Remember my excitement regarding Hertz Ultimate Choice, the new “pick any car on the lot!” that was promoted to me in anticipation of my arrival at Logan Airport on Sunday?

Well it turns out that this was not the “I’ll take a bright red Mini Cooper with crushed yellow velour interior” paradise that I thought it was going to be.

Here’s what happened:

When I arrived in the Logan Car Rental Center and made my way to the Hertz part of the garage, I was directed by signage to the Gold area to pick a car, any car.

This area was one aisle of many, and it was populated exclusively by the opposite of the cars you’d think would be every person’s “ultimate choice.” Scads of generic Hyundai, Nissan and Toyota mid-size cars that one would buy if they were a perfectly sensible, if not particularly inspired person, who doesn’t pay any heed to fuel economy or style.

But I like smaller, more boldly styled, more fuel efficient cars, and the Gold lot contained none of these.

Back in 2015, I rented a peppy Fiat 500 from Hertz; it was that sort of car I was looking for. So I went inside to the desk to see if one might be coming into the rotation.

I was told–and I’m not making this up–that not only were there no Fiat 500’s on the lot, but that even if there were, I wouldn’t be eligible for one because I’m a Gold member, and Gold members, it seems, can only drive big cars, midsize or larger.

Reconciled to a life inside the mundane gold prison, I went back to try to find the best of the worst. I tried a few cars on for size: a Kia Soul, a Jeep, a Nissan. But none made my heart sing.

Seeing me get out of my third car in a row, a Hertz employee asked me what was up and I told him I was looking for something smaller.

This seemed odd to him: Gold members get to drive big cars. You’re supposed to want to drive a bigger car. Why would I want to deny myself this pleasure?!

Nonetheless, he told me that I could walk to the opposite end of the Hertz lot, to the non-golden peasant section, and pick whatever car I liked.

So that’s what I did.

I found three models of car left: Toyota Echo, Nissan Versa and Ford Focus. I’ve rented Fords from Hertz before, and while they’re not the cars of my dreams, they’re solid, comfortable, efficient and well-equipped, so that’s what I ended up with:

I got myself sorted, and headed toward the exit booth for the paperwork, showing the agent my driver’s license as requested.

Confusion resulted.

“That’s not your car, that’s Anthony’s car,” said the agent. “Hold on a second.”

The agent phoned into the office; there was a question about whether I was allowed to drive away in “Anthony’s” Ford Focus.

It was decided that another car could be found for Anthony.

And I was on my way.

The Ford Focus has proved an entirely adequate car. It does not enliven my spirits, but it does not dampen them either. And it got 40 miles to the gallon on the trip up to New Hampshire from Boston.

Hertz Ultimate Choice is a bust, though. Both because it offered me the pick of an ugly litter, and because it reinforced that “bigger and more guzzling the better” is still too much a part of the American dream.

After a decade of working out of the third floor “crow’s nest” here at Yankee, I’ve been upgraded to an office. Or at least an office-like cubicled-off section of the third floor hallway.

Breakfast in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Short stack of blueberry pancakes, $5.50.

“You like coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

It’s just me and two older veterans a couple of tables over.

They’re taking about military prisons.

“You kill somebody on board your ship, that’s a dishonourable discharge… It fucks up your life pretty good.”

If you’re anything like me, you’re getting a bit of spam from “friends” and “family” today that looks like this:

After the fourth or fifth message today, I realized there was a pattern: all of the “from” names in this spam were from people I know use Yahoo Mail as their main email account. Looking at the “from” address in the messages reveals what appears to be randomly-selected or generated email addresses that aren’t @yahoo.com, and aren’t related at all to the name.

As such I suspect what we’re seeing here is not attackers compromising Yahoo email accounts and using them to send spam, but a follow-on effect of the Yahoo data breaches of 2013 and 2014, where the contacts lists of friends and family who had me in their contacts were vacuumed out and now circulate around the Internet, associated with the original Yahoo user’s name.

