Disciplining Vulnerable Employees

"Mr. Mohammed did not consider the particular circumstances or make any assessment of the actual seriousness of Ms. Ram's conduct before deciding to terminate her employment."
"He claimed that he did not do so because it is necessary to ensure that employees know that taking food without authorization will not be tolerated."
"[Mr. Mohammed had testified that Usha Ram] was a good and valued employee, with no record of any formal discipline] with the Burger King chain before she was fired."
"[Janif Mohammed and co-owner of the franchise Michael Lacombe] behaved in an unreasonable, unfair and unduly insensitive manner."
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Lisa Warren

Usha Ram has been awarded $46,000 after being fired from a Vancouver Burger King. (Jesse Johnston/CBC)

A 55-year-old woman who had come to Canada in 1987 from Fiji with a basic amount of English at her disposal having achieved a Grade 8 education in her country of birth, worked as a cook in a Burger King franchise for 24 years. As a full-time worker the woman, who was the sole family earner whose salary enabled her to care for a physically handicapped husband and an adult daughter who is mentally disabled, earned an annual wage of $21,000.

Her long employment and dependability marked her as a valuable employee, a fact her employers agreed upon. Yet she was fired because of a miscommunication and a company policy that ensnared this woman into a situation that was both demeaning and crudely and cruelly dismissive of her work record, her dignity as a human being, as well presenting as an acute instance of total disinterest in her welfare at age 55, with few other skills and poor English, in a search for replacement employment.

Her firing transpired as 2013 came to a close when her employer accused her of stealing from the company. Her crime was that she understood she had been given permission to take home with her a fish sandwich, french fries and a soft drink as she went off shift. She had asked the duty manager at the fast food outlet for permission to take home with her a "fish fry" free of charge as she had forgotten her wallet.

The manager agreed, under the impression that she would be taking the fish sandwich only, not accompanied by french fries and a soft drink. At the Burger King franchise employees were given entitlement to free drinks during shifts and outside of shifts, half-price food. Miscommunication aside, the cost of the the food items that Usha Ram had taken home with her would represent a value of $1.00. But management was offended that she was under the impression that she owed them nothing.

The manager bided his time, waiting for Ms. Ram to pay for the 'extra' food she had taken, but when she neglected to do so, he notified the owners. That resulted in Janif Mohammed accusing Usha Ram of theft. She wept, offering to pay for the food, hoping her job would not be in peril. But the decision had been made to fire her. This is a woman whose loyalty to her employers was evident in her willingness to be assigned to various sites.

The franchise locations in Vancouver, included a number of sites, and she was transferred to one site after another over the 24-year period when she was employed by the franchise owners. Justice has now finally been done. She has been awarded $46,000 for wrongful dismissal. Justice Warren ordered that the franchisee pay this ill-done-by woman general damages of $21,000, reflective of a year's salary, along with $25,000 in aggravated damages.

Freeing The Mind With Movement

"It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth."
"[Being able to] walk in the mountains for seven or eight hours without a trace of weariness [enables philosophical composition]."
"The suppleness of my muscles has always been greatest when my creative energies were flowing most abundantly."
Friedrich Nietzsche, In Twilight of the Idols (1889)

"If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish."
Charles Dickens letter from Boulogne, France, 1850

"The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared."
C.S. Lewis, Author of  The Chronicles of Narnia

"There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together. Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively."
"Your senses are sharpened. As a writer, I also use it as a form of problem solving. I'm far more likely to find a solution by going for a walk than sitting at my desk and 'thinking'."
Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking

It was observed of Steve Jobs who used the mind-clearing exercise of walking to tease his mind toward clarity and inspiration, that "Taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation", as stated in the biography of Apple's co-founder, written by Walter Isaacson. Taking inspiration from a man whose inventive genius was an example to many others in the field, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is also credited with adopting the walking-to-think example.

Charles Darwin is reputed to have walked constantly along what he termed his "thinking path", a road called Sandwalk Wood located close to his home in southeast England. He developed a habit of three-45-minute walks each day; before breakfast, lunch, and the third post-prandially, in the early evening. His son attested to his father's rarely straying from the routine. And it was that routine he relied upon to aid him in finalizing his theory of natural selection and random mutation.

