Tony Clement Has Some 'Splainin To Do!

I'd like to draw your attention to this letter that my mom sent to Federal Health Minister, Tony Clement, 6 weeks ago. Even an 8-year old would realize that its entire focus is on drug addiction and the negative repercussions on law abiding citizens.

Yet, this is the letter she recently received from Minister Clement:

With all the tax money that we send to Ottawa, is it too much to expect that our government officials or their staff actually read the letters that citizens bother to write?

My only explanation for this is that my mom's letter was scanned by a computer with OCR software and it picked up on the word "drug" and then automatically sent a pre-written letter. I'm willing to be corrected, Mr. Clement. Until then, take me off of your fan club list.

Ever wonder how much money is spent holding each meeting?

I'll never forget the time I was a consultant, helping to reorganize the graphical document management system of a large company. We held a meeting to finalize a number of issues. One topic that came up was what colour a line representing a certain kind of object should be. The choice was between Red and Green. There were about 10 highly paid individuals there, all employees at this company. What I thought might take 60 seconds to decide ended up going back and forth for at least 30 minutes. It was simply ridiculous and I later started calculating how much money was being spent in salaries to make that one decision.

One of my new favourite blogs to read is the "Bits" section of the NY Times. It could aptly be described as "Technology meets Culture". An hilarious story today was about a little piece of software called "Meeting Miser" that allows one to calculate how much money is wasted ... errr "spent" at each meeting.

Diary of a Government Contractor

Here is a perfect example of why government projects cost sooooooooo much money.