As a result, spammers can send me an email that looks to me, on first blush, like it comes from my friend “Stan Zarvox,” but, in fact, has nothing to do with him. There’s a link in the mail and if I click on it, curious to know what Stan has sent me, I end up at some spammer site that may then induce me to do something that would compromise me.

Unfortunately, there’s little the poor compromised Yahoo users can do about this: things have left Yahoo’s hands now, and the email is not coming from Yahoo, nor in any way under their control.

So there’s little point in sending friends and family a “I think your account’s been hacked” warning; they probably already know 5 times over.

One of the most challenging things for families that receive funding to support their children with autism, either under the School Age Autism Funding program from the provincial Department of Education, or from the Disability Support Program of the provincial Department of Family and Human Services, is the burden of being an “employer” as far as the federal government is concerned. This means registering for a business number, making monthly payroll deductions and remittances, filing T4s at the end of the year, and preparing a Record of Employment when a employee moves on.

For many families, raising a child with autism leaves little time in the day, and navigating the paperwork jungle to do all of this correctly requires skills that not everyone has. As a result, I imagine many families are left either not receiving funding that could help them, or receiving funding but not filing paperwork and leaving themselves open to penalty if they’re found out.

So far I’ve done okay on the payroll side: it’s something I do every month for work anyway, and so it’s not a huge burden, especially because I can do the filing online through my credit union, and because the Canada Revenue Agency has a “My Business” site that’s actually quite useful and, if you set aside the “let’s recreate the flow of a 1975 PDP-11 application” style of the interface, is relatively easy to use.

Today, however, I needed to prepare the paperwork for the first employee we’ve had that’s moved on to a new job, which requires preparing a Record of Employment. You would think that all I would need to do is to login to the “My Business” system using my existing account, click a few buttons, and grab the ROE.

But no. Not that.

The Record of Employment system turns out not to be a Canada Revenue Agency system at all; it’s a completely separate application, run by a completely separate department. So it’s a completely new day in terms of online registration.

Actually, it’s worse than that.

First I needed to get a GCKey, which they tell me is a single-sign-on for many government services but that which, for reasons unknown, is not the same account I use to login to “My Business.”

Getting a GCKey required filling in a form with my name, address, and phone, and then choosing 3 security questions and answers.

But that’s only the first step.

Next I needed to use my GCKey to register for “ROE Web,” which also required providing my name, address, phone and choosing 5 security questions and answers. At the end of that process I then used the other login I have, the one for “My Business,” to tie my new “ROE Web” account to my “My Business” account.

At which point I imagined I would be able to click a few buttons and grab the ROE.

But no.

Now I see a notice on the page:

An authorization code has been mailed to the business owner or chief executive officer at the address on file.

That’s right: now I need to wait for them to mail me an authorization code. Despite the fact that I’ve created a new GCKey account, and connected it to an existing “My Business” account that already establishes me as the “business owner.”

This makes no sense.

I’m 100% down with meeting my obligations to the federal government. I enjoy paying taxes. I think taxation is fair.

But I believe that the federal government owes me, at the very least, a painless way to meet these obligations: the system we have now is cumbersome and half-baked, and has the smell of a system that no real human being with the power to affect change has ever actually used.

Who can I talk to about making this easier?

Every Friday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Atlantic, 1:00 p.m. Eastern, my colleagues from Yankee Publishing and I have a one hour call where we review the week just passed and the week ahead (I wrote about a part of this process 7 years ago).

After all the heavy lifting is done–the prioritizing, the ticket-assigning, and so on–Alan, who handles ecommerce, will often take the floor and try to stump me on Canadian trivia questions he’s diligently gathered over the week.

I’m happy to report that I turn out to be quite successfully Canadian, at least by my success rate at answering Alan’s questions; I knew last week, for example, what a “double double” was, and that a “chesterfield” is a sofa.

By way of rewarding Alan’s devotion to highlighting my Canadianess, I decided that I should seek out a book for him before heading down to Yankee next week, and so Oliver and I found ourselves headed toward the “local interest” section at The Bookmark this afternoon.