Ludwig van Beethoven, deaf at 40, had his own regimented routine that included regular walking. He would intersperse his composition time with swift forays out of doors to refresh his mind. Once his working day was completed, he would take long, solitary walks carrying with him a pencil and notepad to stroll the Viennese woods. There to find inspiration, then recording them. His sixth symphony the "Pastoral" is complete with woodwind sounds of various birds he heard during his rambles.

Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Thomas De Quincy, Constantin Brancuso, Bruce Chatwin and Vladimir Nabokov all indulged in walking to release themselves from the stress of life and work, allowing their minds to roam creatively, indulging their natural creativity and in the process enriching their originality, unleashed through the serenity and mind-wandering that captivated their inner consciousness, gifting society with the results.

And now researchers with Stanford University have validated the process of unleashing creativity through the act and art of walking. The study results, conducted by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology resulted from an experiment where participants were tasked with undertaking Guilford's Alternative Uses Test.

This is a timed activity meant to measure creative thinking; while sitting, and alternatively while walking on a treadmill. The two researchers discovered that walking did indeed increase creativity for 82% of the research participants, with increases of output averaging 60%. The test evaluates the quantity of ideas, but also their quality; the originality of ideas and specificity of those ideas. Additional ideas were generated while walking, of a high quality; innovative and practical.

The advice of those who engage in walking is simply to go out and do it. The benefits endowed by so doing are just too numerous to overlook, from the simple enjoyment of exercising limbs, to the freedom to look about and appreciate a landscape, to the freeing of the mind while taking in prevailing clues of light, distance, fragrances and activities taking place all about; whether in an urban streetscape or a woodland landscape ramble, the results are manifold.

Human beings were not designed to sit for interminable hours at desks staring at computer screens and exercising their cerebral matter through forced communication without some manner of inspirational motivation interrupting the stagnation of movement and boredom. Walking does that, the ingestion of the scene through fresh air to stimulate the brain along with the physical momentum of striding along and appreciating the sensations that surround and impress.

From those stimulations come the urge to indulge in performing some measure of expression, for we are creatures meant to communicate, whatever the tools we use at our disposal; words, paint, sculpture, music, or dance.  

Unfortunate Realities

When people are in anguished pain, they want some relief from their suffering. When a child dies, preferring to voluntarily surrender life to the expedient of suicide, because life seems just too much to bear, a sense of guilt infuses all of society. Someone is surely to blame, the reason for that child's abandonment of life must be sought out, and the accused must carry the stigma of responsibility. There are times when a single cause is discovered and relief is found from the emotional dungeon of despair.

And then there are those times when the reasons are numerous, intertwined, and confusing. Where the victim of the tragedy that ensued out of what might be construed as a deviation of a normal rite of passage to social maturity caused shame and a social outcasting of someone who like everyone else wants to 'fit in' be just like everyone else finds herself the subject of universal scorn among her peers. The fault, if such can be said, can be found in personality, circumstances and opportunity.

Rehtaeh Parsons is shown in a handout photo from the Facebook tribute page "Angel Rehtaeh." The RCMP say they have made two arrests in the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, the 17-year-old Halifax girl who was taken off life-support following a suicide attempt in April.    Photograph by: Handout, Facebook, THE CANADIAN PRESS

 

Grieving parents of a 17-year-old girl, raised in a culture and a society where sexual experimentation sometimes goes beyond experiment into practise and in the process brings shame to girls, want to find someone to blame. Where else to look but at those whose participation in a social event led them to a situation where alcohol sufficiently loosened inhibitions to the point where mutual acquiescence to sex benefited them?

Perhaps the parents of all concerned were consumed with guilt that they knew very well from their own experiences that the formula of youth, hormones, sex, alcohol and social partying could result in an orgy of distraction and compulsion. And while knowing, do nothing to forewarn, to chaperone, to themselves take guiding parental responsibility. In the case of Rehteah Parsons, who appealed for a stop to the shaming and the Internet circulation of a cellphone video that disgraced her, there are no easy solutions.

