POSTING #46

A Mysterious Credit Card Purchase; Boris from Ulyanovsk; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

A Mysterious Credit Card Purchase

Pat and I were in a mall in Brampton recently doing some shoe browsing (or is that 'surfin') waiting for the start of hospital visiting hours when my cell phone rang.

A woman who said she was from the Fraud Prevention and Detection bureau of one of our chartered banks wanted proof that I was indeed John Hunter. She asked a slew of questions that I was able to answer but I stumbled when she asked the maximum on the card we had with her bank. Like most seniors, we pay off our credit card accounts when they come in and although we love our Canadian banks we would not think of paying them 17.9% interest, or whatever it is they are charging (gouging) today for unpaid balances.

So, I didn't know the maximum.

When I finally convinced her that I was who I was, she wanted to know if I had made a purchase of $1.27 at 12.30 am that morning.

I told her I was sound asleep at that time.

She asked if I recalled making any payments to an APL account.

Nope!

Now any young person reading the above will know immediately what was happening.

I didn't have a clue.

To make a long story short, it turned out that someone had acquired our credit card number and downloaded a song from iTunes, which is owned by Apple.

The bank official speculated that some company at which we had used our card had not protected its computer records carefully enough. Someone had hacked in, got thousands of card numbers, ours included, and then sold them to youngsters who wanted cheap music.

I'm really impressed with the bank. It detected the misuse quickly and we had new cards with new numbers in 5 days. The bank told us it would erase the iTunes amount and would accept responsibility for any other charges that came in for the old card.

Well done!!



Boris from Ulyanovsk

One of the model offices we created during the Russian aid project was in Ulyanovsk on the Volga, named in Soviet times for Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who in 1901 changed his name to Lenin, to confuse the Czar's secret police.

On my inspection trip, I met the Regional Employment Director, Boris, (not his real name), and his manager of the proposed model office.

The visit went well. I toured the office and quickly agreed that it would make a good model office. I proposed a plan of work for the consultants, which Boris and the manager accepted.

Over dinner, Boris and I found that we had two things in common: we were born in the same month of the same year and each had three children. He, however, had a number of grandchildren and Pat and I had none. He told me I was to tell our children to get a move on (we didn't, but they did).

A burly fellow, he had been a senior Communist Party official, responsible for assembling the workforce required to build the Ruslan, (also known as the Antonov AN-124) for many years the world's largest assembly-line plane. The huge workforce required a large new town, but coming from peasant stock he insisted that the rich top soil be carefully scraped off the site and used elsewhere.

Our discussions were very cordial until I asked the wrong question. My map of Russia showed the name of the town we were in as Simbirsk, not Ulyanovsk, and I wondered why. My interpreter tensed up as he translated my question---usually a sign that I was putting my foot in it.

Boris launched into a diatribe about how the new government was changing all the Communist-time names back to the old Czarist names. Leningrad had become St. Petersburg, Stalingrad had become Volgograd and so on. He almost pounded the table as he declared that Ulyanovsk was going to stay Ulyanovsk, in honour of Lenin.

That should have alerted me that we might have problems with Boris.

Back in Moscow, I made plans to include Boris and his office manager in an upcoming tour to Canada. Just before the group was to leave for Canada, I heard that Boris couldn't go---he had been diagnosed with some kind of cancer. His deputy went instead.

The two Ulyanovsk officials came back from their trip full of praise for what they had seen and ready to start changing their office.

The Canadian employment officers selected for Ulyanovsk---four very strong people---arrived in Moscow, were briefed and then took off for their assignment.

Emails from the team were positive, things were going well. The team members finished their task and returned to Moscow. They told me that the office manager and staff had hosted a lavish send-off dinner, and everyone promised to stay in touch.

In the midst of this debriefing, my Russian liaison officer interrupted. She said that Boris had just phoned the President of the Russian Federal Employment Service complaining that the team had not done what I had promised they would do. He was not going to accept that etc. etc.

The team, which was getting ready to fly home, was puzzled and upset at the complaint.

In the end, I agreed to keep another Canadian team in Russia for an extra two weeks so they could go to Ulyanovsk and remedy whatever shortcomings there were.

