Early Morning Puzzle...

It's 7:00 am and I’m just finishing up breakfast here at the Quality Inn on Carlingview in Toronto. Looking around the restaurant over my second coffee I note that there are around 100 of us here, all men. Where are the business women? Fully believing in the best person getting the job no matter whom or what they are I started wondering and came up with some theories. Maybe you can help me iron them out a bit and I welcome all comments from all sides of the fence.

One: All the business women are too smart to book meetings and travel for the early morning. They probably even got to wherever they had to get to yesterday so they could get a decent night’s sleep and rise the next morning at a reasonable hour, not 5:00 am as I did.

Two: The men are all so paranoid about the possibility of a woman taking over their jobs that they can’t sleep. This forces them to congregate in small huddled groups either before or just after dawn, pretending to enjoy the camaraderie of their equally paranoid competitors.

Three: Perhaps, as in my case the timing just wasn’t right. I would have preferred to take the train from Sudbury but on this occasion “time was of the essence” and a quick fly down and back was called for. Or…


Four: Maybe they are like me and just enjoy watching the world come alive with the sun over that first coffee of the day. Of course, here in Toronto I can’t say that the world ever comes alive. In the self-proclaimed “Centre of the Universe” all I see is dirt, slush, smog and traffic. Who in their right mind would ever consider this life? A life sentence maybe, but certainly not life. Give me the open skies and clean air of Manitoulin Life any day!