Tuesday November 6, 2007
Just a Thought
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. [Herm Albright]
Good morning. First of all, if you came to find my journal at chfi.com yesterday and today - thank you. You went the extra mile and I am grateful. My server has been down since Sunday; I’m not sure why and I don’t know when it’ll be back up, but a big BIG thank you to Jay Kennedy, our CHFI web whiz, for getting the journal up just on chfi.com, since www.erindavis.com is pooched. I appreciate it.
Jay comes in around 5:30 every morning to handle all of our web content needs: the Birthday Game Spotlight Song at 5:55 am, hot topics that we’re discussing (and how to get more info) and all kinds of other stuff. He’s cheery, he works really hard and although the website woes can be enough to make anyone pull their hair out, he maintains a terrific attitude. Also, at 7 am, just about the time that the first (and/or second) coffee has worn off, Jay makes a run for fresh ones for us all. We’d love him anyway but, well, that’s just the icing on the coffee cake!
Friday morning after the 8 am news and during a rare quiet moment, I saw one of the listener phone lines flashing. As we’re all wont to do (when time permits or there’s not a contest coming up that means callers are just trying to get through early to qualify) I answered and the gentleman on the other end was quite insistent that he talk to Mary Ellen Beninger. Logistically (unless he were to call the 680 newsroom) it wasn’t possible and since he was clearly in transit, an e-mail address wasn’t going to help. So I asked if there was anything I could pass on to her.
The man - whose name I didn’t get, I’m afraid - took issue with MEB’s segue from a story about the then-$1.06 Canadian buck, to another story, with the line “…in other good economic news…”. He asked me to ask her, “How can the Canadian dollar’s strength be good economic news?”
He went on to explain: he runs a company with about 180 employees in Brampton. The product that they make is usually sold to a large Canadian chain store, but he’s worried for his employees’ - and presumably his own - future. As he puts it, why would this chain keep buying his goods as the Canadian dollar soars when they can be bought far more cheaply from a company that makes them in China?
I wasn’t able to address that, of course. And who can? When you have goods being made by workers who earn $4 an hour (and that’s on the high end of the scale) then how on earth can any company compete? A story in one of the papers’ financial sections last week illustrated that point: a car made in North America, once you figure in the cost of health care benefits, costs about $120 an hour in labour. In China, those numbers are more like $4. Not $40, but $4. Two toonies. That’s it. How can we compete, indeed?
I’m not an economist, so I won’t pretend to know any more than what I read, and what this upset business owner told me on Friday.
But it got me to thinking about the strong dollar, the economy, farmers and sunshine. Where do the last two come in? Here’s where:
On a Friday morning last September, Mike and I were talking about the weather for the upcoming weekend and we were unabashedly delighted about the sunny forecast. You may recall me journaling about a man named Markus who wrote about how fed up he was with people on the radio and television (and since I happen to read my e-mails, I guess writing to me was Job #1) raving about the sunshine. Didn’t I know that farmers were suffering through the worst August (and Sept.) ever, thanks to a lack of rain? And what about gardeners? Didn’t we know that rain was needed there, too?
I thought it over and wrote back to him that I couldn’t celebrate a rainy weekend, no matter how hard I tried to put myself in someone else’s boots. I can definitely sympathize (coming from farmers on my father’s side) but in the end, it’s what our listeners feel and want to hear that we have to try very hard to reflect. As it happened, the days approaching included the Weekend to End Breast Cancer, and I didn’t wish a soggy two-day walk on anyone. Who could? I never heard back from him; maybe he just needed to vent. Lucky me.
So, how does this tie in with the heady Canadian dollar? The fact that we’re heading south with listeners in under two weeks has us thinking about the astounding exchange rate, and how - for a change - we aren’t going to have to add another 10, 20 or 30 percent to the price of goods as we’re figuring out the Canadian to US dollar swap at the airport and everywhere else. As well, Rob and I are booking travel for 2008 and to be actually saving money on accommodations or tours is so brand new that it makes us giddy.
But there’s that damned guilt. Even though I’m not among those Ontarians going across the border to shop (buying American retailers’ Chinese-made goods instead of our Chinese-made goods in many cases) I know that my glee over a strong Canadian dollar is tempered by the worry and anger that people like that Brampton businessman feel every day that they hear the latest exchange rate. Somebody tell me, where is the happy medium? How do we reflect what our listeners feel when they’re going through two extremely different experiences?
And on a more rhetorical level - can’t we all just agree on anything? Just one thing? And why does everything positive also have to have a down side - the negative yang to the cheery yin?
More to the point, why on earth do I have to care so much???
Jeez, I hope Lauren decides to become a shrink, so I can get a family discount. As it stands now, she wants to go into radio. Well, maybe we’ll get a mother/daughter rate.
Have a great day - and we’ll talk here tomorrow.
Erin