Leaving Toronto and Monopoly Innovations

As alluded to a prior post, a little over two weeks ago, on Friday September 16th, I said goodbye to my co-workers at Alcatel-Lucent (who had organized a moving send-off that I really appreciated). I’l stick to not really commenting about work here, but it was definitely sad to leave the office (pictured below) for the last time.

Less than six full days later, the movers showed up to pack everything in our home, and as of the following Friday, all our possessions were loaded onto a truck for transport – all 10,300 pounds of them. Just looking at that number makes me glad we were using professionals this time – when I moved back to Toronto at the end of 2001 to join VoiceGenie, we had hauled everything ourselves in the biggest U-Haul that they rent out.  I’m glad that wasn’t necessary this time!

Of course in any move, especially from one coast to another (I can only image a trans-continental move), there’s a number of days or weeks in which everything you have is in transit, so you have a home neither here nor there. While I might have opted to stay in Toronto during this period, a rule with immigrating to the U.S. is that you have to enter before your possessions will be permitted across the border. You can get around this by driving across the border and getting your visa, then coming back into Canada as a visitor and non-resident, but with lots of things to get set up in the U.S. (including buying a minivan) I decided to just head down there permanently and take advantage of temporary housing made available to me. Valerie and the kids are coming later, since with no transportation (until I bought the minivan and had it delivered) not to mention no toys, it wouldn’t have been a good start for them. Plus we didn’t want to move them into temporary housing and then again into our permanent home. My first week with Google being in Mountain View, CA also meant it made even less sense for the whole family to come down right away.

Super Elite status with Air Canada definitely came in handy for the move, because while I never check bags on business travel if at all possible, it does provide for up to 3 checked bags.  In this case, I needed it. My main carry-on was full of camera equipment, a tablet, and a net book; my personal (small) carry-on was a small camera bag with more lenses; and my checked bags housed my desktop PC, a monitor (not my 30″ sadly, which I need to wait for the truck for), and keyboard/mouse/headphones/accessories respectively. I did bring some clothes, but really just as padding for the other items :).

Now, the second part of the title of this post is a little confusing, but often when I’m travelling through airports in North America, Europe, or Asia, I’m astounded by the fact that Relay seems to have a real stranglehold on the news kiosks in what seems to be the vast majority of airports that I visit. I mean, you’ll see a Hudson’s News or something once in a while, but Relay seems to pretty much have a lock on things and ubiquity across different areas of the globe. In any other category – retailers, fast food and restaurants, money changers, etc. – there’s real variety from airport to airport, but not so with news.

Now, I’m sure that like in any corporation, even when you control most of the market, employees are encouraged to innovate. Indeed, the role of my team at Alcatel-Lucent involved innovation, and it’s no easy thing to drive. Still, I couldn’t help but laugh at what Relay managed to come up with in Pearson airport:

Perhaps they simply repurposed something and forgot to change the label, but the idea that selling candy was either “New”, or that the above could be referred to as an “Innovation Station” certainly had me chuckling. Though with the aforementioned innovation element of my former job responsibilities, and the fact that I did in fact help to stock a candy area in our Toronto offices, perhaps calling the candy area an innovation station is something I should have thought of…