If you’ve spent any time transiting through Trudeau Airport in Montreal – and if you live in Charlottetown this is something you can’t avoid – you’ve likely encountered the Provincial Airlines poster above the escalator on your way down into the underground passageway that leads to the remote gulag from which Charlottetown flights depart:

And perhaps you’ve noticed that the map on the poster is completely missing Prince Edward Island (while including, oddly, islands like Anticosti and Grand Manan).

After returning from a recent trip I decided that something had to be done about this; think of the untold damage that has resulted from thousands upon thousands of air passengers left with the impression that Prince Edward Island has disappeared.

So I emailed Customer Service at Provincial Airlines, and yesterday was happy to receive the following reply:

Thanks Peter, for your feedback concerning our map, your timing is perfect because our marketing peeps have picked up on it as well and are in the process of having it changed. 

It’s so nice to receive a reply from a real person at an airline that both acknowledges a problem and points to a solution in the words. Good on Provincial Airlines.

When I first moved to Charlottetown 17 years ago, Carter and Company was still in business on Queen Street. Carter’s was your stationers’ stationer: creaky wooden floors, a vast range of products, excellent customer service.

You couldn’t ask for anything more in a stationery store.

And then came The Great Consolidation of the downtown stationery market in Charlottetown. Staples arrived on the outskirts. Carter’s closed their Queen Street store and opened on Kent Street. Eventually we were left with one stationery store downtown, Colpitts Office Products, seemingly a hybrid of Premium Office Products, Carter’s and Colpits that’s now part of a small Quebec chain.

It seemed like every move from the original Carter’s into today’s pale shadow involved a decrease in selection, friendliness and service. But, committed to downtown business as I am, as much as possible I’ve been shopping at Colpits just to help keep them alive. (After all, who wants to drive out to the edge of town to buy a pencil).

Until today.

Today I needed to mail a big book to Germany, so I needed a big envelope.

I went over to the Confederation Court Mall to Colpitts and in the envelope section I found exactly what I needed: big manila envelopes sold individually.

I went up to the counter to pay and was told “oh, you can’t buy this, you have to buy ten… they should have had a rubber band around them.”

“I just want one envelope,” I replied.

“You have to buy ten,” said the clerk.

“So you can’t just sell me this one envelope here?”

“No.”

Not needing 10 envelopes, nor wanting to spend $12.00 on 10 envelopes to get one, I left.

Five minutes later I had a single large envelope in hand, purchased at the Canada Post outlet at Shoppers Drug Mart. Where they sell big envelopes both individually and in larger quantities.

I’m never going back to Colpitts Office Products.

Why?

Because this experience, perhaps a result of “store policy” or a computer system incapable of selling items a la carte, and very obviously the result of a company that doesn’t allow its employees to be, well, friendly, was completely devoid of humanity.

Here I was, a guy with an envelope and the cash to buy it. An envelope sitting, individually and ready to purchase, on the counter between me and someone who should have been happy to sell it to me.

And her only response was “you have to buy 10.”

This is a violation not only of fundamental laws of customer service, but also of fundamental laws of human decency. A real person, in a company that gives their employees to latitude to be real human beings, would have said “give me a loonie and we’ll call it even.”

Instead their service quite clearly said “we don’t want to sell you what you’re looking for.”

So now they are never again going to sell me anything.

My Internet friend Edward Hasbrouck – you may know him from his columns about The Amazing Race or from his book The Practical Nomad – sent me a link to Canadian privacy office questions US surveillance of Canadian travelers which details the implications for Canadians of U.S. policy regarding air travel passenger records, the heart of which is this:

Asst. Comm. Bernier’s statement was limited to flights to, from, or overflying the USA. We suspect that her office is unaware that the DHS already has ways to get access — without the knowledge or consent of anyone in Canada, including airlines and travel agencies — to information about passengers and reservations for flights within Canada and between Canada and other countries, regardless of whether they pass though US airspace.

Just like airlines, travel agencies, and websites in Europe, those in Canada routinely outsource the hosting of their reservation (PNR) databases to third-party Computerized Reservation Systems (CRSs), most of which are in the USA. When you make an airline reservation with a Canadian travel agency, even for a domestic flight within Canada, the first thing that generally happens is that a PNR is created in the database of a CRS in the USA.

What this means is that if you fly from Charlottetown to Halifax, your PNR – passenger name record – may be stored in a computer system under U.S. jurisdiction, placing it beyond the reach of Canadian privacy legislation.

The story finishes with a suggestion:

We encourage Canadian travelers to request a full accounting of what has happened to their airline reservations from Canadian travel agencies (we’ll be happy to help interpret the responses), and to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner if they don’t get the answers to which they are entitled or if the responses show that their data was sent to the USA without their knowledge or consent or without complying with PIPEDA.

If you take them up on the suggestion, please let me know what you learn.

After checking out the big hole and making sure that Tai Chi Gardens wasn’t open yet, we continued down Pownal Street toward the water. It was a beautiful, sunny, crisp day.

In front of the Royal Canadian Legion there were about half a dozen cardboard boxes filled with books and CDs, and resting on top was a copy of The (Last) Whole Earth Catalog.

