Banks just don't care

I guess we all know this already, but it is always fun to get a nice stark reminder when you are confronted with it face to face.

When we first came to Canada a few months ago we had a huge collection of things to do, one of which was to set up a bank account. Initially we went with Bank of Montreal, for no reason other than we knew where they were. We deposited a few thousand in there and applied for credit cards. To get credit cards we were told that we would need to put up cash collatral in lieu of our credit limit (not much of a "credit" card if you think about it). I understand the need for this as new immigrants, but it is a little aggravating when you have gold cards in other countries, but won't be given any line of credit. We were told that we would need to leave this money with the bank for a year until we had a credit history in Canada. As much as this left us $2000 out of pocket so to speak at a time when we really needed the money, what could we do. So we complied and set about living in Canada. Since then months have passed, we have opened a number of other Bank accounts and as it turns out we have now obtained a credit history in this country.

As the card has been very active and yet paid off, we actually have a good creidt rating and were offered a credit card by another bank the other day. No cash desposit, no horribly restrictive credit limit, just a normal card. At the time we turned it down, but it got me to thinking.

If we have a credit rating here and are now past the cash desposit hurdle, why are BMO still hanging on to our cash deposit. Surely they could free this up and increase our credit rating due to the fact that we

1 Have a credit rating
2 Are both employed
3 Their compeditors are willing to do this

Against these facts is the fact that we were told we would have to wait a year. To me that is pure buearacracy and not a real reason. So I called them up the day before I was due to fly out to Whitehorse and asked to have my credit limit increased and the cash freed up. They said no, as we had to wait a year. So I asked to speak to a supervisor. I was told they would call me back. I asked if they could call me back before 3 that afternoon. (They called back 3 days later). So I called back after 3 and got a little uppity with them. The woman on the other side refused to pass me on to any supervisor and when pressed, gave me the number of a car rental place just to get me off the line.

That just got me pissed and I called back to place a complaint against the person who did that. While I respect the balls it takes to be so dismissive of a customer, it was a little much. The complaint call achieved nothing as they said they would call me the next day, but never did.

So I had to call them again the next morning. I was not in the best frame of mind with them at the time as I had once again run up against my credit limit. I travel on expense a lot and often spend $1000 in a week on hotels/rentals/flights etc. Having a limit less than this means constant paying into the account and as it sometimes takes 4 days to go through I have suffered the embarressment of having my card refused, as I did at the hotel the night before.

So when they listened to my request and told be directly that they were not interested in helping me I was a little put out. No one tried to even increase my credit by a dollar. They simply said no and when I told them that other banks were more understanding, they were not interested in the least. When I told them that I would be closing my accounts if they didn't think of some way of helping out, they simply said we won't help.

Ok, so I am new to this country and they need to be careful, but consider the facts. I am employed full time. They can verify this. I have a lease that binds me to an apartment. They can verify this. I have used the card very extensively, yet never missed a payment or failed to fully clear the card. They can verify this. My wife and I are in the market for a house, and potentially we are going into debt to the order of many thousands of dollars. You would think a bank would be falling over itself to get that mortage of 2 university graduates working full time. But no, they would rather try to hang on to a mere $2000 dollars for a couple more weeks. And they will lose that too. So, as soon as the other creidt cards I have since applied for come through, I will close all my BMO accounts down and never do business with them again. From potentially having a client for life, they will have a vocal critic for life, with my little bit of money they have leaving and someone actively discouraging others from investing with them.

Atlin!!!

During the course of my global wanderings I always liked to seek out the unusual and out of the way places. I wanted to find and authentic experience, not just a generic touristic holiday. Thus, instead of Annapuna I went to Dalhagiri, instead of Arusha, I went to Amali. To Puerto Williams, Sucre, Dodoma, Megahalia etc etc. Places it is unlikely most people have heard of and few have been to.

Coming to Canada has not dulled that thirst for the unique and remote and my job has the added advantage of taking me to remote places. For the most part though I am in the bush with my truck, far from towns in endless forest, with a view of little more than trees. Sure the drives are great and the scenery can be stunning, but I long for more.

I was lucky this week to thus visit Atlin. If I was backpacking through Canada, Atlin is just the sort of place that I would seek out and spend some time in. Because not only do I like to find interesting and unheard of places, but I enjoy spending time there. Why go to the effort of hunting out these gems, only to pass through.

Unfortunately I do now work and only had a day in Atlin. But I will be back. With only 400 people living here it is a small town at the end of a 100km long dead end road, the turn off from which it starts been a further 90km from Whitehorse, the nearest town. Decidedly remote. And as such they use our Satellite internet services, which brought me in along the mixed gravel and tarred road on a cloudy Tuesday morning. Being the dead of winter the sun only started to get up around 10, shortly before I came into town. Still, there was enough light around for me to enjoy the view and pull over to the side of the snow covered roads more than once to take a photo or two.

