Control Freaks

            On Wednesday at 9:30 I went downstairs to the donut shop to find out the new password. I bought a small tea that I didn’t plan on drinking, and after paying and letting the counterperson keep the change from $2.00, I asked for the password. The one she gave me was the same as the old one and so I wondered if something else was wrong. I sat down at a table and turned on my laptop. Two networks appeared on my list with the name of the donut shop, but one with “5G” on the end. I went to ask the counterperson which network they were using now. She answered that it was the same as the old one. On the way back to my table I ran into my neighbour, Benji and asked if he knew the new password, but I was trying to find out the same thing. I went to my table and tried both networks with the old password but neither of them worked. Benji came over to tell me that the donut shop had switched from Bell to Rogers. Someone we didn’t know stepped up to us because he thought we knew the password. I went over to stand in line again with three people in front of me and this time I got the younger counterperson this time and he told me that the new password is almost the same as the old one but with just a “4” added on the end. I sat back down and had no problem logging in this time. Benji said he still couldn’t but I think he did something wrong.

            I went home and got my computer back online, though the new network seems a bit slower than the old one. It didn’t crowd me out from midday till nightime like the old one had been doing lately.

            In the early afternoon I had an appointment with my social worker, so at 13:30 I rode up to 1900 Dundas. As I was locking my bike I saw a lot of large suitcases and black plastic bags against the side of the building that were so worn out that they looked like garbage. But inside there were a few people that looked like they might be new immigrants from either Haiti or Africa, so the luggage might have been theirs.

            For the last several years the building has had a burly and bald thirty-something security guard that has his own computer station in the reception area. I noticed this time that he’d been replaced by another guard of a different ethnic background, but still burly and bald. I wonder if his company requires a head shave as part of the uniform.

            The reception area used to have a thick (I assume bullet resistant) acrylic glass barrier between the reception people and the clients, but that’s been gone for a few years now.

            My worker was almost ten minutes late calling me.

            I told her about my rent increase and she put it into the records but it seems like useless information for them to have since they only pay less than $350 for rent assistance, which my worker admitted is a ridiculous amount, since there is nothing in Toronto that can be rented for that much.

            I showed her my bank statements but made sure to point out to her that the reason that I have almost $2000 in the bank right now is because back in the fall I received a retroactive deposit from the Toronto Housing Allowance Program. She informed me that up until last year anything over $500 in our bank accounts would be deducted from our cheques, but now we are allowed to have up to $10,000. That’s a big change!

            I had to sit alone for several minutes in her little cubicle while she went upstairs to print up a form for me to sign.

            On the way home I stopped at No Frills where I bought Garden Cocktail, apple juice, orange juice, avocadoes, minneolas, red seedless grapes, black sable grapes and a package of brown tomatoes called “kumatoes”. Kumatoes were developed in Spain as Olemeca but the patent holder is a Swiss company named Syngenta that only allows one rigorously selected greenhouse producer in twelve countries, including Canada, to buy their seeds. They not only make money from the sale of the seeds but from how large the greenhouse is and they also get a cut of the sale of the fruit. They are control freaks that require the growers to follow very strict rules of cultivation or no deal. The kumatoes would have to taste like heaven to justify jumping through all those hoops.

            Syngenta got charged with human rights abuses in Brazil. Some landless farmers had occupied one of Syngenta’s experimental genetically modified seed farms. A security team came in to remove them and two people were killed. There is also controversy over the Syngenta produced herbicide, atrazine, which a researcher named Tyrone Hayes has said alters reproductive organs in frogs. Investigators from the governments of both the United States and Australia have found no evidence that atrazine alters sexuality in amphibians.

            When I got home I had time to have lunch and then take a siesta before leaving for school.