I thought that Wal-Mart was supposed a “customer connected, always tuned it” kind of retailer, with virtual electrodes tied into the consumer consciousness so that if North America wakes up wanting green peanut butter on Monday morning, they’ll find it at Wal-Mart on Tuesday.

Tonight we went to Wal-Mart to buy a fan for Oliver’s room. We went to Wal-Mart because it was 8:41 p.m. when this need struck us, and we knew Wal-Mart was open later than anywhere else.

Because we shop so little at the store, the layout of Wal-Mart doesn’t exactly make sense to me. I know where the diapers are, and the Oreos, but everything else seems randomly assigned to zones that don’t reflect my stuff classification guidelines.

So we wandered from “small appliances” to “housewares” to “hardware” to “sporting goods” — all possible locations for a fan — until I gave in and asked a clerk.

“No, we don’t have fans,” he said.

“Don’t have them right now, or you don’t carry them at all,” I replied.

“No, we carry them, but they’re out of season right now. Would an air cleaner do?”

It is 11:24 p.m. It is August. It is 22 degrees outside right now, down from almost 30 degrees earlier in the day. If there is a season for fans, this is it.

We drove up the hill to Canadian Tire. We forgot they were open until 9:30, and found them open. They had about 25 varieties of fans in stock running from $12 to $160. We bought a Twindow, our 4th — it’s a well-made dual fan with several speeds and thermostatic control that fits between the window and the sill.

Is this an aberation, or is Wal-Mart not all it’s cracked up to be?

Back in the mid-1990s Catherine Hennesssey was running for mayor. I was a very casual acquaintance of hers at the time, but this was enough to have me drafted to serve on her campaign team, or at least to circle around it curiously.

Somehow it came to pass that Martin Rutte, another friend of Catherine’s, and an author, speaker and consultant of some regard, donated his services to Catherine’s campaign in the form of a workshop for the aforementioned campaign team.

A motley bunch we were, covering most walks and stages of life. We gathered on Water St. in a vacant townhouse on a Saturday morning for the festivities. Although the specific ontological details of the morning are lost to time, the general subject of the seminar concerned identification of personal goals, roadblocks to achieving those goals and finally steps that could be taken to work around or smash through the roadblocks.

I did not do well at this.

Other people did. I remember one participant talking about how she wanted to break into film (she did), another talking about how she wanted a cottage on the shore (she has one now). There was discussion of career and family, love and relations. It was an unusually intimate exercise for people many of whom knew very little of each other.

I maintained that I had no goals. For Martin, trained in the arts of getting ornery or un-self-fulfilled people to discover the hidden goals within themselves, this presented a problem. I could not have no goals, he maintained. I must have roadblocks in the way of my goals in the way of my roadblocks.

He came at me this way, and he came at me that way. I held fast. I was simply being honest: I had no goals. Finally, after 45 minutes of thrust and parry Martin gave up.

He decided to come to terms with the fact that I had no goals. And that was that.

I had cause to think of that morning this afternoon when I called an old friend, out of the blue, to see how he was doing.

Well and not well, he said.

I asked him what he meant.

And he relayed a complicated tale that ended up with anti-anxiety drugs, a daily course of which he is on to this day.

I asked him what this meant for everyday life, and he said the most noticeable side-effect is that he totally lacks ambition. He can operate fine on a day to day basis, but he has no desire to set or strive towards longer term career, work and life goals.

And, he added, he’s more productive, and happier, than he’s been in 20 years.

Maybe he should talk to Martin.

I accidentally discovered musician Kate Rusby, who’s been described as a “Mercury Prize-nominated, flag-waving folk princess.” Think Dougie MacLean plus Tori Amos. You can buy her CD’s at Indigo, at least in Charlottetown. Wonderful voice.

By the way, I couldn’t remember Tori Amos’ name, so I gonged up my brother Johnny and our Jabber chat went like this:

john_rukavina says: hello
peter says: Need a name:
peter says: Female singer/songwriter
peter says: Flaming red hair.
peter says: Plays piano.
john_rukavina says: Bonnie Raitt?
peter says: No, younger.
peter says: More hip.
john_rukavina says: Sarah McLachlan?
peter says: No, American, with bigger lips.
john_rukavina says: Tori Amos?
peter says: Yes. Thanks. oo
john_rukavina says: oo

Everyone should have a brotherly reference source. Between my three brothers, I don’t think there’s any popular culture fact that I can’t find the answer to in 10 minutes.

NetNewsWire is one of those evolutionary pieces of software that you wonder how you ever did without.

It’s a Mac OS X (only) application that lets you organize and browse the wide variety of websites that make their contents (or at least their headlines) available in a format called RSS.

RSS is a standard — in the same way that, say, trailer hitch sizing is a standard — that allows authors and developers of websites to format information in a way which it makes it easy to syndicate. Usually this syndication happens through other websites — Site A might have a list of headlines from Site B, for example.

NetNewsWire reads these “RSS feeds” and displays them in an elegant format that makes it much easier and quicker to navigate through your personal collection of news and views websites.

A screen show demonstrates this better than anything:



NetNewsWire is a well-polished package that’s dead simple to use. Recommended.

From Chuck Shotton comes a link to Cyberextruder which he calls “exactly one other cool piece of technology” (one other in addition to EyeTV, which I also think is very cool).

Here are the top 10 books at Amazon.com containing the word ‘reinvented’ in the title:

• Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
• Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry-And Made Himself the Richest Man in America
• Plural Marriage for Our Times: A Reinvented Option?
• The Evolution Of Tom Peters — How He Reinvented Himself For The Internet Age
• A Government Reinvented: A Study of Alberta’s Deficit Elimination Program
• Charles Schwab: How One Company Beat Wall Street and Reinvented the Brokerage Industry
• Managing Effectively in a Reinvented Government: The Federal Manager’s Roadmap to Success
• Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians
• Phoenix Rising: Southern Women Who Reinvented Themselves
• God Reinvented?: A Theological Search in Texts and Tables

An interesting week, as it turns out, on the Clock front.

After I sent out a Communique on Wednesday to the CBC and The Guardian both picked up the story.

On Wednesday afternoon I did an interview with Dave Stewart from The Guardian and they ran the story in today’s edition (not on the web, alas).

And on Thursday afternoon I met up with Paddy Moore, working for Mainstreet for a week while on sabattical from his regular gig as online news reporter at CBC Ottawa, and Paddy produced a piece for the afternoon show on Thursday (also not on the web, alas).

Both Paddy and Dave approached the story with good humour, as did Neil Blanchard, area manager for that Bank of Montreal.

The final irony, as Paddy Moore found out, was that Mr. Blanchard had fought for the clock when the BMO was renovating the branch several years ago and head office decided they were getting out of the clock business.

Catherine Hennessey says the situation isn’t over yet and they clock may live to see another day. Here’s hoping.

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.