She is dead by her own hand, badgered, ridiculed and shamed as representing someone she had no wish to be, a "slut". At a party of her peers where young people mingled, listened to music, drank alcohol and flirted, daring one another, enticing each other, and some breaking off to isolate themselves in upstairs home bedrooms, Rehteah Parsons was a drunk, giggling and willing participant in sex; group sex actually.

Her best friend, with a more level, self-preserving mindset, tried to persuade Rehteah to leave the bedroom where she lay naked with several boys, but she refused. That friend left the premises and brought her mother back with her, and neither was able to persuade Rehteah to leave. Whom to blame? There was no rape, as Rehteah's desperately bereaved parents wanted to believe, and consequently no young men to shame and blame and place on trial for the death of their daughter.

There was, however, the circulation of a cellphone video on social media that serviced quite well to appeal to the mean streak in most people, who enjoy seeing the social alienation that can be brought upon others victimized by misfortune and circumstances often beyond their control. Rehteah did not enjoy being an object of derision, her pleas that these things halt and desist went unanswered. She responded by taking steps to put a stop to her own very personal anguish.

The only criminal charges left to be exercised to help society and mourning parents exorcise their demons is to charge three young men with the crime of circulating child pornography, victims of their very own misfortune.

Critical Best Practice

"If you are bleeding from a hole in your liver, and on top of that your body cannot form good clots, it's a bad combination.
Until 2007, "a patient would come in bleeding, you would try to stop the bleeding and at the same time start intravenous saline -- nothing more than water and salt. If the blood work showed your patient needs blood, you would give blood."
Dr. Sandro Rizoli, director, trauma program, St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto

A new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal co-authored by Dr. Rizoli brings into question what has become standard routine in transfusing trauma patients. Prior to 2007 it was standard procedure in trauma centres around the world in treating car crash victims, for example, to give intravenous saline comprised of water and salt. Blood was transfused only if tests indicated anemia from  loss of blood, or improper clotting was resulting from medical trauma.

But then, in 2007 American military doctors operating within war theatres in Iraq and Afghanistan noted their observations that wounded soldiers seemed likelier to survive their trauma injuries if attending doctors immediately began transfusing large amounts of blood, rather than waiting for blood-testing results before proceeding. The U.S. military study altered the manner in which trauma centres worldwide resuscitated their patients.

"The standard became to treat patients with a big bleed by assuming they're not clotting and immediately transfusing with blood", explained Dr. Rizoli. A combination of equal parts red blood cells, plasma -- the liquid part of blood containing clotting factors -- and platelets, responsible for giving blood its sticky values making it more likely to form clots, comprised the transfusion.

Recently, however, the new Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre study compared blood-based resuscitation as opposed to what was once conventional resuscitation to discover that blood waste and medical complications in patients automatically transfused with blood resulted. Additionally, there was no difference detected in rates of death from use of either method.

Among trauma patients, hemorrhage is recognized as the leading cause of preventable, in-hospital deaths. Dr. Rizoli's team conducted randomized trials of the formula in trauma patients. Their study indicated blood wastage and greater respiratory complications requiring that patients be connected to mechanical ventilators with the blood-transfusion formula. And a negligible difference in rates of death resulting.

Minutes after a major trauma as for example, car accident, a serious fall sustaining gross injuries from a height, gunshot or stab wounds, one-quarter of patients fail to clot adequately. While in a trauma medical state, their bodies release huge amounts of natural substances that have the effect of preventing clots from forming. And this is a condition that increases the risk of bleeding to death.

Seems as though there's never a final word in medical-scientific treatment. New procedures in response to life-threatening events often become widely accepted when they are held to be superior in outcome to earlier methods. But sometimes what is popularly believed to be so, just isn't. Just take the example of teaching people the long-accepted technique associated with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, as one example.

