It's True - I invented the Selfie in 1977

In 1977 I was with a group of friends hiking the trails along the Humber River near the McMichael art gallery. One of them was carrying an inexpensive Kodak point and shoot camera. At one point he asked me to hold his camera while he looked for something in his pack. I don't know what possessed me, but I held the camera up with the lens pointed at my smiling face and snapped the shutter.

I had no idea how the picture would turn out or whether it would turn out. In those days you waited until the roll of film was used up, then sent it out to be developed and picked up your prints in a week or so.

It was some months later when my friend showed me the pictures from his camera. The selfie I took turned out remarkably well. "Who took that?" he asked. "I don't know," I shrugged, not wanting to admit to my vanity. Those were the days when I tried deliberately to look like John Denver.

But there we have it. When selfies became all the rage with the advent of the smart phone, I I had a certain amount of gratification that the selfie was nothing new. I was the one who first came up with it.

The Wild Colonial Boys of Summer House

 

During the summer before my final year at the University of Toronto, I had a gig managing the fraternity house. It was an elected position – you chose a “running mate” and the two of you sought the necessary endorsement from the other members to be nominated as joint candidates for Summer House Managers.

If elected, you and your partner had the task of renting whatever rooms were vacant between Firecracker Day and Labour Day, paying the utility bills, and looking after any necessary maintenance. We used to have a full-time maid named Maria back then and you had to handle the payroll which meant taking the statutory deductions from her pay and remitting them monthly to the government.

My running mate was Brother Conrad and we ran against the slate of Brothers Mark and Pierre. During a round of questioning by the members, each team was asked what kind of system they would use to keep the books. In third year Industrial Engineering, accounting was one of the required courses. I struggled with it at first and actually flunked the mid-term. Just in the nick of time, it came to me in a propitious revelation and I aced the final exam, winding up with a decent grade. I explained that we would use the double-entry accounting system approved and adopted by the fraternity's head office.

Brother Mark introduced the members to his “(patented) two-shoebox technique.” You have two shoeboxes; the money comes in to one shoebox and goes out through the other shoebox. As long as there’s more in the first shoebox than the second, you’re doing alright. The guys were not impressed. Conrad and I won handily.

Conrad had better people skills than me and he took on the job of renting the rooms. He had a knack for finding compatible guys who paid the rent on time. The renters understood that it was just for the summer and they would have to vacate when classes resumed in September. One guy named Roscoe got along particularly well with the members. He could chug beer with the best of them.

The Colonial Tavern was one of our favourite haunts during that summer. Sandwiched between the stately columns of two venerable bank buildings, the allure was cheap draft beer and good music. One night in late August, Roscoe was having a few beers with some of the members. I distinctly remember Brothers Brian and Marc being among them.

At one point, Roscoe declared “I wanna go POUNDING!” That meant to finish our beers and head out from the fraternity house to the Colonial. The entourage consisted of Roscoe, Marc, Brian and myself. The Colonial was your typical beer joint with round tables that got sticky circles on top from round after round of 6-ounce glasses of draft. We had quite a jovial time until Roscoe let the beer get the better of his good sense. His seat was against a wall and when he finished a glass, he would slam it onto the floor behind him, smashing it to pieces. The action was accompanied by a bizarre laugh that sounded like a cross between Woody Woodpecker and Superstone from The Flintsones.

“Hoo hoo hoo ha ha.” Smash!

“Hoo hoo hoo ha ha.” Smash!

Before long there was a heap of broken glass building up. The rest of us were mortified but we kept quiet. Roscoe was not being at all subtle and eventually the manager came over to our table. He took one look at the rubble, looked us over and said, “I think you boys had better drink up and leave.”

The next think I knew there was a bouncer standing behind each one of us with arms folded ominously. I didn’t even take the time to empty my glass. I got up and headed straight for the exit. The others followed with Roscoe bringing up the rear.

“What’s the matter with you wimps?” he slurred. “We could have taken them. I know karate.” Roscoe proceeded to demonstrate his martial arts skill with a kick to the air after which he spun around clumsily and fell flat on his butt to the ground.

Seeing that Roscoe was having trouble getting back on his feet, the rest of us helped him up, then escorted him onto a subway train and back to the fraternity house. With just a gentle push, he landed with a thud on his bed. I think that was where the term crashing originated.

Roscoe only had a few more weeks to go in his residency at the house, and they went by without any other major incident. But Brother Brian managed to imitate that ridiculous laugh to a tee, and we would cajole him into replicating it whenever we got together for some imbibing.

When the Colonial was demolished some years later to make way for development, I wonder if the construction workers heard the sound of breaking glass accompanied by “hoo hoo hoo ha ha.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His Drinkin’ and Smokin’ Came Before the Rent

 “Jesse’s drinkin’ came before the groceries and the rent ...”

This line from The Baptism of Jesse Taylor by The Oak Ridge Boys describes perfectly the lifestyle of a guy who was once my drinking buddy. This guy was a full-fledged alcoholic by the age of 20 and for almost 30 years we hung together with booze as our constant companion.

