The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Yesterday’s provincial election in Alberta was probably the most exciting one in some time; it’s the first one in decades where the winner wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The upstart Wildrose Party promised change and were looking to the winners in this election, but in the end, the Progressive Conservatives, who’ve been in power for over 40 years and it shows in some pretty bad ways, won a majority with 62 seats. The Wild Rubes are now the official opposition with 18 seats; the NDP and Liberals can easily fit into a minivan with their respective 4 and 3 seats.

A popular hypothesis is the sizeable pool of undecided voters in Alberta chose to go with the devil they knew. What didn’t help were what the National Post calls “Bozo eruptions” by a couple of the Wildrose candidates. There was the discovery of a blog entry made last year by Allan Hunsperger, a pastor, that gays and lesbians would burn in the lake of fire. More damning was Ron Leech’s statement that his being white was an advantage because as the default, he could speak for everyone instead of just for his own tribe:

I think as a Caucasian, I have an advantage. When different community leaders such as a Sikh leader or a Muslim leader speaks, they really speak to their own people in many ways. As a Caucasian, I believe that I can speak to all the community.

Here’s a page with an audio recording of the interview of this statement. Leech’s friends have stepped forward and explained that he misspoke that one time and that what he really meant was that his being white would not be a disadvantage while running for a seat in the Calgary-Greenway riding, a district with a lot of nonwhite voters. You’re taking that one thing he said that one time out of context, they said.

Out of context. Misspoke. Got it. Everybody gets a warning for a first offence, right?

So here’s Leech, saying it again, even more emphatically:

Here’s the transcript:

Ron Leech: I believe as a Caucasian I have an advantage that for the Punjabi community I am able to speak for the whole community and to lift the community up in our region. I believe I have a voice and I believe the community has my ear and I want the community to know that I am attentive to their needs; I’ve been studying about their culture, about their religion, so I can better understanding of their special needs but I recognize that there are many needs in this community, in the Punjabi community and I believe I can help those needs. And I believe that when I come to our community here, I’m very concerned that the Punjabi community have not been esteemed — lifted up. When a Punjabi leader speakes for the Punjabi, the Punjabi are listening. But when a Caucasian speaks on their behalf, everybody is listening.

Anchor Jaggi Dhaliwal: I agree. I totally agree with that.

…

Ron Leech: You can vote for someone who is your own ethnicity and you can support them and they will help you as much as they can. But I believe if a Punjabi leader speaks in the political arena, he speaks for the Punjabi people. But if a Caucasian speaks on behalf of the Punjabi community, my role will be to lift the Punjabi community…

Plenty of context there.

So that’s twice Leech has said it on the record, and a decade’s worth of experience as a spokesperson tells me that he’s said it at least once more — just listen to the way he says it; it’s not just a passing notion.

Is it impossible for a non-Caucasian to speak for communities of different backgrounds? I don’t think so; I’ve been doing it within the tech community for years, on behalf of people born here and abroad, from all manner of cultures and races, and from both the open and proprietary software worlds. (The field still skews heavily male, but we’re working on that.)

Want proof? Here you go:

Yours Truly with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer…

…and with Richard Stallman, the anti-Ballmer.
(Note how Stallman plays with his hair when talking to me. He wants me.)

The bit about “lifting up” the Punjabi community is another “tell”. As a friend of mine quipped on Facebook, pity the White Man for the burden he must bear.

As for Jaggi: the only way you could be more of a doormat would be if you wore a T-shirt that said “Welcome”.

Unfortunately for the Punjabi community, Leech didn’t win the riding in last night’s elections. He lost to Manmeet Bhullar, the Progressive Conservative incumbent. Lacking the Caucasian Advantage, anything he does or says will be immaterial, and Calgary’s Punjabi community is going to miss its lift.

It’s more likely a way to promote Moosejaw’s image as a funny bunch of people from whom you’d like to buy stuff than an actual deterrent for thieves or truck hijackers.

Especially after those summer-like temperatures from late last month.

Electro swing is a fusion of swing — a jazz style first heard in the 1930s (think Benny Goodman and Count Basie) — and modern electronic music that descended from jazz and the blues, such as hip-hop, drum and bass, funk and dubstep. Here are some samples:

Electro Swing Club is a loose federation of clubs and event organizers who like electro swing and put together electro swing-themed events all over the world. They’ve had Electro Swing Club nights in the places you’d suspect: Paris, London, Prague and Hollywood, but they’ve also had them in Utrecht, Antwerp, Torino, Montreal, Vancouver, and as of a couple of Fridays ago, Accordion City.

Anitra was visiting Accordion City at the time, and she found the Electro Swing Club event at the Gladstone while looking for stuff to do online. She’s a swing dancer and I love electronic music, so it seemed like the perfect evening out. The announcement for the event mentioned that there was a sliding scale for admission, with admission being lower for people who dressed the part. I don’t have a zoot suit anymore, but I still dressed up and took Anitra to an appropriately retro place for dinner: The Lakeview…

…and then it was off to the Gladstone!

