than about -2°C, however, was in Montreal, and I believe the conversation went something like this:
[Sign indicates the local temperature is about -8°C]
Andrew: that sign is lying!
Sister: [polite disbelief]
Andrew: Because if it was actually minus eight, I would be dead.
Episode 2: so long, HP
This is the story of how Andrew lost his first and truest love.
We are seriously bad at gadgets in this household. We acquired a wireless router in, I think, 2005, when they’d been available in consumer stores for a few years and we had had a pressing need for them that whole time. We got a MP3 player in 2009, up until then it was CDs when we were out of the house. We got smartphones during the last week of 2011 — Andrew’s was a gift from Google — after spending five months working there amusing his colleagues with his dinky Nokia Classic and its cracked screen.
So it won’t come as any surprise that we were also rather late to laptops, compared to our milieu. I impulse purchased a tiny and ancient Toshiba from Everything Linux (RIP Anthony Rumble) in late 2002, and it was an interesting challenge to get Linux to actually work on it. Andrew nevertheless took it on at least one work trip for Canonical in 2004, and while no doubt again this was a good conversation starter in terms of ancient tech, he nevertheless needed to buy a laptop, and ended up with a rather nice HP one. I was quite envious. (As is the pattern with our gadgets, I bought one for myself some months later, a Fujitsu Lifebook, in New York. As with Andrew’s HP, the first laptop is the best: I still miss it.)
But Montreal broke them up. Andrew’s laptop was stolen from a hotel during a Canonical work event there by a local. There was even some brief drama when the thief was spied again by Canonical staff, presumably returning to the gold mine, and followed, but nothing interesting such as an arrest or a shootout or a duel came of it
It ended up being quite hard on us: Canonical’s Australian payroll administrator had also failed to make Andrew’s HECS (university tuition) repayments on his behalf that year, so within a couple of weeks his laptop was stolen, his insurance claim for it was denied (because it was stolen while unattended in an unlocked room), and the Australian Tax Office sent him a bill for thousands of dollars.
Thanks Montreal.
Episode 3: beware the Montrealer offering lifts
Andrew undertook a couple of round-the-world trips for Canonical involving Montreal, the best itinerary of which involved flying from work in Montreal to a holiday in Thailand, but in the wrong direction (that is, via London) in order to use an RTW ticket. It also involved the most lethal of all timezone adjustments: Thailand and Quebec were 12 hours off each other’s time. The other was more sensible: flying west from Australia to London, then work in Montreal, then PyCon in Chicago, then home.
On that latter trip, he happened to be on the same flight out of London as a colleague, and gratefully accepted the kind offer of a lift to his sister’s place. DO NOT DO THIS. IT IS ALL LIES AND TERRIBLE. They arrived in a blizzard, went out into the long term carpark, did the not insignificant work of digging the Montrealer’s car out and then got lost trying to exit the car park due to low visibility. While you have to admire the personal growth shown over Andrew’s multiple visits to Montreal (ie, he went from fearing death at -8 to being a car unearther) it does sound easier to just get the bus into town.
For his next trick, Andrew looks forward to visiting Montreal not in winter (probably for PyCon 2014 or 2015, stay tuned).
In conclusion, enjoy this video of the “Casseroles” protests in May 2012:
Much as ‘anaphora’ is tempting, I wrote 10000 words on it last decade. The ‘a’ word for next week is… ‘acceleration’.
