Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately because it has become increasingly clear to me that there is someone out there who doesn’t like me. I mean, someone who really doesn’t like me. I have only met the guy once and can’t imagine what I might have done to offend him so, but there is no doubt I’m just not his type of guy.

On paper, anyway, this just shouldn’t be. We both have a lot in common. We were both born in Ontario in the fifties. We were both skinny as flagpoles as kids. We chose solitary sports in high school, both of us becoming cross-country runners. We both tended towards the “brainiac” end of the personality spectrum (though my marks never quite confirmed that), and wouldn’t have put up an argument if you had called us shy. We grew up, married attractive women and both have a son and a daughter, our sons born the same year, our daughters two years apart. So far, so good.

But at some point, our paths diverged. He decided to try changing the world through politics, I stumbled into journalism. And now, he doesn’t much like me. Politicians, you see, have coiffed hair, wear neat suits, choose their words carefully and smile at you when they’d rather run your head into a wall. Journalists are uncouth, unkempt, disrespectful loudmouths who are pretty sure it hasn’t been a good day if they haven’t offended somebody, somewhere. Journalists can never get elected (and rightfully so) to anything more significant than the Health and Safety Committee at work and it’s doubtful they are even qualified for that. Politicians couldn’t write an unbiased story or column if they were promised a lifetime of free manicures to do so.

To sum up, in spite of our various similarities, the directions our lives have taken have landed me and the guy about whom I write on opposite sides of a growing divide, and I don’t know what to do to bridge the gap. I can’t grow a set of manners overnight and l’m pretty sure he can’t learn to be rude and chronically unfeeling.

Our basic trouble seems to beg for treatment at a good audiology clinic. When he says privacy, I hear secrecy. When he says restrictions on media access, I hear censorship. When he says focus on key priorities, I hear gag orders.

But there’s another major difference between this guy and me. He’s a lot smarter than I am. He’s figured out that practically no politician ever lost out too badly beating up on journalists (just as a lot of us make our if livings returning the favour). He knows people won’t care too much if he trashes us all day long because every poll ever taken in recent years has shown politicians, journalists and lawyers all fighting hard for the bottom spot on the list of most trusted professionals in society.

But it’s a funny thing, you know. Come election time, politicians have a way of seeing how wrong they’ve been all along about us rabblerousers and they seek to mend our relationships. They call us up, invite us to fancy dinners and campaign speeches. They ask us along to walk with them as they knock on doors, and take pictures of them as they try to look casual in their suits on a hot summer day, dribbling a kid’s basketball in a stranger’s driveway.

Invited to a special event is how I got to meet the Prime Minister of Canada last time he was in town. Come on out, said his “handlers” – that’s what I need in my life is some handlers – and get to know him. So I did. I shook his hand. Asked him a couple of questions. Took a few photos of him. But I didn’t get to know Stephen Harper till he became prime minister. My suspicion is, I’m about to find out all about him the hard way.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Richard Branson, head of Virgin, once said a business owner should train an employee so well that he could leave him. Then treat him so well he wouldn’t want to.

I have seen this principle at work so often, usually in a negative way. It’s incredible to watch a company invest time and money and sometimes years getting an employee all ready to walk across the street and go to work for the company’s competitor. Or even worse, to start their own competing company with their newfound expertise. All because, having invested in the employee, the company then insists on failing to value him. Low pay, little stature, few benefits, punishing work schedules.

The competitor across the street takes notice of the man’s value and hires him away from the place which gave him his start and his skills. The competitor is happy to be able to take on the fully trained but undervalued employee, allowing them to bypass the apprenticeship. The competitor treats the man well and keeps him.

Meanwhile, Company A repeats the mistake over and over and soon falls behind, often going out of business in the end. Penny wise and pound foolish.

All companies are only as good as the people they employ. It is amazing how often true value is chased out the door to save a few bucks. I patronize a business in my town which has kept a steady and happy workforce for years. It’s the most solid enterprise I’ve ever seen. A chance meeting with the owner tells the story: That man is a gem.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Why is it, the more miserable the world gets, the happier morning radio announcers become? Do they think they can turn back the tide of gloom and doom with a few, well-placed yuks? Or is there a humour pool somewhere they’re desperately trying to keep filled up?