I quit drinking in 2012 and have not touched a drop of the stuff since. It meant giving up certain habits and even acquaintances and I could no longer associate with this guy. For the rest of this piece I will refer to him as “Guy” although that’s not his real name. Those of you who are close to me will recognize who Guy is, and would I ask that you keep that to yourselves. He is, simply put, the biggest screw-up I’ve ever known, and you may get a chuckle out of some of the tales I relate.

Guy lived with his parents until he was 32 years old. He blasted the music on his stereo until all hours of the morning. Every day he drank until he passed out, with the music still blaring. His mom or dad would have to enter his room and turn the music off. When he finally came to, he was usually too hung over to go to work. He missed more days of work that he put in and never held on to a job for very long.

Every morning his mom cleaned out the overflowing ash tray and picked up the empty beer bottles. Another day, another twenty-four empties.

His parents finally had had enough and told him to move out. His dad ran his own carpentry operation and had contracts with several apartment building owners. He used his contacts to land an apartment for Guy and personally guaranteed the initial rent. When Guy could no longer find work on his own, his dad took him on as an employee of his firm and tried to show him the ropes.

How Guy ever managed to hang on to his apartment for 15 years before being kicked to the curb is a constant source of wonderment to me. His dad eventually stopped subsidizing  his rent and he continually fell behind in the payments. Beer and cigarettes took priority over the rent. To make up for the shortfall in the budget, he borrowed from everyone, his lawyer sister being the main source.

One day Guy showed me a notice he’d received from the Landlord and Tenant Board. The landlord had scheduled a hearing at which they would ask the board to grant an eviction order for unpaid rent. You’d better go to that meeting, I told him. I can’t, he said - I have to be at work. Your choice, I said, but if you don’t show up they’ll probably get an order.

Some time later his sister contacted me and said that her brother, true to form, did not show up at the hearing and the landlord got an eviction order that they could enforce at any time. She didn’t have the time to look after it and was not familiar with tenancy law in any case. She knew that I’d had experience with the Small Claims Court system and because it is similar to how the tenancy board operates, she asked if I’d help.

I am neither a lawyer nor a paralegal but I had years of watching Judge Wapner on The Peoples Court under my belt. In those days you could represent Small Claims litigants as their “agent.” I helped several people win their cases against rogue towing companies. I successfully sued one of them myself and won a large judgment which included hefty punitive damages.

Guy could appeal the eviction order by applying to the board for a hearing at which he would have to give reasons why the order should be lifted. The first thing he would have to do is bring all rent arrears up to date. He would have to swear an affidavit outlining the date and method of all payments made.

He borrowed from a bunch of people, even me, and his sister commissioned the affidavit. Then he would have to go to the board’s office and pick up a package with instructions for launching the appeal.

Fast forward about a month and I get another call from the sister. No one showed up at the appeal and the board left the eviction order in place. She asked me if there was anything more that could be done.

I was astonished to learn that Guy could appeal the appeal. It was called a request for reconsideration or something like that. He would have to pay a $50 fee and provide a damn good reason why he should get another kick at the can.

Why in God’s name didn't you attend the appeal when you went to all that trouble to pay the back rent and get an affidavit signed? I asked incredulously.  He never picked up the package from the board. (“I had to be at work.”) Well, for Christ’s sake. The package contained the date and time of the hearing, a Notice of Appeal to be served on the landlord and an Affidavit of Service to be filed with the board as proof that the landlord had been served. Since the landlord was not notified of an appeal, they of course did not show up.

The only explanation I could think of was that Guy did not understand the procedure. He would not have gone through the process of paying all arrears and swearing an affidavit if he wasn't serious about an appeal, I argued. The board somehow bought it. They scheduled a hearing.

This time I made damn sure he attended and I went with him. The meeting went quickly. The lawyer for the landlord explained to us how it would work. He would rise when the chair asked if there were resolutions, he would state that all arrears were paid and ask for the order to be stayed. “You dodged a bullet,” the chairman said to Guy.

A few more months passed and I got a call from Guy. He was living with his parents again after 15 years. He’d been evicted. The board had stayed the order, but not rescinded it. The landlord still had the order in their back pocket. It could be enforced whenever the landlord wanted. The very next time he fell behind with the rent, they called the sheriff, who came and changed the locks while Guy was at work.

Since then (2013), the tenancy laws have changed and there is no more appeal of the appeal. The tenant gets one shot to get it right. But the law still highly favours the tenant and a landlord can incur large financial losses if they are unfortunate enough to be saddled with a professional deadbeat.

As for the money I loaned to Guy, I had to think of innovative ways to recoup at least a portion of my losses. But that’s another story.

 

Taras Shevchenko Day

People have wondered why I observe Taras Shevchenko Day every March 9. Taras Shevchenko (March 9, 1814 - March 10, 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, artist and social activist  who became a national hero to that country. 

"But you're not of Ukrainian descent," they correctly note. If I were to take an Ancestry DNA test, I'm thinking it would show 50% English (my dad's side) with 25% Irish and 25% German (my mon's side). Here's the story of a man named Oleg:

It was March 9, 1992. I was working as a development support analyst in the IT department at Eaton's. I was responsible for the batch processing that started up near the end of the workday and continued running overnight. I would carry a pager so that I could be reached if something went wrong in the middle of the night shift. On most occasions I could solve the problem over the phone. Sometimes, however, it meant going in.

