Over the years I have been employed in many businesses in Toronto, the heart of Canada's economy. And for a man with a tremendous disadvantage, being born almost blind due to cataracts, I know quite a lot of things most of you would never even grasp due to your lack of disabilities. For example, I see every day how those of us made weaker due to no fault of our own have to make do, and that's something many of you simply can not ever fathom dealing with. Imagine waking up and not being able to leave home without it and it's not an American Express card? But you also can not even read a single word on any paper even if you squint or bring it near. Low vision is difficult, and yet I've worked at Fortune 500 firms, support Canada's Internet backbone, and mastered more programming languages than a CompSci graduate at the Ph.D. level. So I know a lot about interacting with managers, co-workers, authorities, and even government officials in Ottawa. So please do understand my viewpoint as it is made valid by all this experience.
Women and men are never paid equally in Toronto, never, and it never can be equal. Feminism is a recent development in our cultural awareness and its desire to render problems less than a concern. However, no cause can cure the human heart, nor greed, let alone bring this scale into balance tipped one way or the other by forces understandable only without a wielded power hand. Many times while employed for these big and small firms, such as Sprint, I encouraged women to study, helped them master concepts, and fostered an attitude of respect among all around. In fact, I remember one time when I thought a particularly beautiful blonde woman could do better than sit in a go-nowhere position so I encouraged her to move to our department, and there she earned as much money as we did and even dare I say found love with a co-worker. That is equality, and it had nothing to do with some cause like feminism, nor some desire to balance the ying with the yang. I simply saw what another person needed and helped her. It's a human thing, and does not require any magical colour coordinated movement within society. If you believe it does, then you may be that very noose around all of our necks. In fact, I didn't even think I'd ever talk about that example as there are plenty others, but the reason I bring it up will become clear in a bit.
There were many women working with us in the computer department, but many is a word meaning more than a few and does not mean half, does not mean most and does not mean the mathematically accurate equality of fifty percent. Many means a handful versus a hundred men for example. Maybe we had five women and twenty five men. Many could therefore mean more than one. This is how many women use words in Toronto and thus people assume all manner of opinions about what is and what is not true. For example, the phrase that I worked many double shifts could mean many more than others, or many more than I wanted to but just as many as others in my office. However many even in Toronto's Police force do not question these words and thus often push the wrong things into people's lives. So this is one problem those seeking equality have never even dreamed of tackling, and they never can, for language is fluid.
In another computer corporate environment I worked with a ticketing system. This means we received a problem, opened a ticket to write all the evidence, and then worked on the problem, updating notes, and then closed the ticket when it was resolved. We could measure work done by how many tickets were solved daily, hourly even. After working there for years I realized that while my co-workers were watering plants on their desks and pursuing dance classes, as well as attending TIFF and other events, I was not. In fact, I was so swamped with work, that I was even working from home and giving up my music hobby to help those still back at the office. When I would come home, I would log into the office systems and be available without pay to anyone asking me anything. Not because I wanted to gloat about it in this blog, but rather, I loved what I did, it was a lot of fun, and it never really felt like work. I always thought I was just playing like a kid, exploring the Interwebs, and helping others have just as much fun as me. But then I looked around the office, and felt uneasy.
So I created a script, a program, to tally up all the tickets of my coworkers. I didn't tell anyone I did this, and since I'm a programmer, I could harvest the entire ticketing system without anyone's permission and do a count. It was a simple SQL query, and as there was no book explaining it, it took a bit of social engineering, and trial and error - I didn't do anything wrong nor illegal, all the data was available to all - I simply looked at it. We all could see each other's tickets, in case someone is ill or does not know how to solve a problem, so we can all take over other's work. Really simple stuff. So I ran a SQL tally sequence, and saw the numbers. Over the past two years, I had done three times more tickets than the woman sitting next to me. The very woman who had time to pursue dance classes at the office, to water a thousand plants on her desk, and to chat with her friends, lovers, and others. While I did not. Even though we both, on paper, received an identical numerically equal salary, or close to it, as mine was a bit lower since she was hired before me, I was doing three times more work. So technically, I was doing three quarters of the work the two of us accomplished in those two years. This means, for the same salary, she did a quarter of the job I did in the office, but did three times more socializing and fun stuff around Toronto than I did. Now who is paid less than whom ladies? Sure I could have complained of sexism, as clearly my manager must have known of this. Was he allowing her to do three quarters less work because she was attractive? Was she allowed to work this poorly because of her gender? Did she do sexual favours to slip by the radar? Nobody knows, as it was long ago. But the catch is - I was a disabled man doing three times more work than a woman without any disabilities. And this is in general my experience everywhere I worked, but not merely with women. Men also did far less work than me, but feminism does not concern itself with this aspect. I am just a very skilled and inquisitive minded person. I love to fix things, I love to tinker and so forth. But to the pink flamingos of our Canada, they focus entirely on gender, sex, orientation, whatever the modern word of the day is and ignore reality.