As we approached the section, we saw that our way was blocked. But it was blocked by friends: Brenda Whiteway was in rapt conversation with Jeff Bursey. I interrupted. And then bogarted the conversation right out of Jeff’s hands and had a nice chat with Brenda. At the midpoint of which we were joined by her husband, J. J. Steinfeld. From whom we learned about new developments on the Steinfeld publishing front.

J. J. was suddenly whisked off for promotional duties, and, as Brenda and I continued to chat, I noticed my friend Mark Leggott across the room.

I said hello.

Mark said “Oh, Peter, this is certainly a book that you should buy,” pointing at a copy of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint sitting on the counter, and motioning toward its author standing nearby.

J. J. returned, and whisked Brenda off in search of lunch, and so I introduced myself to Merilyn Simonds (the author), and we had a chat about her book, a book that, she told me, details the creation of another book, produced on a letterpress.

As you can imagine, we had a lot to talk about.

One of the things we talked about was this other book, the letterpress-printed one. She pulled out a copy of it for me to page through (it is beautiful). I asked her where she’d sourced the paper, and she replied that it had come from Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montréal.

Saint-Armand, of course, is a company I know well, and of which I am a big fan; I visited, with my parents, in 2010 and we got the cook’s tour from owner David Carruthers, and I’ve purchased their excellent paper many times.

As it happens, Brenda Whiteway and I renewed acquaintance in 2014 because of David Carruthers: her search for a printer led David to connect her to me, and we went on to collaborate in service of the Confederation Country Cabinet.

Needless to say, I left The Bookmark with a copy of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint in my hand (along with a copy of You Know You’re An Islander When… for Alan) and joy in my heart.

I stumbled across a a secret cache of videos from the Reboot conference.

As Paul Offer explained to me at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market this morning, chickens do not lay eggs in multiples of 12. Which means that if you get to the market late, and dawdle, you end up with the modulo. As we did today.

We’re here at the Civic Centre for the goodbye celebration for Bruce Rainnie and Boomer Gallant from CBC’s Compass supper-hour TV news, who both retire from the CBC tomorrow. There’s a big crowd of enthusiastic fans.

Back in 2003, I blogged about the brand new Bruce-Boomer partnership on its second night on the air; I knew we were in good hands when Bruce left a comment on that post the next day:

Enjoy reading your site and appreciate your critique. Rest assured, my goal will never be to ” Out Boomer Boomer. ” That would be foolhardy.

Remember, though, it is important to be yourself on air, and if that involves an occasional pun or quip, so be it.

Some will work, some won’t, but none will be offered in competition with Boomer. He’s and Island staple, I’m an Island rookie. Keep watching, and keep the comments coming. It keeps us on our toes.

Indeed we did.

It’s been a good ride, fellas. Best wishes for the future.

I am flying to Boston on Sunday, en route to spend the week with my colleagues at Yankee in New Hampshire.

I’ve booked a car for the week from Hertz, and today I received an exciting email:

Exciting news. Hertz Ultimate Choice™ is now at Boston Logan International Airport

With Ultimate Choice, you’re free to choose the car that’s right for you. There’s no need to look for a specific number or car on the lot. Which means you can get on your way even faster, in the car of your choice.

Upgrades are available for just $35 more per day* (only $25 more per day* for President’s Circle and Platinum members). Simply select the vehicle you want to drive from the Premium Upgrade zone and go. Changes to your reservation will be completed at the exit gate.

With Ultimate Choice™, choose the car that’s right for you.

I am very particular about rental cars: I’m that guy who goes back to get a replacement car if the one I’ve given smells like it was smoked in, or has rattling parts, or if, as happened to me some years ago in Toronto when I was offered a Hyundai Veloster, I don’t actually fit in the vehicle.

I’ve had perhaps more than my fair share of random wins with Hertz over the years–a beautiful Volvo station wagon we had for a week at a midsize price, a BMW I had for 24 hours in Montreal, a Fiat 500 a few years ago in Boston–but I’m also just as likely to end up with a horrible Chevy Uglotronic as anything else.

So, in other words, I’m very excited about my new ability to pick from a litter of cars as opposed to bargaining for one.

I will report back on Sunday night as to how things went.