Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2016-40

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IN THIS ISSUE

• From Heroic Stories, a story of a son´s care of his dying mother
• The editor writes about life during the Great Depression
• Don Henderson forwards a modern parable
• Tom Telfer sends a groaner
• Here is a warning about the possibility of fraud on PayPal
• Sites are suggested by Barbara Wear, Jay, and Tom Telfer

Mary Flores from Texas writes about her brother-in-law in HeroicStories:

CHEO

In mid-1993, my mother-in-law, a Guatemalan peasant, was very ill, and finally agreed to go to a doctor in Guatemala City for the first time in her life. My husband and I readily agreed to send money every month for her doctor visits and medicines, but someone in Guatemala would need to? see after her care.

Unfortunately, that was not easily remedied. I had met my husband while working in the Peace Corps in the small village of Zapotitlan, Jutiapa. His family was hard-working and dedicated, but they were simple peasants, unaccustomed to the ways of the big city. There was no one in the village that would be able to care for Mamita and accompany her to the doctor.

My husband Walter has five brothers and three sisters. Only one brother, Cheo, had left the village for life in the city. We called him to discuss what course of action we could take. Cheo told us not to worry. He would quit his job and care for Mamita for as long as it took.

Every month Walter and I sent money to Cheo via a Guatemalan friend who had a bank account in the States. We deposited the money, and Cheo was given quetzals at her home. This eliminated the expensive fees to mail money overseas.

Cheo took Mamita to the doctor monthly on the 3:00 a.m. bus to the capital, arriving at 9:00 a.m. He picked up the money, took Mamita to the doctor, bought any medication she needed, and took her back home. On one such trip, his bag with all Mamita´s medications was stolen off the bus when he took Mamita to the restroom at a stop, forcing Cheo to return to the capital for new medicines.

Unfortunately, Mamita was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and we knew she eventually would succumb to the illness. She was very ill, but the medications helped. Walter and I were so thankful for Cheo´s vigilance with Mamita. He literally sat by her bedside, cooked for her, and cared for all her needs for the last six months of her life. That included carrying her outside at times to relieve herself because their small, one-room home did not have a restroom.

We had no idea Cheo was using the extra money we sent to fix Mamita´s home - we assumed her care required all the money - but he put a beautiful tile floor over her dirt floor in their one-room home, white-walled the inside, and painted it a happy, bright teal.

When Mamita died, all the neighbors were so impressed that Mamita died in such a beautiful home. They marveled that Mamita had lived a life of financial poverty, but had died a queen. People came from miles around and filled that tiny one-room home for her funeral, commenting continuously on how loved she was.

Although there were sacrifices to send money for Mamita´s care, Cheo completely gave himself to Mamita for six months. I cannot think of a greater gift, and I am proud to have him for a brother-in-law.

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Since I have had no response to my request for personal stories, I am repeating one of my own stories from long ago:

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

It was the "Dirty Thirties," when hobos rode the rods, and family men lived and worked in relief camps for $1.00 a day. In small towns, it seemed as if the whole world was poor. Tradesmen and professionals took part of their payments in produce; men knocked on doors offering to work for a meal. As I remember it, there was a different feeling to that depression: most people were in the same boat, if not actually floundering in the water; doors were always open; people helped one another. There was not the stigma associated with poverty that is a sign of these less-kindly times. No-one thought it was your own fault if you were poor.

After living in a number of logging camps around the Shuswap Lake, our mother insisted that my sister Nell and I should be going to a regular school. On a summer day we left the camp, our belongings piled high on a raft towed by one of the boats that were always available. (The horses and logging equipment were not with us; I guess Dad had sold them to some other logging outfit. I am also assuming that small spreads like ours were no longer viable, or Dad would not have abandoned it so readily.)

The day we left the camp was cloudless, with a light wind. The Shuswap can breed sudden storms that have taken many lives over the years, but that day remained calm. I towed a hand-carved wooden boat behind the raft. I don´t remember looking back nostalgically at the camp I would not see again for many years; I didn´t know then how much influence the bush would exert on my life.