After the second's team visit to Ulyanovsk, Boris told Moscow that he was satisfied, but not enthusiastic, with the work of the team.

Ulyanovsk was the only location where we had had any complaints about our work and it rankled with me. In the end, I decided that you can't win them all.

As the project was coming to a close I was assembling the last study tour to go to Canada. My Russian liaison officer came to say that Boris's doctor had declared him fit for travel, and he was demanding to be included in the study tour.

Although our contract didn't require us to include him in a tour---we had already sent two officials from Ulyanovsk--I recommended that he be allowed to travel and Ottawa agreed. I met Boris when he came to Moscow on his way to Canada and took him through the Canadian itinerary.

He was correct but cold---there was no sign of the earlier warmness when we had first met.

Three weeks later, Pat was in the office helping me pull together the final reports required by the World Bank when the interpreter came in and said that Boris was back from Canada and wanted to speak to me.

I thought, "What now? What went wrong in Canada? What is he going to complain about this time?"

Boris started to talk in a low voice, looking at the table. After a few minutes, the interpreter stopped him so he could translate that part.

The interpreter said that Boris saw employment programs in Canada of the kind he had never imagined.

He talked about rehabilitation programs for the disabled in which people in wheel chairs were being taught to use computers by tapping on keys with a stick attached to their forehead.

In Russia, he said, when a person becomes disabled they are left in their apartments to die because there are usually no elevators.

The interpreter told Boris to continue.

Boris resumed talking in Russian but this time instead of looking down at the table, he was looking at me, eye to eye.

After a couple of minutes, he stopped.

The interpreter said that Boris was saying that when the Canadian team was in Ulyanovsk he had been hard on them. He didn't believe that Russia had anything to learn from a NATO country.

The interpreter ended by saying, "Boris wants to apologize. He was wrong and you were right."

Pat said later that you could have heard a pin drop.

Boris and I got up and gave each other a Russian bear hug.

He was a big man---in every sense.

Unfortunately, the cancer came back a few years later and he lost his battle with the disease.


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

The greatest British drinking song, in my humble opinion, is "On Ilkla Moor Baht'at". It is sometimes sung by people from the south of England but they should stick to "Knees up Mother Brown". They just can't do the Yorkshire accent.

The rollicking and cheerful song is about a young man who visits Ilkley Moor (a few miles north-west of Leeds) without a hat, catches cold, dies, is eaten by worms etc. etc.

Really cheerful stuff!

Click here for more information on the song.

On the way out of the town of Ilkley there is a cattle grid to prevent the sheep, which graze on the moor, from coming into town and eating the roses.

Friends from Ilkley told us when we lived in Leeds that some sheep had learned how to defeat the cattle grid. They would lie down, tuck in their legs, and roll over the grid.

Now, I think the reader will agree that this is a good story.

And I've told it often, for almost fifty years.

But each time I've wondered whether it was true, or just another urban (rural?) myth.

Thanks to Google, I have now been able to get some corroboration---of a sort. A biologist researching animal behavior posted this request:

"I am a biologist doing research on animal behaviour. There have been several reports in the press about sheep excaping (sic) from pastures by rolling over cattle grids, and i am trying to find out how widespread this behavious (sic) is. Has anyone seen it happening?"

One person responded with this account:

"I've seen it in the Forest of Dean with animals trying to get on to an Industrial Estate. It involved a ewe and, I presume, her two yearling lambs. The first sat down part on a corner of the grid part on the ground whe (sic) was leaving. The other two walked over her, she then used her back legs (front legs still in a kneeling position) to push herself into a half roll so that her back legs were then on the 'new ground.' She then pulled herself back off the grid and only straightened her front legs when she had got them onto the 'new' ground."

(To see the exchanges, click here.)

It is not easy to understand the response but I take it that the ewe lay down on the grid so her lambs could walk across her to the other side. She then rolled, to the other side.

I think that this story from Gloucestershire is even better than the Ilkley moor one, implying as it does intelligence, planning and maternal love.

But "On Ilkla Moor Baht'at" is still the best British drinking song.

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See you next Sunday for Posting #47 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.