Coming in a grand total of 3 cars were seen on the road, 1 more than I saw on the hour and a half long drive out.

Atlin began life as a spin off of the famous Klondike gold rush of the 1890's with a little gold being found some way from town. The area itself is truly stunning and I think this natural beauty has been enough to keep the town going. Located next to the largest natural lake in British Columbia, the town looks directly across on stunning mountains, which made an appearance out of the ice fog as I rolled into town.

My work in town involved a service call to replace all the components of our system and this took the better part of two hours to have up and running again as before. The guys in our NOC (network operations centre) wanted to watch it a bit before I left site, so I had a couple hours to kill. I took a short lunch in the only place in town to serve food and then went on a bit of a walk around town, taking in the lake front. The lake is all of 300m deep and thus takes a long time to cool down in the winter. Although most other lakes in the area are under a sheet of ice, the lake here was still lapping its crystal clear waters on shore in places. This resulted in an ice fog above the lake as the warmer water laden air left the surface. The surrounding ring of mountains came into and out of view, and the fog itself gave an at times eerie and lovely light to photograph. I took a few shots, some of which are the best I have taken in a while. I particularly like the shot of the house overlooking the docks, with its menacing sky which is at the start of this post.

The town now survives on a summer tourism trade and was mostly boarded up for the winter. Indeed the only shop in town had closed its doors for the winter, resulting in the petrol station being the main place of trade. During the summer the lake must be stunning and it runs right up to the glaciers that carve directly into it in the south. This is something I want to see and the single government agent, Glen, liked my suggestion of a summer holiday return enough to offer his boat. He was an interesting character in himself, having lived here for 9 years as the sole representative of all things BC government. He has also traveled extensively and we chatted a bit as the satellite system passed its testing hours with flying colours.

It was with reluctance that I left around 5pm, with the light almost gone for the long trip back to Whitehorse and my hotel room.

Yukon

There are a few places in this world which beckon to adventurers everywhere. Their names are such that the very mention of them get some of us dreaming of wild days and remote nights under the stars. Patagonia, Mongolia, Tibet, Serengeti etc etc. I am sure we all have our own personal list, but on my list there has been "The Yukon"

The river itself is central to that longing I have for the region. It is one of the great watercourses of the world, up there with the Mekong, the Orinoco, the Congo,the Nile or the Amazon. Sure there are other big river like the Mississippi or the Rhine, but to me they do not mean "adventure" The Yukon does. So it was with childlike excitement that an email arrived in my inbox last week from our operations Centre. Clay, who has a similar love of the open road and wild places as me, had simply entitled it "Atlin!!"
Now I am almost certain that people reading this would never have heard of Atlin, which is why I have a whole entry dedicated to it. But I knew it enough to know I was off the the wild blue Yonder!

The Air North flight was on time into Whitehorse on Monday, and I touched down in this regional capital on the banks of the Yukon a little before 22:00. Gone are the hard traveling days of hunting the cheap bus into town and then stomping around under a weighty backpack looking for the cheapest sleazy dive in town. I now get to expense things, and Clay had organised everything in advance. So, despite the fact I was still heaving the same old Macpac on my shoulders, I got to stroll over to the rental cars and pick up a nice to little SUV and drive into town to a rather swank hotel complete with Jacuzzi.
Yesterday saw me do the work needed out in Atlin and get back late after leaving early. No time to explore this town, although a truly wonderful trip with some of my best photos in ages.

Today was although more touristic. The flight back leaves a little before 15:00, giving me the whole day really with only a couple packages to send. So I have been walking around in this nice little town, taking photos. It is clearly NOT tourist season and there is not much to do. It is a Balmy -10 outside, which for this time of year is outright hot. So I took the chance to stroll all over town. Aside from the standard photo in front of the boat I was rather amazed with the murals in town, so I took a number of shots of them.



Lastly and maybe most importantly for me, I got to meet the Yukon. Ask my friends, I like to meet things up close. Merely taking a photo of some famous landmark in the background does not cut it for me. I want to touch it, feel the texture, examine it from different angles. The Yukon should be met in a canoe if you ask me, with days of paddling and nights on remote shores. But failing that at least I want to touch it, taste it and be at one with it. In summer I guess swimming it would count. Now, I took a photo, not in the river, but on it. Standing alone on the ice 100m from shore, with its once famous rapids (form where the name Whitehorse comes, since dammed out of existence) somewhere below my feet I at least met the river enough to feel satisfied with my brief and interesting visit.