We moved into an empty house about five miles from Salmon Arm, on Engineer´s Point. A big old house, it was a far cry from the log houses of the camps, but there was still no running water, no electricity, no phone. It was still on the lakeshore, and we drew our water directly from the lake. Beside the property ran the main line of the CPR, and Nell and I waved at every train that went by. In those days, trainmen always waved, and some of the men in the cabooses used to throw us bundles of funnies and chocolate bars. They probably had a regular host of children living beside the tracks who awaited their coming. We always waved at the hobos riding the rails, and they waved back.

We walked three miles along that track to Canoe (uphill both ways, of course), where there was a two-room school. Nell went into grade three, in one building, and I went into grade four in the larger building. With four grades in one room, we got a circular education; by the time one reached grade seven, one had heard all the lessons for all the grades four times. Not a bad system. By the time I left there in the middle of grade seven, I had a thorough grounding in English, grammar, poetry, history, and arithmetic. There were few frills. No wonder - how could any teacher offer lessons in the basics to four grades and have time left for much else? We did learn a few crafts, but I suspect these served the purpose of keeping us occupied while the teacher was busy with other classes.

We were poorer now than we had been in the camp. Mother received $20 a month for a family of four, and even with the low prices that prevailed at that time, it was slim pickings. She still baked her own bread and pies (no meal was considered complete without dessert, either fruit or cake or pie), canned berries and jam, and made countless stews composed more of vegetables than meat. Our diet consisted mainly of starchy foods: bread, porridge, pancakes, potatoes. Cheap and filling.

Nell and I needed more formal clothing now that we were going to school. I remember we received a box of clothing from a church group that supplemented our very basic wardrobe. I don´t remember ever being cold, though the winters were so hard that the lake froze over, but I do remember being self-conscious in a dress my mother had sewn for me. She was no seamstress.

We moved to Salmon Arm when I was in grade seven so we would be able to go to high school. Mother had had to stop school to go to work on the death of her father, when she was 14, and she was determined that we would finish our education. Our earlier unorthodox schooling had not harmed us; the correspondence courses of those years and another I took in first year university were among the best lessons I ever had.

Still we were as poor as the proverbial church mice, but again it did not make any difference in our social life at school. Dad went back into the bush to work in other men´s camps and Mother maintained a home for us on the little amount of money he could send her. We paid $7.00 a month for an old house in the middle of the little town. Our allowance was 25c a week, and we spent it all on the weekly movie. When Dad joined the army in 1939, Mother got $50 a month - more than she had ever had before in her life.

In the summers Nell and I, along with most of our classmates, picked berries. Arriving at 5:00 o´clock in the morning, we often had to wait until the dew had burned off before we could begin. We would finish the raspberries around noon, and then if we were unlucky, would have to pick the sharp-thorned loganberries. At the end of the berry-picking season we would have made enough to buy our school books for the coming term. Once I had enough to buy a used bike with an oval rear wheel which produced a slight galloping motion, but it beat walking.

Our amusements were simple. We walked and biked every road around Salmon Arm; we climbed Mt. Ida and McGee´s Mountain; we skated on the big lake when there wasn´t too much snow, and on the Little Lake, where we could clear rinks; in the summer we walked or hitchhiked out to Canoe or Sandy Point to swim. (Salmon Arm´s water was too polluted even then swim in: the sewer emptied out into the arm.) Every night every kid in town strolled down to the railway station to watch the passenger train come in. It was more of a place to gather than any fascination with the trains that drew us there.

By this time we had electricity, running water (cold), and phones. I never lived in a place with plumbing until I married at the age of 24. (No wonder roughing it holds few attractions for me now: I lived like that for too many years with no choice.) We had an early-model radio on which we listened to Fibber McGee and Mollie, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra.... We had a baseball team and a lacrosse team which played neighbouring towns in the summer, and a hockey team for our winter amusement. When the indoor rink was not busy, we used to skate round and round to the sound of loud music. A great place for the young people to meet and flirt.

In my leisure time, I read everything that fell into my hands. I worked my way through the small local library and the high school library. I was especially fascinated by the myths and legends of gods and heroes, and the innumerable fairy tales. This taste has persisted to the present: one of my favourite genres is fantasy.