In addition to a DJ spinning the electro swing tunes, we were also treated to Rambunctious, Accordion City’s brass jam band made up of a dozen players of various persuasions of horn and a drummer. I know their frontman, Michael Johnson, from Kickass Karaoke — he and I have played together on Istanbul (not Constantinople), with him on trumpet and me playing you-know-what. He even paused for a moment, said “Hey!” and waved my way when he saw me, which is always a good thing when you’re taking a girl out on a date and trying to impress her — and besides, it only helps to perpetuate the myth that I’m connected to everybody. In my line of work, that’s a good thing.

Rambunctious don’t play any set pieces; they improvise. Michael would call out to the audience to give him a name for the next piece, and then someone in the band would start a riff and they’d build on it until everyone was contributing. Michael would make up vocals on the spot based on the suggested title. That night, they ended up performing numbers named “23 Skidoo” (a slang term from the era), “No Love at the Pharmacy”, “Brass Baby”, and the piece I recorded below, “Fish Legs”:

They didn’t just stay on stage either…

…they hopped out into the audience and we had a grand old time.

We were even treated to a solo from the rhythm section: a baritone sax player and a lingerie-clad drummer. I managed to get a clear shot of the baritone sax player, but I’m going to have to disappoint you fans of female drummers in skimpy clothes — I was too far away and my shots are a bit blurry:

Then came the burlesque act. The dancer followed a simple formula: dancing, balloons, cigarette…

…and you know what happens when you press the lit end of a cancer stick to a balloon!

So when are we having the next one?

We need to put together an expedition and chop this sign down! It’s so anti-accordion that it’s drawn upside-down (the piano keyboard should be on the viewer’s left or the player’s right).

Click the photo to see it at full size.

In addition to new office space, Shopify also occupies what used to be the Capital Music Hall. While the office space is largely complete (there are still a couple of rooms that are still getting furnished), the big room — I believe it will eventually be called “The Lounge” — is still undergoing renovation. It was far along enough for us to have an end-of-week all-hands meeting at the end of Friday afternoon.

The photo above shows a view of the north side of the room, as seen from the balcony. The photo below was taken from the same vantage point, but southward:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Here’s a view from the ground floor, looking northward:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The all-hands meeting took place yesterday afternoon as work wound down. We grabbed a beer or two from the kitchen fridge (Friday afternoon beer is one of the many perks of working at Shopify) and made our way to the Lounge…

Click the photo to see it at full size.

…where Daniel Weinand, Shopify’s Chief Design Officer and Chief Culture Officer, addressed the troops:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

None of the announcements were earth-shaking, but now that the company’s grown to a hundred people spread over two floors in Ottawa as well as people working from Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg, all on many different projects, it helps to have a gathering where we can all get together.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

As I write this, I’m back in my home office in Accordion City. While I do like living in Toronto, I’m a big fan of travel and enjoy coming up to Ottawa and visiting Shopify HQ. It’s a great place, made even better by the people with whom I work: a smart, fun bunch.

And then there are these guys 😉 :

Shopifolks Edward Ocampo-Gooding, Daniel Beauchamp and Willem van Bergen.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

Previous Shopify HQ Entries

• Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 1: The First Thing You’ll See When You Visit
• Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 2: The Hot Sauce Library
• Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 3: Some of the Rooms

It’s the end of the week, and my monthly check-in with Shopify HQ in Ottawa is drawing to a close. I fly home tonight at 9:10 p.m., arriving an hour later at Billy Bishop Airport, after which it’s a quick cab ride home to High Park. I thought I’d share some of my photos of the office before taking off.

This is a relatively new office, but it’s just what we needed. We were running out of space at the old place — it was already cramp when I joined as the 60th employee, and with the acquisition of the mobile dev company Select Start Studios, we’re now at 100.

The two pictures above are our reception area — we look like a real company now!

We’ve got a number of mottos that we live by at Shopify, and this one’s one of my favourites (you could say I’ve been doing this all along): Do things, tell people. Get stuff done and make sure people know about it. This one’s posted on the wall outside our CEO Toni Lutke’s office.

Tobi’s office is one of the more sedate rooms at Shopify HQ. The others, for which we were given budgets to decorate as we saw fit, are a good deal more colourful.

Every self-respecting software development shop understands the need to take a break from work and play videogames. Hence the games room, which features a nice-size TV, proper Street Fighter arcade-style controllers, an oft-used XBox 360 and a less-used Playstation 3.

And yes, a lot of posters catering to Anime fans. Anitra would love this room.

In addition to offices divided by function, we have a number of unassigned workspaces that people can use if they need some extra-quiet space to take a call or get work done. These rooms are themed, with themes determined and then implemented by employees (who were given decoration budgets, natch!). Here’s the Silly Hats room:

It features a fine set of chapeaux and a mirror so you can see how dashing you look when haberdashed:

The music room is one of my favourites:

Nice, quiet, low-lit and decorated with classic album covers, its a good place to get a little coding work done, do a conference call or even record some podcast audio (I’ve done all three).

Cool companies need cool workspaces, and Shopify is — as Outkast would’ve put it — ice cold. While Accordion City is home, I’m looking forward to my next visit in May.