You see, to me, it makes little difference what the worker solving a problem is. In fact, it could be C3PO or a dog with an AI collar. It's entirely irrelevant to me if it's a person with this or that skin pigment, or if their underwear has what I like or do not need in my life. But when I am doing three times the load, and I'm not paid three times, while you got to have three times the fun outside of the office, and then join a feminism movement and claim that I as a male oppressed you? That's when I use the word "terrorist". Because that's exactly how they behave. I do the work while you take the money and the fun. That's criminal, and cruel. Now granted, maybe she did not realize it because it feels normal. I do "my best", and look, I have lots of spare time, so I can use it how I choose. That's what feminists do not notice. We the hard workers in society, we make it seem like you have more time than you can imagine. When she asked me a question, I helped her understand complex technical issues, pleasantly, without accusations, never even told her after the SQL results revealed she did less work, and then I'd go back to my tickets. I was not angry, nor upset, nor feel discriminated against precisely because I was having fun! But you see, here is the truth. Because she was having just as much fun as me, she did not notice that I was not having fun outside the office. Because my hard work gave her fun outside of the office, she could not notice that I was sitting alone at home and working while she was dancing. The feminist was at TIFF while I was pulling a double shift to cover the empty slots in the schedules left behind by even other people's, including male worker's, fun moments in life. This is not some accusation, it is just a rendering of what I spent my twenties doing. In essence, I allowed you all to connect with each other via the Internet, while you had all the fun and forgot who made it happen and that he should have been invited a few times. But the catch is, if you invited me I could not have joined, because hey, someone had to make it all work as none of you were there due to your partying. So unless she curbed her enthusiasm for Toronto's night life and looked around wondering why I was over worked, nothing could have changed. And that is not what feminism is about. Nobody is trying to achieve equality by working harder to prevent others from being over worked. I have never seen a co-worker noticing that I was not watching Netflix at work and worked harder until I caught up on my lost time with The Mindy Project. And believe it or not, I really wanted to see this show, as lame as it sounds. Maybe it's because instead of dating in my twenties, the rest of you dated, while I worked, and I had a crush on that actress? Or maybe I'm gay. But that is irrelevant in Canada as are many things. Including how hard a man worked, and how little he was paid. All that seems to matter is that genders are balanced fifty-fifty. Who does how much work and what type of work isn't in the books ever. And if it is, my low vision eyes have not seen it.
So now with this backdrop, if we were to talk about salary differences based on gender, we can conclude that although I was paid $100k and she was paid $100k, since I was doing three times the work, it would mean that I was paid $33k while she was paid $100k. But on paper we both got the same $100k, so we need a different currency - perhaps a social currency? She had 3x fun and $100k, and I had 1x fun and $100k. Sounds like she got way more than a million dollars for those two years, does it not? What is it worth to you all that in your twenties you went dancing, vacationing around the world, and did not work in a dangerous profession risking neck and limb, while others maybe got hot tar poured on them, broke arms in construction sites, and maybe missed out on dating entirely because work had to be done and nobody else wanted to do it? What is all that worth to you ladies and gentlemen? How much would you pay to have the other experience, the one where you partied and did not work? Is that worth a million a year or a day? Because at this point, gender-based salary differences in Toronto, under this new maths, seems to indicate that women earn a billion an hour while men in dangerous fields earn a few thousand a year. We can all fudge views and numbers how they suit our agendas and desires. We all can twist the arm of the law and lie on medical reports, and we all can lie to our spouses and in court. Even I can, and for all you know, this was all made up and is nothing but fake news. But fact is, she did not buy a new MacBook just to play Halo at work on release night while doing triple shifts - I did and it was damn awesome fun! I just wish throughout it all I also got the equivalent of 3x fun outside of the office and now I'm forty and those years you all took from me. But I'm glad to read and see online how much my sacrifice made you all happy. It's just unfortunate feminists can not appreciate things as honestly rendered as these words but always look only as far as their perspective is validated. No one's perfect, right? Now back to learning how to be a ninja, I hear that pays way more than IT.
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