pitbullmedia.ca

I’ve never met John Tory, the leader of Ontario’s PC party but he seems like the right guy.

I liked his Mayoralty campaign and I think he would have been a better choice than David Miller who has consistently tried to screw the suburbs with his garbage proposals, land transfer tax and worst of all car registration tax. If you live outside of the old city of Toronto you’re more likely to have more than one car since transit is so crappy. So the tax raised per household is more of a burden on those of us in single family homes on single lots than say those downtown condo dwellers who never venture north of Eglinton.

But back to John Tory. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal yet his proposal to extend school funding to all faiths has both sides of my political polarity in overdrive.

First, it’s a bonehead move. We can’t afford it. Secondly, if you want to create cultural silos it’s a wonderful idea. I just don’t happen think further dividing our society is a good idea.

 Heck, we can’t even get along on Vision TV where it turns out all kinds of extremists have been spouting their hatred on the public airways. One of them was on for two years before being defrocked, so to speak.

How then, are we going to know what our kids - yes, the kids of other families, races, cultures and languages are all our kids because it take a village to raise a child - are being taught behind the closed doors of their schools?  Sure, it has to follow the Ontario Education Ministry curiculm but there’s an awful lot of room for some freelance preaching here.

Fragmenting the public school system, as the otherwise sensible Bill Davis did when he left office in 1984 and approved full funding for the Catholic Separate School Board, was a fiscal bombshell we have yet to recover from. Our schools are falling apart; teachers are angry and frazzled. And so on and on.

Funding two systems is bad enough. Worse when we add French language school boards because the whole reason for funding the Separate School Board was that it’s constitutionally required under the old BNA Act. Duh, then why fund French schools? Look, it just happened that the French were mostly Catholics but the intent was for them to have access to education in their own language. We just went overboard with political correctness.

Religion is best left to the Church. And good luck to ‘em. Keep religion and faith out of our schools where we need one good system dedicated to education all kids regardless of race, colour creed or religion.

 Where do you draw the line? Sure there are substantial Jewish and Muslim families who would send their kids to publicly-funded faith-based schools. What about the Aboriginals? The Rastafarian? The Vegans? The Church of the Universe? Moonies? Scientologists? Amish? Lutherans? For each kid going to a publicly-funded school there are overheads and other standing costs for support staff at all levels of government to adminster and pay for. 

That’s why John Tory’s proposal has me losing my faith with the Ontario PC party because I’m starting to worry that PC stands for Politically Correct. I liked the John Tory who took a stand because it was the right thing to do not because it might expand his voter base. This smacks of political opportunism and it stinks.

The only issue now is that I’ll have to vote for those lying Liberals or the NDP.

I bought a Dell Inspiron in July for my daughter Meaghan who is off to Italy for four months as part of her graduate studies program at George Brown’s Chef school.

She needs a simple laptop that isn’t going to keep up all up at night worry about the financial loss should it get stolen or lost. So I found the Dell for $569 Canadian and called to make the purchase. All she does is email, surf and share pictures and  - for the first time - make Skype calls.

Making the deal itself was bad enough. I spent close to 40 minutes on the phone because the Operating System I wanted was XPSP2 - not Vista. I have Vist on my HP and it’s really annoying. Almost every program I have needs patches to work properly. And it’s a bit of a resource pig on entry level machines like the Dell Inspiron.

They wanted to charge me $100 more for XPSP2. I said no give it to me for the same price. It took 40 minutes of being put on hold before some manager in Hyberabad could authorize it. I even hung up and they called me back at one point.

I should have known this was only the beginning.

Two days later I get a Dell flyer in my Globe and Mail offering the Vista version for $499. With tax that’s a $80.50 difference so I called and complained.

No dice, they said. Dell doesn’t offer price protection. I found a couple of websites like ihatedell.com  where there’s some discussion around Dell having a policy of giving credit when the difference is more than $50 and the time frame is less than a week.

So I’m escalating my claim for a refund. And I’m going to be stubborn. I didn’t call my business frenchpoodlemedia. It’s called pitbullmedia for a reason.

Then I discover that despite my insistence they not give my personal information to a third party along with my credit card that they did just that. Bell Sympatico delivered a modem to my home along with a three months free offer.

Right. I already have a cable ISP (Duh, I live in Toronto, guess who that is) and I’m not changing my email addresses so why would I need it? And of course it’s a negative billing thing…once the three months are up…..they start dinging your card. That puppy is already on its way back to Bell. But isn’t that a violation of my PEPIDA rights or something?

And the last kicker? Apparently Purolator tried to deliver the package July 31….but didn’t leave a notice of attempted delivery so we knew nothing about it until someone calls us the next day. Strange, because I was working from home all day.

Then they tell us they’ll deliver on Saturday (which should have set off alarm bells). We wait pretty much all day (okay we were painting the living room) and nothing shows up.

I call today - monday being a holiday - and guess what. They don’t deliver on Saturdays. And no they can’t change the delivery address to the client’s offices where I’m working all this week. I have to go to the north end of the city to pick it up in person.  Luckily I’m working around the corner this week so it’s not as major a pain it would have been had I been working at home.

If Meaghan wasn’t leaving in a couple of weeks and I didn’t need that time to get her machine configured with Office, Skype and a few other goodies I would just tell Dell to take their machine back and credit me because just about everyone has their machines on Back to School sale now. The fact is I’m so damn busy this month I don’t have time to run around. Had I known this in July I would have just gone shopping in August for a machine at a store somewhere after doing some online researcy.

Having gone through this I wouldn’t recommend the process to anyone considering a new computer. Even an Acer looks good right about now for $499.

The final irony is that I interview Dell’s chief blogger Lionel Menchaca who writes the Direct2Dell.com blog just a few weeks ago. He said the reason they started the blog is because they wanted to reach out to unhappy customers and change Dell’s perception in the marketplace.

Psst. Lionel. The blog is nice but I think the issues start a little earlier in the process.