Ideeahs

I went grocery shopping today at the local Loblaws supermarket. I have been going to that market since October when we moved into this neighbourhood. After eight months of visiting this store and pushing my cart up and down the aisles I noticed something that I had noticed before. I looked down at my two hands grasping the handle of the shopping cart and saw a warning label. Yep, a warning label. It said something along these lines: Customer warning. Caution, the cart you are now driving handles differently from regular carts. It is wider. Please be careful. OK then, some comments: 1) since the aisles at Loblaws are North-American sized it would seem that driving SUV sized food carts should be manageable. 2) if you can't drive a shopping cart around you should not have driven your car to Loblaws to start off with. 3) is this message meant to be cover-your-ass lawyer speak? "I will sue your behind if I so much as get nicked by some crazed cart driver." 4...

This is the story of a man who had a knack to make dinner at his restaurant memorable - Shafeen Jamal. His family owned a restaurant in Vancouver called Rubina Tandoori - or simply, The Rubina - on Kingsway just west of Victoria, on the south side of the road. My wife and I accidentally fell upon this restaurant one evening in 1994 or 1995. We were on our way home after a long day at work and we were hungry. We didn't know too many restaurants on Kingsway and, when we saw the red neon sign for Rubina,  we parked and decided to give it a go. Many Indian restaurants in Vancouver are very plain looking from the out and inside.  As we entered The Rubina we wondered whether we had made a mistake.  Luckily, we were immediately greeted and the point of no return had been passed.  Walking out now was not an option.  We hesitatingly walked in and were seated in the dimly lit dining room at the back of the restaurant. Sitar-heavy tunes and fragrances from the kit...

"As far as we are concerned the payment has been sent. Contact the merchant." "We have not received payment so please contact your bank." Meanwhile I am out $261 and can't drive. "It is not our operating system. Please contact the application vendor." "Our application is fine as we can't recreate the problem here. Please contact Microsoft." Meanwhile I can't use my application. "We have checked our cables and all is fine. We can view the picture." "The cabling on our end is OK. Please contact the service provider." Meanwhile I have no programming. "Our compiler is working properly. There is an error in your code." "I have compiled it under another and the code is fine. Check with the manufacturer." Meanwhile the application is down. Has this ever happened to you? Surely it has. That line of demarcation which different vendors do not ever want to cross. It is like the Korean DMZ - a no ...

Diversity in employees is one of the keys to success in business. I would argue one of the most important ones. By diversity I don't just mean the ones that are typically used by corporations such as sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability. I also mean different social backgrounds and work experiences. People from different industries but having worked in similar functions. Where are you from? Country, city, rural, urban, developed or developing world? Where have you worked? What industries, roles? What have you learned? What are your ideas and views on such and such ? What are your hobbies? What do you read? What music do you enjoy? What are you handicaps? Blind? Deaf? How does this affect your being? What about your ethnicity? Do you feel that you are a minority? Do you care? If so, how has it affected your life? What new ideas do you have to solve a particular problem? What perspectives have all of these items given you? It takes a hiring manager that ...

A decade ago I swore that I would never buy another piece of IKEA furniture. I don't remember the precise details but it had something to do with a missing part or, maybe, a broken part, and having to wait at the returns and customer service desk at the Montreal IKEA store. Arrgh. Frustrating. When we moved into this house last autumn we had a lack of furniture and window furnishings. So we decided to hit IKEA again. Those first few months improved my impression of the company. The quality seemed to be improved and for the price it was good value. Well the good run started changing course around Christmas and, today, it reversed completely. We have waited for the last two and a half months for the Edland dressing table to be in stock. Finally last week it appeared in the Toronto and Ottawa stores and we thought that it would finally appear in Montreal this week. No such luck. So we decided to drive the one hour and forty-five minutes to the Ottawa store today. Yes we did...

Almost every day I am kindly reminded by Bell Canada that telecom companies are terrible at communications. Examples: For the last little while I have been receiving at least two letters a week from Bell. They all come from the same VP and are all trying to upsell me new services or, worse, sell me services to which I already subscribe. I was told that I would have two months of free movie channels when I subscribed. Instead I was charged $13 a month for a movie package I never asked for. I asked, three months ago, to have my paper bill cancelled. I get the online version but still get the paper version. The fact that my internet and telephone service monthly rates both increased a month after I subscribed. Then there is the example I mentioned two weeks ago in this entry. When I lived in Vancouver and had to deal with Telus it was not any better. I wonder, what is it that makes telecommunication companies so terrible at communications? I have some ideas. Their business has grow...

I spent eighteen minutes, Wednesday, February 10, on the phone with a nice woman sitting in Kitchener, Ontario at a Bell Canada call centre. I wanted to order the five free Bell TV HD Olympic Channels that are being advertised quite extensively on the bell.ca website. Enjoy all the great action on HD - free! But you need to call to order the channels. So I did. February 10 was the first day you could call to order the channels which start airing on the 12th, the first day of the 2010 Games. So I called. I tried to use the IVR and the telephone keypad...to no avail as there was no event code that I could enter. So the system transferred me to an attendant. "We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes today" (isn't that always the case?). After some nice pleasantries regarding weather.... -Can you please give me the event code? -There is no code sorry. Just the channel number. -What is that start time of the event? -There is no time. It just says February...

Last week The Montreal Gazette started appearing at our door. I let it slide a few days and then contacted their subscription department to let them know that I had not asked for delivery. They informed me that it was a free one month subscription which would cancel itself in mid-February. "Alright then", I thought. Who reads those papers anyways? After a few days of attentively reading the rag I started realizing that there was no real news in the paper. I had already ready the news - yesterday on the net. The only sections of a newspaper that may still have some value are the Life, Arts and Entertainment sections. It seems to me that no one on the net has yet created a site that gives a thorough view of local cultural scenes....at least not one that pops up on the main search engines and is therefore easily clicked on. Well for the last three days the paper has stopped appearing at our door. I should still have three weeks on my subscription. If The Gazette is tryi...

A few years ago I attended a conference as a guest of an Indian IT outsourcing company. Some of their other invited customers were managers from the airline industry. I remember listening to these people talk about their competitiveness and their innovation. A question immediately popped up into my mind, which I did not ask, unfortunately. "To me innovation is about offering new products and new services. Distinguishing yourself by adding more value, often for the same price. How is it that cutting services and/or starting to charge extra fees from them can be considered innovative?" Over the last years the airlines have started charging for booze, food, seat selections, head phones, blankets, pillows. I remembering reading that Ryanair was considering charging for the use of toilets (see link ). Now I am reading that Air Canada is going to introduce a charge to people requesting the bulkhead or exit rows as they have extra leg room. Pity those mums travelling with k...

Halloween has come and gone but all the candies that my children collected are still piled high five days after the big day. So we are having regular treats now. Smarties is one of the more popular options in my family because there are many candies in a box (apparently size does not matter when it comes to candies.....), they are colourful and they are fun to sort into their respective colours. So...yes....they are colourful. Intelligently the makers of Smarties (Nestle) have decided to no longer use artificial colours in Smarties. Good news. They announce this on the side of the box by stating "No Artificial Colours*". If you follow the asterisk to the back of the box Nestle goes on to say "Non-Artificial Colours are prepared from natural sources. For more information visit www.smarties.ca". So I went there to find out more. The page with all the details is http://www.smarties.ca/main/english/noartificial.html. Question 2 on the page tells you that ...

The jet is sitting on the tarmac. It is -4 Celsius outside. Buried in the massive hull of the airplane lies a tiny package destined for my son...... On October 30, Friday, I bought an iPod from the apple.ca store. The device itself is approximately 45mm by 18mm by 8mm and weighs 10.7 grams. On October 31 my order was filled and on November 2 it left Shanghai, China at 21:30. It was in Anchorage at 11:52 the same date (local time). It should be here, in Montreal, on November 4 according to UPS. This is amazing. Here I was, at home, in my slippers, one afternoon. I clicked and bought this tiny device that will allow us to store 4GB worth of data. The click started an amazing chain of events that is only possible due to the amazing human brain and its ability to create a telecommunications network and devices that allow for almost instantaneous transmissions of credit card information between consumer and supplier, address details between consumer, supplier and shipper. Imagine f...

New and improved. We all like that. Faster computers, cameras with more mega pixels, larger chocolate bars, different smells for soaps, etc. Many years ago I used to watch 60 Minutes religiously every Sunday evening and would look forward to Andy Rooney's commentary at the end of the sixty minutes. Today when I bought a bottle of Children's Tylenol I was reminded of one of Andy's commentaries. It was one of those where he covers his already messy desk and office with boxes of crackers, cookies, cereals and rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. He goes on to compare the present's product (new and improved often times) with the past's product carrying the same brand and name. The Ritz crackers now have 50 less grams in the package. The chips have less as well but the bag is the same size. Now you get twenty fewer squares of bumwad. You pay as much (or more) and you now get less of the newer and better, improved, product. So back to Tylenol. I was buying i...

I can no longer drive in Canada. This was news I got this evening courtesy of the Government of Quebec. Yep. My driver's license is now invalid. Let me explain..... We recently moved back to Quebec from British Columbia, two provinces in Canada. This is not the first time we have moved within Canada as we also lived in Ontario for a few years and moved back and forth. Since Canada is a confederation of power hungry, independently minded, self interested provinces moving within this one country is quite the pain in the behind. Every time you need to get new license plates, a new driver's license, new car insurance, new medicare cards. You see in this country, provinces have a heck of a lot of powers. That in itself is not the problem but the issue is the lack of organization and acceptance of one province's standards in another. Different drugs and medical procedures are reimbursed, at different levels, in different provinces for example. So back to my ability to drive. It t...