I was just about to leave for the day when I got called. The very first job in the batch run crashed. Then every job running simultaneously. I looked at the system log and saw that every time the system issued an operator command to mount a tape, the program would abort. The batch systems back then relied heavily on tape input and output, unlike the real time systems that ran during the day, which used direct access disc storage.

I figured it must be the tape management system. It was a third-party software product that replaced IBM's subsystem, which had severe limitations. I ran one of my own programs that retrieved data I had stored on tape. You had to conserve every precious byte of disc storage back then. I had just run it a couple of days before. Now it crashed. The tape management system had to be the culprit. I paged the system programming manager, whose department was responsible for supporting the software. He called from a pay phone saying he was on the way home but would head back in. Meanwhile, Oleg, a technician in the network area, happened by my desk.

"Vurkink late?" he asked in his delightful Ukrainian accent. I explained the problem and he said, "show me dump." The system dumps the contents of its storage in hexadecimal digits whenever a program crashes. At one time they had to be printed on paper, producing a stack three or more feet high. We at least had the technology by that time to route the dump onto disc where it could be viewed from a screen.

After about 15 minutes Oleg showed me a line of hexadecimal code that meant little to me. I had never mastered the technique of analyzing system dump data. "Shooting dumps" is what the bits and bytes techies called it. He pointed out a two-byte segment of machine code. "Here iss vair eet crash," he said. The line of code looked something like this.

5820 B022 5A20 B021 8B20 0001 5B20 B026 0A0D 000C

It meant nothing to me. "See the eenstruction 0A0D? 0A is machine code that pass control to supervisor. Next two hexadecimal digits can be from 0 to 255 (00 to FF in hex). 0D is hexadecimal for 13. Supervisor call code 13 mean seestem abort task immediately. Vhy iss user program doink supervisor call anyvay? That is reserved for operatink seestem."

I told him that the tape management system probably does calls to the system supervisor as it replaces IBM's code. "That must be eet," Oleg said. “Somevun poot een wronk supervisor code. Must findink out vut supervisor code tape seestem use." I paged the system program manager again. It was unknown how long it would take him to respond. Meanwhile, Oleg suggested we go to the system programming department and look at their manuals. We encountered a row of empty desks as they had all left for the day. Oleg pulled a manual from a bookcase. It was the installation manual for the tape management software. The system was called UCC-1/TMS from University Computing Company in Dallas, Texas. It was used by almost all the big iron mainframe computer installations.

Oleg pointed me to a section in the manual where it described the software's supervisor call routine. It used code 208, D0 in hexadecimal. The system programming manager had now arrived back at the office. Oleg asked him if a recent change had been made to the tape software. They had put in a patch earlier in the day, he said. It was done by one of his guys.

"Your guy dyslexic," Oleg told him. "He code 0A0D ven should be 0AD0. Instead of passink control to tape subroutine, supervisor brink whole seestem down." The manager's jaw dropped. I would have never found that in a million years. I'll bet he wouldn't have either." Change code, reboot seestem. Then should be okay."

It was now the other guy's problem. He said he was going to have a little talk with his guy the next day. It would take a good two hours to reboot the system and get everything running again. I said I was going to leave. If I didn't get paged, I would assume everything worked alright. Meanwhile, I told Oleg I owed him a drink. Or several. It was about eight pm.

We went to a restaurant and bar at 1 Dundas West called J J Mugs. My drink of choice then was scotch & soda, his vodka & tonic. And boy could he drink. We had dinner and several rounds of drinks. At around 10 pm we were ready to leave.

He said it was Taras Shevchenko Day and he was going to catch a celebration at the Ukrainian Association at Bloor and Keele. Taras Shevchenko? He told me about the Ukrainian poet and social activist who was that country's national hero. I decided to go with him.

Taras Shevchenko 1814-1861

The place was crowded to the rafters. There was music, dancing and laughter. Oleg disappeared into the crowd. I hung around for a bit. There were some announcements over the loudspeakers and cheers and applause came from the crowd. I didn't understand any of it. I figured I had better head home, sleep off my drunk and try to get to work on time in the morning.

At work the next day I filled boss in on what had happened. Good work, he told me. It was all Oleg, I said. I didn't know if anyone else would have found the problem. Oleg didn't come in to work that day.

I associated closely with Oleg after that. We had lunch on many occasions. I had never met a more brilliant software technician and I learned a lot from him. He was a really nice guy to boot. He told me my name is also a Ukrainian name; it is pronounced "Deneez." Of Greek origin. He even showed me how to write it in the Cyrillic alphabet - Дениз.

We were all laid off from Eaton's a few months later. The entire company went belly up seven years after that. With his cred Oleg probably landed another job immediately. It took me a year. I found work at Canada Revenue and moved to Ottawa where I stayed for six years.

Ever since, I celebrate Taras Shevchenko Day every March 9 and remember what a wonderful help Oleg was to me that day.