And all this time, we were working our way through the local high school, until finally we graduated into a world where there were few opportunities for young people - just like today. But then came the War. The boys all joined up, and because there were no boys left to fill the position, I was offered a chance to become a printing apprentice at the local newspaper office, which I wrote about in a recent issue.

Once the war started, the depression ended. Suddenly there was money for uniforms and training camps, guns and ammunition, tanks and jeeps and cannons, airplanes and ships. Governments that previously had been unable to pay a living wage to hard-working foresters now had money to burn on materials of war. Very odd!

COMPUTER HUMOUR

Isn´t it amazing just how sophisticated computers are becoming? Just the other day, I was looking at the newest ones in a computer magazine

I saw one which really caught my eye. Instead of an owner´s manual, the operating instructions consisted of a single sheet of paper, printed on only one side.

The sheet read, "If you have trouble operating this computer in any way, please do the following:

1. Locate the nearest 12-year-old child.

2. Listen to what s/he says.

Don Henderson forwards this

MODERN PARABLE

A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (General Motors) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race. On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had eight people paddling and one person steering, while the American team had seven people steering and two people paddling.

Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were paddling.

Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the paddling team´s management structure was totally reorganized to four steering supervisors, two area steering superintendents, and one assistant superintendent steering manager.

They also implemented a new performance system that would give the two people paddling the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the "Rowing Team Quality First Program," with meetings, dinners, and free pens for the paddlers. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes, and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices, and bonuses. The pension program was trimmed to "equal the competition" and some of the resultant savings were channeled into morale-boosting programs and teamwork posters. The next year the Japanese won by two miles.

Humiliated, the American management laid off one paddler, halted development of a new canoe, sold all the paddles, and cancelled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the senior executives as bonuses.

The next year, try as he might, the lone designated paddler was unable to even finish the race (having no paddles), so he was laid off for unacceptable performance, all canoe equipment was sold, and the next year´s racing team was out-sourced to India.

Sadly, the End.

Here´s something else to think about: GM has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can´t make money paying American wages. Toyota has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the USA. The last quarter´s results:

Toyota makes four billion in profits while GM racks up nine billion in losses. GM folks are still scratching their heads, and collecting bonuses....

If this weren´t so true, it might be funny.

Tom Telfer forwards this story:

WHAT´S IN A NAME?

Do you remember the famous Olympic skier Picabo Street (pronounced Pee-Ka-Boo)?

Well, Picabo is not just an athlete. She is now a nurse currently working at an Intensive Care Unit of a large metropolitan hospital.

She is not permitted to answer the hospital telephones any longer.

It caused too much confusion when she would answer the phone and say, "Picabo, I.C.U."

This article by Jennifer Stewart appeared in the Toronto Star:

PAYPAL FRAUDS

When Toronto bank consultant Russ Willis moved to New Zealand for work, he had to sell his Infiniti G37x in a hurry. He placed an ad online and was thrilled when he received an email of interest right away.

The message told Willis the buyer was on an oil rig in the Atlantic Ocean without access to a bank. Instead, he wanted to pay for the car using PayPal, an online way to pay for purchases and transfer money via email. To avoid shipping costs, the buyer would send a friend to pick the car up.

Willis felt uneasy about the offer because of the buyer´s sense of urgency to complete the transaction and the suggestion to use PayPal rather than certified cheque or bank draft.

He did a little research and found he was right to trust his hunch. A common online scam has a similar chain of events - a buyer uses PayPal to pay for something and claims he or she cannot pick up the item because of a remote posting. Instead, a friend will pick up the product and then the buyer claims to have not received it. Without an official shipping receipt, it can be nearly impossible to prove that the buyer received the item or that it was ever picked up. The buyer can then request that PayPal reimburse the money.

"The Internet allows for immense reach by fraudsters," said Willis. "It´s important to safeguard yourself and be diligent in all online communications, especially if you´re buying or selling something."

