Blessed by the Potato

Well, I’ve seen lawns toilet papered before, but this is ridiculous:

My building recently upgraded the toilets, and that was the pile made after a single day of renovations (I think it took them 5 days total). I thought they were going to continue to pile on toilets in some kind of monument to the porcelain gods, but on the second day they brought in dumpsters instead.

I don’t particularly care for the new toilets: they work well enough, but the flush lever is way around on the side and halfway down, almost as though they were trying to hide it from you in the dark. They were also installed a few inches from the wall, and have a slightly convex top, so it’s rather difficult to use the toilet tank as a makeshift shelf (our old toilets had a flat lid with a raised lip and were flush with the wall, perfect for battery-powered nightlights, kleenex boxes, and whatever else might need to be put there). Of course, what I’m most concerned about is that my landlords will use this as an excuse to jack my rents in January. Considering they did this as a cost-saving measure (they’re water-saving toilets; new showerheads went in too, and the building pays for the water), it seems like the perfectly sneaky way to screw me later on.

Naturally, I threw the original notice (containing the water-saving motivation) in the garbage as part of my crazy post-thesis apartment clean-up. My place still has a little ways to go yet, but I’ve cleaned up so much it’s almost unbelievable. After snaking my way through piles of paper on the ground, I seem to suddenly have this giant expanse of usable floor space that I just don’t know what to do with.

I still don’t know exactly when I’ll have my car back. After I get it back, I’m going to have to clean it. Wayfare made a good point: I should probably just pay someone to clean it, since cleaning up the mess of the person who stole my car would probably be somewhat psychologically devastating. Anybody know of a good place to go? A chain of some sort would probably be best, since I don’t want to leave the mess there for a week until I get back to Toronto…

Ben’s right, my post did deserve more profanity! I just hadn’t had a chance to see my car to see exactly what those fuckers did to it, so it hadn’t really sunk home yet. I took a few pictures with my camera phone, I’ll see if I can get them on here.

But basically, they just trashed the inside (as you’d expect from someone with so little respect for someone else’s property that they’d break in and steal it). Both front seats have been damaged with puncture marks. The ashtray was torn out (presumably to get at the $45 emergency gas money I keep kept there). The glove compartment was emptied. They had McDonald’s and threw the wrappers and cups all over the backseat. They took my bag full of towels from the trunk and ripped it apart (what, thinking I kept my laptop in a bag full of towels or something?). I keep a tub of road salt in the trunk for emergencies — that was dumped all over the trunk, and then my windshield washer fluid likewise opened and dumped on that to make a congealed salty wreck of my trunk. The poker set was stolen (but the frisbee, thankfully, was not).

Just what the fuck!!?!?!

Edit: The radio was left. Also, about the timing: I left my apartment around 12:30 yesterday, and saw the car was gone — the cops called my parents at 12:47 (just a few minutes before I got back upstairs after talking to my landlord).

Update: Here’s a picture of the broken ignition.

Also, I’m not sure how far the car was actually driven. I thought I filled up in Toronto before coming back to London, which would have left me with about a half a tank of gas — it was sitting at 1/4 full in the lot there, with 380 km on the trip meter (I reset it when I fill up, and I think it should have been at around 300 km when it was stolen). So, that could have been a fair bit of driving with a lot of idling; an outcome that would fit well with my supervisor’s scenario of the car being stolen to commit a few robberies and then being dumped.

I just had another golden idea that I’m going to give away for free: elevator shelves.

How often have you seen someone stumbling into an elevator with their arms full of bags or a box? Quite often, we’ll try to precariously balance our stuff on the handrail to take a bit of the load off as the elevator moves us up or down. Well, what if there was a shelf in the elevator that could fold down (the first thing that comes to mind are the baby changing tables in restrooms)?

Well, I just got a report that my car has been stolen and recovered by the police with the ignition ripped out. I’m waiting for the case officer to call me back so I can get the details…

Not even a week after graduating, too.

Edit: so it was stolen and taken for a joyride then dumped. They towed it to the exact opposite end of the city from me (south of the 401 — my dad figures they get paid by the km for towing), so I’m not even going to bother shelling out $60 in cab fares to go look at it first, I’m just having it towed for repairs.

There wasn’t too much in there that they could have stolen (and who knows, it might still be full of my junk). My poker set, my jacket, my sunglasses, the stereo & CDs, the tools and pump, and the irreplacable fabric frisbee. I hope that’s still in the trunk…

Today there was a vote on campus today about whether or not graduate students who don’t have teaching assistantships (namely, research assistants) should unionize. I was tired, busy, and completely torn on the issue, so I ended up abstaining.

On the one hand, I liked the idea of forming a union. Graduate students are some of the brightest people coming out of their bachelor degrees (at least academically, since we obviously have no common sense), and spend years — the prime years — of their lives toiling away in research making less than minimum wage. A union might be able to get us some human decency and a pay raise.

However, I also appreciate that the university doesn’t have a whole ton of money kicking around for grad students (and actually recently instituted the minimum stipend support); likewise, research grants only stretch so far — our whole R&D system is predicated on the essentially volunteer efforts of the grad student army. I doubt a union would get much in the way of salary then, though I still hold some hope for a better dental plan and some perks like paid maternity leave and perhaps an injunction against our supervisors saying that they expect us to be in the lab 50+ hours a week, because research isn’t like a regular job.

Even then, I just don’t see an RA union having much teeth: the research we do goes into our thesis, that’s our lives, not our jobs. A job action (which is what’s usually needed to squeeze anything approaching even the rate of inflation out of the university) wouldn’t be well attended — who wants to put their whole lives on hold? So many of us cut our budgets so close to the bone (or even have to rack up student debts for the years living away from home), that even with strike pay a prolonged strike would run the very real risk of not getting the rent paid.

With all that, unions have their down sides too. For starters, what if they tried to equalize the pay for all grad students? Right now, science students have it slightly better than arts or social science students (partly because of the dangerous environments we do our research in, partly due to having funding agencies with slightly deeper pockets). If a union brought everyone to the same level, it’s possible I’d be shooting myself in the foot. Union bureaucracy is well-known, and not usually for the best (whether it’s mandatory advertising and competition for positions, or setting limits about what non-union vs union members can do, and of course, rewarding seniority above any other form of merit).

A memo was sent around:

To: Academic and Administrative Leaders
Date: May 15, 2006
From: Jane O’Brien, AVP, Human Resources;
Subject: Graduate Research Assistants – Certification Vote

I am writing to let you know the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) has made an application to the Ontario Labour Relations Board to unionize Graduate Research Assistants on our campus. This memo provides some information concerning union legislation, Western’s position on PSAC’s application, and an important vote that is happening tomorrow, May 16.

First, under the Ontario Labour Relations Act, only individuals who are determined by the Ontario Labour Relations Board to be employees of an employer can be unionized. At Western, Graduate Research Assistants have never been considered to be employees of the University. For example, the funds Graduate Research Assistants receive are not considered employment income, and are therefore not subject to income tax deductions and deductions for CPP and EI. [emphasis mine, because it’s not true]

Western’s position is that Graduate Research Assistantships are a mechanism to help graduate students academically and financially with the completion of their research associated with their graduate studies. For this reason, the University has asked the Labour Board to dismiss PSAC’s application to represent Graduate Research Assistants. The Board will rule on this request in due course.

However, in the interim, the Labour Board has ordered a vote to be held tomorrow, May 16, 2006 between 10:00 am and 5:00 pm in Michael’s Garden, Room 3320, Somerville House. All Graduate Research Assistants will be eligible to vote and the outcome will determine whether they will be certified as a union under PSAC. The University is encouraging all Graduate Research Assistants to participate in this important vote to ensure their voice is heard.

That’s also contributing to my inclination to just abstain from this vote. Why bother going all the way out there to vote if there’s a good chance it will be determined that we’re not employees after all. Personally, I think we are (while we are here to learn, the vast majority of our day-to-day time is spent working on our own, producing intellectual property or learning on our own without active instruction). However, I can see that the university has a good case here, seeing as how after tuition we make much less than minimum wage, which would probably be illegal if we were employees — though on paper we do make the cut thanks to them paying us enough for tuition then taking it right back. Which is something I’ve always considered a little dubious considering how few classes we take, and how we have to maintain continuous enrollment for all three terms. It just seems like administrative waste to have us pay the tuition then get it right back in stipends/scholarships (except for the few students like me who go over the alloted time for their degree or whose average drops below 78 and have to pay it out of pocket).

I also wonder about some of their statements regarding us not being employees — because we do get knocked for CPP & EI. They don’t take tax off, but that’s only because our income is so low they know we’ll just get it all back at the end of the year anyway (and we can ask to have the tax taken off if we’re afraid other sources of income will put us over and we’d have to pay).

Anyway, as I’m posting this the vote is long since over, so I’ll be keeping an eye on things to see how they go. It could be interesting.