This entry is about what our society considers an upgrade - something of greater value received for the price of something of lower value. While value is a subjective notion we generally equate it to some type of monetary measure. Money after all was invented to create an easy way to not only purchase items but to allow us to draw comparisons between the worth of different good or services. While money does serve a purpose in assigning a value there may also be other measures that one could use to determine whether one has been upgraded. So this ideeah occurred to me recently when I was renting a car. As I have started travelling regularly for work I have become a "frequent traveller" - not a frequent flyer. In my case this means car rentals - the town I need to travel to weekly is not served by airlines or trains. As a result I have become a Hertz Gold member and, likely very soon, will move up to the next level. Tangent --> By the way, if you need to travel for w...

Over the last few weeks I have noticed many bus drivers either talking on a mobile phone or with music player earbuds in their ears while driving me, and my thirty or so fellow passengers, around town.  To see what Translink had to say about this I sent a note to their complaints department to see what they thought.  This was about a week ago.  Before writing this entry I wanted to give them the chance to let me know what their thoughts were on this kind of behaviour by their employees.  Well, a week has come and gone and, being an impatient sort, I tired of waiting.  I can only assume that they either are overwhelmed by complaints, that they are understaffed, or simply don't care what their customers are saying. I doubt I need to explain the dangers of driving a bus with one hand.  The massive steering wheel must not be very easy to turn with one hand.  In fact it would appear that even with two available hands it is still an effort.  The drivers seem to have to lean forward and p...

This memory came to a little while back while riding my number 25 bus to work.  I was thinking about human behaviour.  Our prejudgements, stereotypes.  How all of this affects our comfort level around others - for better or worse. Back in 1988 my wife worked at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel on avenue du Parc in Montreal.  She worked at the front desk.  Working at the front desk you pretty much get to see all the guests of the hotel and you end up engaging in some level of conversation - even if it is only to give them their room number and key. This particular night a man came around with his wife.  He strolled up to the front desk and asked for restaurant recommendations.  They were looking for a nice place to go for vegetarian cuisine.  My wife gave it some thought and recommended two different restaurants - one was Le Commensal, the other was Cafe Santropol.  The former she suggested was a little on the expensive side and so she leaned them towards Cafe Santropol. Le Commensal is not...

UPDATED April 24, 2009 with New York Times article link at bottom. I have worked in customer service and customer facing roles all my life.  I think that this is why I am very picky when it comes to service.  I expect good service from people and I expect them to suck it up if they are having a bad day and to fake it - likely because I have faked it on crappy days so that I could still provide the best service I could to my customers.  I therefore expect that of people that serve me and I expect that of employees as well. Today I bought an Airport Express form the Apple store in Vancouver (ever since I bought my MacBook, ripped all my CDs to it and have taken to buying music from iTunes I have wanted to be able to listen to all the tunes on my stereo - now I can).  Anyhow...Apple gets consumer marketing and service like no other company that I have come across.  Their products are beautiful, their packaging looks good and is minimalist and their IT systems work.  So I picked up my Airp...

An Important Message for Telus residential customers on my e.bill.  So I click on the link and see: Catch NHL® Hockey on TELUS TV® Pay Per View NHL Hockey is back on TELUS TV Pay Per View. To order from the comfort of your couch, go to channel 135. You’ve got questions? We’ve got answers. Call us toll free. For mobile / cellular phone assistance: 1-866-558-2273. For home phone repair & technical support: 1-888-611-9988. For Yellow Pages assistance: 1-877-987-8737. Thank you for choosing TELUS as your communications provider. Is this important Telus?  It is an advert. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Beware, a rant follows. My mother-in-law was supposed to arrive from Montreal on Air Canada flight 183, arriving at 16:49 on December 25th, here in Vancouver. When she awoke that morning she checked to see whether her flight was still scheduled for an on-time departure. Nope. It had been cancelled. She called Air Canada and was put on hold for an hour to be told that all flights starting with a one (ie. 1xx) had been cancelled. Interesting. Flight AC 111 arrived from Montreal at 10:41am on time (well, two minutes late). Air Canada's website stated that delays and cancellations were expected in Vancouver due to "winter conditions". If you consider partly cloudy, melting snow and a temperature of 1 degree Celsius winter conditions there is something wrong with you and you certainly cannot claim to be the Great White North's national airline. I checked the website of Vancouver International. Only three Air Canada flights were cancelled the 25th (one from Victori...

Today's entry is not particularly positive or interesting - it is a rant.  So you might want to stop reading now.  But I want the story out there so that the company involved can maybe read it and learn.  So that the public can read about my experience.   Public pressure , there is nothing better than that to get organizations to act and admit issues.  So here it goes... Over the last month or so I have been frustrated with my Internet Service Provider, Telus .  I have a very short fuse for poor service.  The reason for this, I believe, is that I have worked in customer service for one of the world's largest IT companies my entire working career - as a call agent in a call centre, in technical support, as team lead, as a manager.  I've dealt with customer issues, seen internal processes and measurements negatively impact performance.  I've seen process, and resulting IT system, changes not thought through completely, or tested completely, cause front-line problems.  The...