Whatever the reason, they’re all driving me nuts. Not because they’re funny. They’re not. The closest they come to that is corny, which can be darned hard to take at 6 a.m.

No, the reason I’d like to send them all back to broadcast school for a bit of upgrading is their unbridled cheerfulness. They sound as if, so far this week, they all just won the lottery, met the man/woman of their dreams, discovered the secret of life and stumbled upon some swami who gave them a lifetime supply of a potion that will keep them 21 forever.

I’ve been listening to radio all my life and used to love it more than TV. But this, oh-so-glad-to-be-alive stuff is turning me – and my radio – off several times a day.

One such “deejay” wouldn’t know humour if he was sharing an apartment with Bob Hope, Steve Martin and Jerry Seinfeld. However, he seems to be operating under the delusion that he’s the Alexander Graham Bell of humour and works on the principle that if you say something – anything – in a “funny” voice, it will be hilarious. If bone-chilling, vein-popping, heart-stopping aggravation is suddenly redefined as comedy, then I’ll personally walk across the stage to hand him his Funny Guy of ’94 Award.

This man’s biggest contribution to the humour pool is the expression, “Hoo hoooooooooo!” He says it 40 times a morning while he tries his zippy best to cajole us out of bed.

“Come on all you sleepyheads out there,” he chirps. “Time to get out of that nice, warm bed. Come on now. Rise and shine. Hoo hoooooooooo!”

The bad news is, he’s the best of a bad lot because many stations have decided the job of saying, “Now here’s another golden oldie” can only be handled by two young, super-cheerful types whose voices are the very embodiment of glee. And of course, the morning “men” on radio come in both sexes now and often use their differing genders as the subject of their playful banter. The ones that most regularly get me grinding my teeth also have their favourite expressions: he – “heh, heh, heh”; she – “hee, hee, hee.” (What is it with funny expressions that start with the letter “h”?)

“So, Linda, whadju do on the weekend?”

“Well, Don, I got the old bikini out …”

“Yikes. Run for your lives everybody.”

“Oh you. Hee, hee, hee!”

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Heh, heh, heh!”

“How about you Don? Whadju do?”

“Well Linda, I dug out the old golf clubs …”

“Oh no! Call 9-1-1! Call 9-1-1! Hee, hee, hee!”

“Heh, heh, heh!”

Now I ask you: what if you had no choice but to listen to this for four hours every morning? Wouldn’t you be asking around for Dr. Kevorkian’s phone number?

One station, not content to double our pain, regularly opts for three voices on their airwaves. Two zippy men and one zippy woman, conducting a daily contest, can hardly get the words out for laughing so hard at their own cleverness as they poke fun at each other. The topics usually involve: (a) the fat male belly; (b) the non-technical female brain; (c) the bald male head; (d) the female penchant for lateness; and whatever other gender-related things can still be safely laughed at.

Things have gotten so bad, I was forced against my will to turn on CBC Stereo the other day. There, unexpectedly, was a veritable shade tree of an announcer in the ’90s radio desert who stated in a calm, monotone, unmodulated, straight-as-a-tightrope voice: “And now, a selection by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, their rendition of one of J.S. Bach’s earlier works.” No, hoo hooooooooos or hee hees. No yuk yuks.

No exhortations to smile. No commands to rise and shine. And definitely no zippiness.

But if the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation isn’t the answer, maybe the next best solution is to sleep until noon.

By Jim Hagarty
2018

Somebody somewhere recently wrote that only a fool pretends to be wise and the bigger the fool, the more wisdom he pretends to have. This hit home with me as I sometimes foolishly share ideas that seem to me to be, if not entirely wise, then at least somewhere in the neighbourhood of wise, if only in the dusty, unlit outskirts.

So, I feel that I have been judged by this man’s assessment as not only someone who is unwise but an actual fool. I sit here on my couch dejected. I’ve always suspected I was foolish and have spent a lifetime trying to disguise it, primarly by trying to sound wise.