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC), a partnership between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario Provincial Police and the Competition Bureau of Canada, says scams like this are on the rise. In 2011, the CAFC documented 202 cases where consumers used PayPal and were victims of fraud. In 2010, this number was 131.

While PayPal is used by more than 255 million people world wide, users need to be aware of potential scams, which can take many shapes.

Here are some red flags in online trading that should spell scam:

1. Awkward email wording: The email or other communication from the potential buyer has generic greetings or words and phrases that aren´t quite what you would expect under the circumstances. It has a form letter feel.
2. Buyer is in a hurry: The buyer makes an urgent, emotional appeal to close the deal, often saying they are in a remote location.
3. Third party involvement: Because the buyer is far away, they are sending a third party to pick up the goods. The friend is doing them a favour.

"People think they are over-reacting if they contact us when they receive an email they think is fraudulent, but they´re not," said CAFC Staff Sergeant Paul Proulx.

Here are some tips for safe online shopping:

o Kick the tires: It´s always best to sell and buy within your local community, according to Proulx. This lets you meet the person you´re buying or selling to, and "kick the tires" of your purchase to check out its condition first-hand.

o Check your bank account: A frequent scam is when buyers send fake money-transfer confirmations mirroring those of PayPal receipts. This often prompts the seller to ship the product, believing they have received the money.

To avoid this, says PayPal Canada´s marketing chief Nicky Mezo, login to your PayPal account and to see if you actually received the money before shipping the product.

"That is the most important thing to do as a seller before you give the goods over to the buyer," said Mezo.

o Pay for shipping: If you are selling something on PayPal, always pay for shipping, and keep the official shipping receipt, says Mezo. If you do enter into a dispute about a transaction, having a paper trail is essential to protecting yourself and your money.

"Although it may be tempting to save the cost of shipping, the proof of shipping with the signature confirmation of delivery is an important way to safeguard sellers against any fraudulent buyers," said Mezo.

o Verify the email´s authenticity: A rampant phishing scam, or an illegal attempt to "fish" private and sensitive information, are emails mimicking the look and feel of PayPal asking for personal account information.

A PayPal email will address you by your first and last name or your business name, Mezo said. And it won´t ask you for sensitive information such as your password, bank account, or credit card.

If you think that you´ve received a phishing email, you can forward the email to spoof@paypal.com, without changing the subject line. PayPal will let you know whether it is fraudulent.

If you receive an email you think is suspicious, do not click on any links or download any attachments.

o Use common sense: If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is, according to Proulx. Stay clear of exceptional deals or anything that is significantly reduced in price form what you would expect to pay.

Internet transactions have exponentially increased access to your banking information. Approach online sales with caution and watch out for fraudulent behaviour.

THE NEIGHBOUR

A man sends a text to his next-door neighbour: "Bob, I´m sorry. I´ve been riddled with guilt and I have to confess. I have been helping myself to your wife when you´re not around, probably more than you know. It´s no excuse, but I don´t get it at home. I can´t live with the guilt any longer. I hope you will accept my sincerest apology. It won´t happen again."

Feeling outraged and betrayed, Bob storms into the kitchen and demands a divorce from his wife.

Moment later, he gets a second text: "Really should use spellcheck! That should be ´wifi´."

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Barbara Wear forwards this link to a video which advances an interesting hypothesis about the earth and sinkholes around the world:

Jay sends the URL for a site which shows how to draw many different things, step by step:

Tom Telfer sends this link to a video of people excelling at gymnastics, bicycling, juggling, inline skating, soccer, martial arts, balancing, and skateboarding:

In this TED talk, Jonathan Pepperman discusses the risky politics of progress:

This male quartet, Il Divo, has been touring and performing, and here they sing "Time to Say Goodbye:"

A grateful group of parents and their children show a beloved NICU nurse at WellStar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Georgia, how much her loving care was appreciated in their time of need:

These towns aren´t waiting for world leaders to take charge on climate change:

Speaking of debates, here is another debate that is very much to the point:

Here and the 25 biggest ripoffs that you´ve probably been tricked into buying:

From Britain´s Got Talent, here is a dance group from Siberia performing an astonishing routine:

This cat decides to be more like a dog: