Oliver and I visited the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company this morning to have breakfast in their Café. While the food was excellent — we both had wonderful blueberry pancakes — the service was subpar. This struck me as odd because I know Bruce MacNaughton, the owner, places a premium on offering good service.

Because I know Bruce a little, I sent him an email relating the details of our bad service. I sent the email off at 2:18 p.m. At 2:20 p.m. — 2 minutes later — I received the following in reply:

I cannot explain the disrespect shown to your or your son, it does not sound like anyone we have working for us, but I do believe you and I will check into who the server was and ask for a non-repeat performance.

I want to apologize for such behaviour and from all of us here at the Prince Edward Island Preserve Co. we sincerely hope that you can forgive us for such an experience. We sincerely appreciate hearing from you and thank you for helping to make us a better place in which people can enjoy their food and atmosphere.

Both the speed of Bruce’s reply and what he wrote demonstrate an amazing committment to customer service, and go a long way to eliminating the sting of the bad service itself.

Many service-based businesses go off the rails when dealing with bad service: they seem to think that once bad service has happened the story is over. They think the way to react to it is either by trying to pretend it never happened, trying to explain it away, or trying to placate their customers with cheap form-letter sympathy.

My brother Johnny, who worked in food service for 15 years, once told me that customers who care enough to write you about bad service are giving you a gift by pointing out things that you can’t see yourself. If you react to that gift quickly (and here I think Bruce has set some sort of world record) and effectively, you can not only keep them as customers, but also turn a bad situation that can fester through bad word-of-mouth into an exceptional “oh wow!” situation that will work for you.

And that’s exactly what Bruce has done: he turned what could have been a note here about “crappy service at the Preserve Company” into a note about exceptional customer service.

Bravo.

I had planned to write a long and detailed review of the new Mike’s restaurant that was built on the site formerly occupied by the Towers Restaurant on University Avenue near the Charlottetown Mall.

But the food was so horrible, the service so abysmal, the decor so artificial, that I find myself unable to conjure words appropriately sallow enough.

Stay away from Mike’s and you will remain happy. Have a meal there and you will have cold, tasteless food served by ineffectual waiters in a faux Italian blandosphere.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I only wish somebody had warned me.

When I was a certain age, my favourite books were those in the The Great Brain series. These books concerned the adventures of Tom and J.D. Fitzgerald: Tom was The Great Brain, a wily con-kid who could defeat any challenge with sheer creative intelligence. I hadn’t given a single thought to the series of books until this morning when I was struck with their memory. Highly recommended for anyone, especially for kids frustrated by authority and needing an outlet.

The other series of books that caught my imagination were written by Louis Slobodkin, and started for me with The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree. This series concerned the adventures of a kid named Eddie who meets a spaceman named Marty. I remember going to the Brantford Public Library with my grandmother to get each book in the series.

I’m just off the phone with a reporter at The Guardian who tells me that his source at the Bank of Montreal says that their inoperable clock is being taken down within 90 days. What horrors have we wrought?

The newly minted Citizens for Correct Time sent out the Communiquer this afternoon.

The first time I ever met my friend Stephen Good (who, at the time, confusingly enough, was named Stephen Elliott) was on the lawn of 107 Hazlitt Street in Peterborough, Ontario.

Stephen was spreading out a collection of soaking wet ephemera that belonged to the absentee owner of the house. The previous tenants of the house had fled in mid-winter, leaving the door wide open, causing the pipes to burst, causing there to be 3 feet of ice through much of the house for 1/2 the winter. Which encased said ephemera in ice, and rendered it soaking wet come spring.

And this just wasn’t any ephemera. The owner of the house collected everything: telephone books from 1973, endless reams of newsletters, books, brochures, and so on. He was a linguist. He was a pack rat. He was weird.

And somehow it had fallen to Stephen to be his agent. Stephen was the guy who had to dry everything out, and was under strict orders not to throw anything away.

The reason that I met Stephen that day was because my friend Simon Shields (who is still named Simon Shields to this day, but who used to eat meat and was a militant vegetarian storming the gates of Marineland last time in checked in) had decided that it would be a good and cheap idea for the two of us to move into the sodden shell of a house.

And it was cheap. And in its own special way, it was good: the house sat right on a beautiful park, at the end of a street, within view of the Otonabee River, over which you could take a foot bridge and be in downtown Peterborough in 5 minutes. If you squinted your eyes, you could imagine that you were in a country estate.

But of course you were also living with a collection of soggy, moldy 1973 telephone books, in a house with plumbing held together with duct tape. You had to squint your eyes a lot.

Simon and I had many interesting days at 107 Hazlitt Street, culminating in a shocking robbery on my last day of residence in which nefarious criminals broke in, stole all of my cassette tapes, my late grandfather’s Philishave, and my other late grandfather’s Olympus Trip 35 camera, and then poured strong smelling aftershave over everything else I owned, following up by sprinkling it all with sea salt. I spent several years de-encrusting my life’s possessions and living in a salty tasting, Old Spicey world.

As that summer played out, I met Nancy, Stephen’s wife at the time, and we spent many happy nights watching thirtysomething and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show together in their little house around the corner.

Fast forward 15 years: Stephen’s changed his last name, has divorced and remarried, has 4 kids (one of which, Anna, I am the God Father of), has trained as both a librarian and a lawyer, and is living and working in Lubbock, Texas. Oh, and he Found God.

For years now Stephen has been sending me long letters with no paragraph breaks. Originally these were written on manual typewriters, then on electric typewriters, and finally via email. The only downside to the conversion to email is that he can no longer send me vintage Heaven Can Wait laserdisks and old copies of the Whole Earth Catalog.

I have known and kept in touch with Stephen longer than almost anyone else I know. At times it’s been a challenge — it’s hard to be a Godless heathen when you’re corresponding with someone who is prone to starting sentences like “I remember what Jesus said about bowling…” But we’ve worked out a common ground (he leaves out direct God references and I leave out my constant questioning as to the actual existence of God), and I’m sure we’ll be friends until we die.

This is all a very long introduction to GoodStephen.com, which I created for Stephen late last week. He’s just getting warmed up. Watch that space.

The Confederation Bridge is running an ad right now in which the tag line is “Faster, Safer, Cheaper.”

I can understand the faster part. Although even there, if you’re going to Antigonish, NS, you’ll do better on the ferry if you time things right (MapQuest says it takes 3:51 to drive to Antigonish from Charlottetown via the bridge, and 1:47 via the ferry. Add on the 75 minute ferry ride, and you still get only 3:03).

The cheaper part is certainly true in terms of absolute dollars out of pocket: the ferry is $49 for a carload while the bridge is $37.75. The ferry website makes a case that you save $32 in vehicle operating expenses by not driving the 100km that you save, but I think that’s a stretch, and not of much consolation when you have to fork over the extra $11.25 at the booth.

But safer? This I had to know more about. I phoned the Bridge’s handy toll-free information line and asked about the safer part. I said “safer than what?” They said “than the ferry.” I said “the ferry is dangerous?” They said “well, there’s more rocking back and forth.” This didn’t seem convincing.

Whether to Bridge people can prove that the Bridge is safer than the ferry seems irrelevant: it doesn’t exactly seem like fair ball to suggest that people are going to become hurt or killed by using your competition. Even if it is true, it certainly isn’t honourable.

Here’s a possible easy, 2 hour solution to the Bank of Montreal Clock Problem: remove the hands and replace with a witty slogan. Result: no more clock that’s always wrong, and you win over the hip ironic set to boot.

On Grafton Street in downtown Charlottetown there is a branch of the Bank of Montreal. On the front of the bank is a large outdoor clock. At one point this clock may have actually told the time, but for as long as I can remember — at least a couple of years — it has not:

While this is annoying, and perhaps even irresponsible on behalf of the bank, more so it is just plain stupid marketing for the bank: if they can’t even fix their clock, I say to myself, what are they going to do with my money? Are their computers and adding machines and timelocks broken too?

I can’t imagine an amount of money that would be too much to prevent the Bank of Montreal from simply getting someone in to fix the clock and, if it cannot be repaired, simply replacing it with something else.

If you have visited the Coles Building, or Province House in Charlottetown, or even just driven down Richmond Street between Queen and Prince, you are sure to have seen the statue of a soldier on a battlefield, bayonet at the ready. The statue is old and green and not in the best of shape. Perhaps you’ve heard it referred to as the “Boer War statue.”

Somehow I missed the Boer War in school: it fell between the cracks between the Family Compact and World War I. Today I found myself, camera in hand, in front of this statue, and after taking a couple of pictures I decided I should find out more.

The Boer War, which began in 1899, was a war between two colonial powers, the Brtish and the Dutch, over control of (and fought in) South Africa. The war was supposed to be a quick affair but, like most wars, it dragged on much longer than the British thought it would, finally ending in 1902.

One of the major battles of the war was the Battle of Paardeberg, fought on February 18, 1900. Among the dead that day were two Prince Edward Islanders, members of the Second Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment. Their names were Roland Taylor and Alfred Riggs. And their contribution to the war, and their death in it, is memorialized at the base of the Boer War statue.

The head of the Boer contingent at the Battle of Paardeberg was General Piet Cronje. Cronje made a stand in the path of the Canadians, and 60 yards west of this stand, known as Cronje’s laager, is where Riggs, W.A., Pte., R.C.R.I. 2nd (Special Service) Battalion, “G” Co. is buried.

The Boer War statue was constructed in July of 1903, making it 100 years old next year. To quote from Catherine Hennessey’s website:

It is a fine monument, too and it needs cleaning. The sculptor for it is prominent as well. Hamilton McCarthy, a British sculptor who had settled in Canada was one of the two artists for The Alexander MacKenzie monument on Parliament Hill, and he himself did the South African War Monument in Ottawa and that wonderful piece on top of the hill, near the Art Gallery, of Samuel de Champlain.

Although our piece of sculpture was not as grand as we had hoped for it’s pretty nice. On that July day in 1903 when it was unveiled what was lost in stature [so to speak] was made up for by the numbers that attended and “by the order, precision and dignity ” of the event.