But then a notion begins to occur to me, in the same way most fools have notions occur to them. By sharing his bit of wisdom about foolish fellas flinging out non-wisdom into the world, is this wise guy actually outing himself as a fool? He has dispensed his wisdom on the topic, and not only that, on a subject that is pretty wide-ranging. So maybe this guy, as it might turn out ironically, is the biggest fool of all, pretending to pronounce on the folly of fools. However, my guess is he believes he is the one exception to his own rule, that he is, in fact, a wise man dispensing nothing but wise guy wisdom. I wonder, and this is probably a foolish idea, whether or not what said brainiac has been brandishing is really only fool’s gold.

Yes, I think I’ve got this sucker. But for a while there, I have to be honest, he almost had me fooled.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Once a man, twice a child. That is one of my favourite sayings, describing, as it does so succinctly, the inevitable stages of many people’s lives. But I think the world is in need of another new nugget regarding the aging process and I suggest this ripoff of the adage in the first paragraph: Once long hair, twice a buzz cut.

There are little signposts along the journey that let you know this is a one-way trip you’re on and the day you are told, by the person who looks after your hair, that you don’t really need to come back any more, you feel yourself in semi-schock.

“When you’re using the trimmer on your beard,” says the hair stylist, “just keep on going over the rest of your head,” She fires up her clippers and takes a run at it, just to show me the way. Suddenly, I am transported back to Fred Guy’s barbershop in Monkton and the simplicity of what was known back then as a “brush cut.” A few waves of his magic wand and I was back in peak trim, each hair follicle having been reduced to about one sixteenth of an inch in length. My entire head, after my brush cut, would look like Fred Flinstone’s face an its three-day shadow he could never quite shake.

It’s a bit sad, of course, to be rounding this turn, but a bit liberating as well. I now have one black comb (a bit bent) and one blue brush (fairly new) for sale and expect to earn a fair sum for both. I no longer have to worry about my hair getting “mussed up” and my baseball caps have never fit better. My total outlay from here on in on hair dryers I expect to add up, with both taxes added on, to zero. A bonus, I suppose, is that some people have been telling me all week that I look much neater. It was never one of my life’s goals to look neat, but I guess if this is considered a positive quality, then I’ll take it.

Another sign that time is moving ever so aggressively on has to do with a man’s “trousers” (as they call them in civilized, English-speaking nations) and how well they resist the pull of gravity. I remember many years ago, having a good chuckle watching a pair of pants fall down around the ankles of an “old” man next door. First of all, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he suddenly had a lot of extra baggage hovering just above his sock lines and secondly, upon discovering this fact, he seemed not to care one whit about it.

The other night, while racing to move some backyard topsoil before the sun went completely clown, I bent to heave some rocks when I felt a “pop” followed by a loosening around the waist, sure signs that a button has fled the scene. But hurry is a terrible thing, with the sun in such a rush to disappear, and so I decided to carry on. While hustling across the lawn with a wheelbarrow full of soil, I suddenly felt much cooler around the leg, thigh and groinal areas and knew that I had been struck by my karma: What we mock, we shall become!

Standing there in the middle of my yard with buzz cut above and no pants below, I had my “aha!” moment: Middle age seemed suddenly in my rear-view mirror.

My only possible salvation is the prospect that I might get in on a little of that “not caring a whit” attitude my neighbour seemed to have. Day by day, I feel that coming on and I can only think that that must be nature’s major compensation for all these completely undeserved changes.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

I heard on the radio yesterday that gas in Venezuela is four cents a gallon. A gallon. Four cents. This works out, for all us on the metric system of measurement, to about one cent per litre. I drive a small car. It would cost me about fifty cents to fill it up in Venezuela, if I could figure out how to get it there and back. The last time the government in Venezuela tried to raise the price of gas was in 1989 and there were riots. Hundreds of people died. I can’t think of a point to all this but I thought you might want to know as you fill up your tank with four or five dollar a gallon gas.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a bully named Bob
Who hurt me all day till I’d sob.
I do not know why
That guy made me cry.
Did he think that that was his job?