Hopefully my work will bring me this way again, and hopefully I can bring Wen-shu with too, to see this outpost in the True Northern wilderness. The remainder of my time in town was spent in a fruitless search of some worthwhile trinket to take back to my loving wife as a memento of the trip. Sadly everything is brutally overpriced here and nothing I saw in the shops I visited was interesting or unique enough for me to part with the better part of $50.
Next time my sweet!

Toaster away

Success, finally. At last the home desktop is burning CD's and DVD's. Finally the last hurdle in the Linux build is over. The issue as it turns out had to do with permissions of cdrecord, the underlying burning program. My good friend Tophe pointed me in that direction and I now have it up and running. I would be a very happy camper were it not for the fact my laptop refuses to burn CD's from MP3 files. I know this is an Ubuntu issue as the codec is not GPL. What that means in simple English is that the way of compressing the sound uses software that is not freely available (free as in beer!). Ubuntu only installs completely free software by default, so things like MP3 support are lacking. While I understand the arguement behind this, most of us have thousands of MP3's on our machines we want to play and burn. Using Ubuntu out the box makes this impossible. IF it were a simple "click here to install this capability" I would be happy, but it is a lot more complex than that. Something I need to solve tomorrow!

Oh, Happy new year, by the way. Here's hoping for a great 2006 for everyone, planetwide

Once great writings

I really used to be good at writing. I only just realised this reading some of my old writings. Since they are long forgotten, I thought I would publish them again. This is from 2000, 5 years ago. My world view may have changed a little, but boy, could I write back then.

"I was driving home last night around three in the morning, thinking of the concept of home. And more particularly, what the concept means to me. I'm very much one of the unattached. I really don't think of any one location as being my home, the place where I am at rest. Staying here in Pinetown (what a bad name, like wattletown or gumtown) just outside Durban has certainly provided me with little sense of place. If anything, the town I left a touch before three last night is still home.

Pietermartizburg. PMB. Big name for what is a small rural city. I've hardly slept a night there in 4 years, and even in my last few months here in SA haven't been there for more than a few hours at a time. Yet the familiarity of the place is like I know for no other. When you still know the side lanes, the confused alleys or the timing of the traffic lights on the main streets. Then I guess you know a place give or take. But that doesn't make it home. You see home is really the place you'd want to be, when life is being plain unreasonable. The better place. And sure, on some particularly shitty bus trips, or in some forsaken hotel room, fighting another bout of something tropical or intestinal, PMB is the place I occasionally would rather be. But not always. To be honest, it really seems a bit lame. Traveled the world, seen the oceans and the mountains, and I, like everyone, hanker after the ordinary of where I grew up. We all seem to do it. Love the normal despite the exotic. And although PMB is pleasant, its not exotic. For some lucky souls, the normal is the exotic. For those folks who live in the Seychelles, or some Himalayan hamlet, or Chobe, or the like, well they can hanker after home for it is after all the sort of place we largely hanker after. But who really dreams of visiting PMB. Which, by virtue of my misplaced individualism, doesn't really allow me to cherish PMB as home. Living there, aside from good mountain biking and proximity to the berg, would finally drive me into just another dull ex-colonialist stupor.
So is home then my backpack, as I occasionally romantically infer. NOT (don't tell me anyone actually believes mawkish triad like that). Nor my tent (Sheryl) or sleeping bag or any other possessions. Which means home must be a state of mind. Hmmm. I spent a bit of time thinking about that. After three, finding toll money and steering at 120km/h. Not the way to approach the problem, but then the apparent solution was that home was moving.
Arriving has to be the second worst part of travel (after packing, obviously) and a three thirty arrival "home" quickly had me surmising that to be still driving would be far better. Hence home=motion.
I used to often drive 540km to PMB on weekends, and come back again on Sunday nights. I adored the late night return trip. Loud music, snack food, empty road. And speed. Soaring through the flat highveld in SA in the early hours of the morning, totally happy (and somehow ignoring the horrendous Monday shortly dawning), my car singing its exaltations with soaring revs, I wondered how anyone can pursue a secure nest. Home was motion. Which of course, is total crap. Home is a place (look it up in a dictionary) If you want to describe the sense of place in placelessness, invent another word! So, after running a few of these thoughts around in my head for a while (While finding the keys, collecting the CD's from under the seat, throwing out the snackfood trash) I concluded that home is just not much of a sensible word in my world view. And given that it's a fairly pivotal concept in most people's worldviews, it no doubt means that I am, in the words of Johan, weird At three in the morning, sober, having just driven 140km for supper, unlocking your parent apartment at 28 years of age, this is hardly a revelation"

Hope you enjoyed that!