Speed Kills

On Sunday evening Kouchi Matsumoto, 70, a former Carleton University chemistry professor died. In a car accident, as he was driving his Hyundai on Woodroffe Avenue. The car that plowed into Mr. Matsumoto's vehicle was a BMW, westbound on the Highway 417 off-ramp. Speeding. The 28-year-old driver lost control. Neither the BMW's driver nor his 22 year-old-passenger was hurt.

The BMW struck a curb, crossed two southbound lanes and leaped over the median. And then it hit Mr. Matsumoto's car. A 66-year-old woman seated on Mr. Matsumoto's car's passenger seat suffered serious chest, abdominal and hand injuries. She is now in stable condition in hospital, while Mr. Matsumoto was pronounced dead at the scene.

Mr. Matsumoto, a resident of Kanata, in west-end Ottawa, studied chemistry at Carleton University in 1967. He returned to Japan, his native country, and lived there, but was concerned about the never-ending cycle of earthquakes, and the use of nuclear power in a country so geologically unstable, certain that it was a poor mix. "You cannot negotiate with nature", he once said.

In 1983 he returned to Ottawa, and took up a teaching position in chemistry at Carleton University. And he has been a resident of Ottawa ever since. When he was two years of age he and his family lived in Hiroshima. His mother was killed and his family home destroyed in 1945 when his city was bombed along with Nagasaki, by American Atomic bombs, just before the end of the Second World War.

Police have said that alcohol did not factor into the crash that killed Mr. Matsumoto. But speed most certainly is held to have contributed to the collision. Police are as yet uncertain whether charges would be laid. Although the circumstances certainly do lend themselves to the laying of charges.

Courage and Compassion

"I took his arm to feel his pulse. There was blood on the pavement where he had been dragged and blood was pouring out of him. Suddenly this excited black man came up to me and said, 'Get away from the body; don't touch it'. I looked up and I could see red hands, a bloodied revolver, bloodied meat cleaver and a butcher's knife. OK, I thought, this is bad."
"There were 50 to 60 people. They were watching; filming on their phones. I pushed one back because he was too close. I told them if they want to do something, come and help. It made me sad. They were thinking of themselves, not about this poor guy."
Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, London, England

This straightforward, non-nonsense woman, middle-aged, confronted by the spectacle of an murderous atrocity that had just occurred, remained cool and collected as she made every effort to make sense of the senseless, aid someone beyond human intervention, and cope with the situation facing her of a seemingly demented killer ordering her to take her distance from the body of a young man he had just transformed horribly into a mutilated corpse.

The single mother, formerly a cub scout leader, and a teacher, has most likely, throughout her life of 48 years, been exposed to just about any startling situation that required her level head to immediately take steps to ameliorate. She was obviously capable of separating her emotions in this situation; compelling herself not to panic, guiding herself to meeting a situation that required a clear mind and an ample response.

Before her stood two men holding butcher's knives, meat cleavers and a revolver. Their aggressive attitudes embellished by the residue of a man's life colouring their hands, their arms, their clothing. "Would you like to give me what you have in your hands?" she asked, just as she would attempt to disarm the poor behaviour of a tantrum in a child under her care, threatening to throw pottery around. "We want to start a war. I will shoot the police when they come. I want to kill them", one man said.

"That's not going to happen", she said calmly, confronting the two. Whom, despite having run down an innocent man with their vehicle, then slashing him countless times, attempting disembowelment and decapitation, all the while encouraging bystanders to take pictures, videos of their bravura performance, are being spoken of by the news media as "suspects", not the murderers they clearly are. "I am here and I am going to listen to you", said Ms. Loyau-Kennett, and she did, until the arrival of the police.

^{Ingrid Loyau-Kennett confronts one of the attackers (@dannymckiernan)}
 
Assured her presence was no longer required she simply left. She had calmed the two terrorists, kept them engaged until the arrival of the police, and was prepared to continue on her way. There were others who exhibited compassion and spirit, a Caribbean women who attempted to aid Drummer Lee Rigby, the 25-year-old who had been selected by the two terrorists as their ideological-statement target.

It was she who informed Ms. Loyau-Kennett that there was nothing that could be done for Lee Rigby.