Driving Home
Friday, February 4, 2022
We left for California just a few days before the Omicron virus began roaring across North America. At the time, land border crossings sought proof of vaccination for “non-essential” travel, but did not require a recent negative COVID test. So, given that we were both fully vaccinated, it seemed like clear sailing, to drive to California for Christmas.
There were adventures getting there, and staying there, but the day came when we decided we’d try our luck at driving home. The weather reports looked very promising – for winter driving across the Northern United States – and, although Canada had re-introduced the requirement that all returning citizens have a recent negative COVID test, I found a place in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that offered an expensive test with a one-hour turnaround, between collecting the sample, and the release of the finished lab report, so I figured we’d be good to go.
We crossed the Sierra mountains without incident, and drove through Nevada in sunlight. The next day we drove into Idaho – coping with some fog, and then some icy roads as we proceeded north into Montana.
By then, however, we had phoned the place which offered the rapid turnaround COVID tests, and learned that they were out of stock. Our night in a Montana motel was spent looking for ways to get a normal COVID test sufficiently near to the Canadian border, that the results would be available to us within the Canada-prescribed seventy-two hour window.
Worse, the North Dakota places that might have been suitable, were not open on weekends, and the earliest that we would arrive in that State would be late on Friday.
Finally, we found the only North Dakota test site that is open on weekends. It’s in the city of Bismarck, so we developed a plan. Since no labs that analyse the samples would be open, anywhere in the state, we decided to get our test in Bismarck on Sunday. Since the lab was in the same city, our samples would arrive at the lab on Monday, and there was a good chance that the results would come back to us well before the required seventy-two hour window for acceptable test results would close.
So, we stayed in Bismarck over the weekend, and got our tests taken on Sunday, January 30, at 2:45 PM. This meant that we had until Wednesday, February 2, at 2:45 PM to get ourselves through a Canadian border station.
The next morning (January 31), we drove to Grand Forks, which is a one-hour drive south of Winnipeg’s most convenient border crossing, at Emerson, Manitoba. We checked in at a very nice hotel, and waited for our results. They came in that same day, at 8:00 PM. Both were COVID-negative. Phew!
Normally we would have left our Grand Forks hotel early Tuesday morning, to head up to the border. BUT... the weather intervened. A huge weather event came through Manitoba and North Dakota, dumping great quantities of snow on Manitoba, and a mix of snow and icy rain on Northern North Dakota. Interstate 29 and Manitoba highway 75 were both closed to all traffic. We had to stay put, through Tuesday, February 1. But, we had until Wednesday, before our test results would become stale, and, by checking online, we learned that the highways reopened before dawn on Wednesday.
We packed up, and began the drive – very carefully, because, while the ploughs and the salting machines had been out, there was quite a bit of slipperiness on the U.S. portion of the highway. We saw three semi-trailers in the ditch, and a couple of passenger vehicles. But we made it to the border, and – armed with all sorts of paperwork – we presented ourselves to a pleasant border official, who soon allowed us into Canada.
HOWEVER, the border official also said that we had been “randomly selected” to take a self-administered COVID PCR test at home. “Here are the instructions,” he said, handing us three printed pages, with small print instructions on both sides of each page.
But... we were back in Canada!
Our rejoicing, however, did not last long.
Freedom?
We suddenly found ourselves at the back end of a line of hundreds of trucks moving at 10 km/h, and filling all lanes of highway 75 in both directions. It was the Trucker “freedom convoy!” I took the picture that you see here, from my slowly-moving car. It was taken very shortly after we joined the blocked procession. We were behind a couple of private cars which were not venturing to go on the paved shoulder in an attempt to pass the flag-waving pickup trucks in front of them.
The truckers’ protest convoy at Emerson, Manitoba, Canada
Then I saw a passenger van drive by, on the margin, doing exactly what I was contemplating to do myself, passing the line of transports on their right.
So I moved my car over, and on to the margin, and proceeded to drive past twenty or thirty trucks. But then, one of them – with an American licence plate – saw me coming in his rear-view mirror, and moved his vehicle slightly onto the margin, to block me. So I pulled in behind him, until he couldn’t see me any more. Finally, he must have tired of driving on the right-hand rumble strip, because he moved into the lane, leaving the margin clear. I immediately pulled out, and roared past him. Then, I must have passed fifty or seventy more trucks, and eventually found myself alone on the highway with the lead, flag-waving, trucks behind me.
Although the Emerson crossing blockade has not gotten much media coverage, I checked news sources online, and found a Fargo-based agricultural news outlet which describes the trucker protest there in some detail. Here’s the link:
The AGWEEK article about the Emerson border protest
Fun, eh?
Self-testing!
As I mentioned, above, the Canada Customs border agent gave us two boxes, each with a full PCR test kit. We were to perform these “up-the-nose” tests on ourselves, instructed and watched, over Zoom, by a Registered Nurse. The process had to be done right away, so, once we were unpacked, I called the number, and a woman in Toronto explained the process in detail, after which, once I had logged in to a website, under her instructions, she clicked off, and a screen opened with a nurse in Montreal, who – after taking tons of personal information – told us, step-by-step, to open the boxes, take out the swab, and... uh-oh. As Heather cut open the sealed paper package containing my swab, I pulled the thing out, and the nurse, watching on the screen, said, “Oh dear, you’ve put your finger on the swab tip. That has contaminated it. We’ll have to order you a new kit!” Yikes! Well, Heather, now better informed, correctly extracted her swab from its packing, rammed it up her nose (“Aaah-choo!”), and I helped her put it in the sealable test tube, to the approval of the face on the screen. Purolator was to pick up Heather’s now sealed and packaged sample sometime yesterday, “between 7:00 AM and 4:00 PM” – which meant that we couldn’t really go anywhere, at least, not until the fellow should come! And I also had to wait until another Purolator driver comes to deliver a fresh kit to me, after which I was to once more get a face on a screen, an R.N. who would watch me do it, and do it correctly, this time!
Newspapers!
But now this – take a look at a letter that I sent, yesterday, to the Winnipeg Free Press.
Thursday, February 3, 2021
Dear Winnipeg Free Press;I am sitting here in a state of annoyance. I called 204-697-7001, worked my way through what felt like a million options (“if this, press that”), then I sat on hold for more than twenty minutes. Finally, a human picked up, and when I explained my problem, she said, “not my job, talk to Sabrina,” and, instead of transferring me to the said Sabrina, she asked for my phone number, and, when I gave it, she told me to hang up, and Sabrina would call me “right away.” I sat there waiting for my phone to ring, and finally did some chores around the house, always with one ear cocked for the phone. It’s been forty minutes, and “right away” has yet to happen.
The problem about which I was calling, for your information, is as follows:
I have been a home delivery subscriber since the 1970s
I pay my subscription by automatic deduction from a credit card, roughly $50 per month.
On December 10, I put a vacation stop on my home delivery, agreeing to keep paying, so that I could support your newspaper, and, on occasion, access it digitally.
Assuming that I would be back home in early January, I set the restart for January 12.
And I left the country.
Due to several family issues, I was unable to return home as planned, so, on January 12, my neighbour texted to say that a Free Press had been delivered, and was sitting outside my apartment door. I asked her to recycle it, then I went online and entered a new vacation stop, to conclude on January 31. On January 31, while I was driving home, but impeded by weather and the need to get a COVID test, my neighbour texted to say that the paper was once more sitting at my door.
I made it home yesterday, February 2. But my kindly neighbour, who has a key to my apartment, and who had put the January 31 and February 1 issues on my hall table, said, “There was no paper today.” Oh.
After unpacking, I went through a stack of mail that the same neighbour had put on the table, and found TWO from the Winnipeg Free Press. They were identical to one another, with the exception that one bore the words, “1st Renewal,” and the other, “2nd Renewal.” They were printed one day apart – on December 20, and 21, respectively. And their contents were quite confusing – for they appeared to offer me a subscription, when I knew I was already a subscriber with automatic payment deducted monthly.
Nowhere did these documents indicate the simple fact that my credit card had passed its expiry date.
As well, they did not seem to know that I had put in a vacation stop, which meant that I was unlikely to receive any sort of information via Canada Post.
While I was typing the above, Sabrina called, and I have now been re-instated as a subscriber, and have paid for an entire year’s print delivery. Sabrina effectively disarmed my annoyance, and I want the people who oversee her work to know that this woman is pure gold! Keep her!!! Give her a raise!!!
But, I am sending the above because I think there are some administrative glitches that need to be addressed.
1. If a vacation stop is in effect, the customer is not likely to see any message sent by Canada Post (if we can’t look at a newspaper delivered to our door, it’s unlikely that we can look at physical lettermail!).
2. The Free Press customer file has full contact information and would include email and cellular contact, if such exist. When the Free Press needs to reach out to a subscriber, it would be best if a living human looked at the file, to make an informed decision about how to make the contact.
3. Sabrina tells me that when customer service agents tell the subscriber that there is a problem with their credit card payment, some clients get mad, and yell at the agent during the call. Hence, the Free Press became wary about saying too much when they write to the customer. Well, I wouldn’t be upset, myself. But think of this: automatically renewed electronic payment means that one doesn’t have to think about the subscription. Do I track when my credit card expires, and contact all the people who are deducting from it? Nope. Probably pretty dumb of me, but I assumed that if a card expires, the affected business would reach out and say, “Your card has expired, please contact us and restore it.” Wrong assumption, it turns out. However, at your end, if a human employee (as opposed to a robot or computer algorithm) knows why the subscriber must be contacted, they can use their discretion to frame their message such that they won’t get yelled at. Heck, if someone like Sabrina had contacted me (by email, text, or cellphone call) to say, “Hey, your payment bounced! It looks like your card has expired!” I would thank her very sincerely, and immediately rectify the situation. If a less agreeable colleague of Sabrina’s were to phone and say, “You missed a payment and your credit rating is about to go into the toilet!” they will very likely get yelled at. But in general, humans are better at public relations than robots and algorithms. Jus’ sayin’
I love the Free Press, and intend to subscribe to paper delivery until I die, when my executor will have to cancel my subscription.
Which brings me to the end of my rant. Thank you for reading it.
Tony Harwood-Jones
Incidentally, while I was on the phone with Sabrina, my cellphone rang. It was Purolator. They were at the building entrance, but couldn’t reach us when they buzzed our apartment. This was because I was on the house line with Sabrina! When people buzz us from the entrance, our house phone rings, and we admit them by pressing a button on the phone! So, Heather personally took the package of her samples to the Purolator person.
In the early evening, another Purolator courier arrived, and got buzzed in successfully. He handed me my replacement PCR self-administered test kit. This morning (Friday, February 4), I successfully connected with an R.N. (in New Brunswick!), who watched me stick the (expletive deleted) swab up my nose, resulting in several giant and extremely loud sneezes. Later in the day, Purolator came to pick up the sample.
And as my properly-sealed sample went away in the courier’s hands, I finally began to believe that we are truly home from our trip. 1
Thanks for reading.
FOOTNOTE:
1 In case you're interested, both of our tests came back negative.