It wasn’t clear from the position of the boxes whether they were being put out to the trash, or in transit – there were about 2 feet in from the sidewalk in an ill-defined no-mans land – so I wasn’t comfortable with just picking up the Catalog as my own and walking on.

So I picked up the Catalog and walked into the Legion.

Spotted a man walking out of the banquet hall: “You know anything about those books out on the lawn?” I asked.

“We’re hauling them to the library,” he replied.

“Wanna sell this one?” I asked, holding up the Catalog.

“Sure. Just go and talk to those ladies in there,” he said, pointing toward the hall. Inside I found three women clearing up from what looked like the end of a yard sale.

(Oliver, meanwhile, was cowering at the entrance; I don’t think he knew quite what to make of the Legion).

“The man out there says you might sell me this book,” I said.

“Certainly,” they exclaimed, in unison.

“How much do you want for it?”

“A dollar,” said the woman behind the bar. You could tell from the reaction on the faces of the other women that she’d spoken too soon and too low.

I looked in my wallet. I only had a $20 bill.

“Do you have change for a twenty?”

“Sure do.”

“How ‘bout I give you a twenty and you give me $10 back and we’ll call it even.”

This was an unexpected turn of events, and they were obviously (pleasantly) surprised. Not only did they give me my $10, but I walked out with a couple of (very tasty) chocolate chip muffins, a half-dozen peanut butter cookies, an invitation to their concert on June 1 and several rounds of thank-yous.

The Whole Earth Catalog is a powerful book, and you gotta be careful of maintaining karmic balance when it changes hands.

Two and a half years ago I made the following prediction in this space:

The Timothy Chaisson song All Over Again will be used as closing credits power ballad on a prime-time television U.S. program in the next 12 months.

Well, I was off by 18 months, and I got the song wrong, but I just got word this afternoon from Gardiner MacNeill that Tim’s song Broken Hearted Beat was featured in a recent episode of Heartland (see 4:10 in this video).  And, what’s more, he’s going to provide two more songs for Heartland’s next season, one of which will be used in the closing credits.

This is great news, both from Tim, and for my chances of accurately predicting the future.

I’m helping to plan Prince Edward Island’s first “Pecha Kucha” event for June 17th – more on this shortly – and I’m using this as an opportunity to do some letterpress experimenting.

Nigel Roe from Holland College generously invited me over to see the graphic design program’s collection of metal and wood type this morning – a vestige of the days when the College had a letterpress of its own – and allowed me to borrow type to assembly into a Pecha Kucha poster. They have an eclectic but not particularly well-organized collection of type – midway from sorted to pied – and so my challenge was as much finding a typeface sufficiently complete for my purposes as anything else.

Here’s what I ended up with:

I brought this type home and locked it into the chase of my little Adana Eight Five letterpress – it just barely fit – using my meager collection of furniture as best I could (which was not well at all), to end up with this:

As I’m still awaiting the arrival of some rubber-based ink and some tympan sheets for the Adana press, I made a rough proof of the poster by simply rolling out some (very old) red Speedball water-based into onto a glass sheet and then inking up the type with the roller:

I then grabbed a sheet of paper – it happened to be a sheet of old cream-coloured H.B. Willis Company letterhead that’s got a little texture to it – and placed it over the type, put a paperback book over the type and then pressed down really hard. I removed the book, rolled the back of the sheet a little bit more with the (de-inked) rubber roller. When I pulled the sheet off the chase, the result was this:

Which, actually, doesn’t look so bad if you’re going for a “distressed” effect. It did show me that I’ve ended up with a bum letter J, which, alas, is the only letter J in the typecase at the College, so I’ll have to accept it as humanizing element of the design.

I’m expecting ink and tympan later this week or early next, so the next step is to re-pack the chase so that it’s a little more secure, and then to fire up the letterpress and see what happens. You can watch this Flickr set to see how things develop.

It was a school holiday last Friday and on my way out the door to the office [[Oliver]] asked me what he should do all day.

“Do some research on volcanoes,” I said.

And a few hours later in my email box arrived a collection of images and links on volcanoes and earthquakes.

So on Sunday we went into iCal on Oliver’s computer and set up a Research Calendar for him, with a topic for every day. Here’s what this week looks like so far:

• Saturday: iPad
• Sunday: Family History
• Monday: Estonia
• Tuesday: Lions
• Wednesday: Van Gogh

Last night, in anticipation of today’s “Lions” topic, Oliver suggested to me that lions can navigate using the stars – I think he got this idea from The Lion King, but I’m not sure. I initially dismissed the idea – lions can’t use sextants, after all – but some quick web research revealed that animals use all manner of methods to find their way in the world, so who knows. More study needed.

This morning on the way to school we talked about how dogs are “canines” and cats are “felines” and we wondered what lions are. So Oliver’s going to look for an English to Latin translator when he gets home from school.

We welcome suggestions for future topics.

It’s interesting to read this press release from Camper regarding “articles in the greatest international publications” about Casa Camper Berlin in light of the fact that my own review of the property is the 8th search result on Google for a Casa Camper Berlin search and the 2nd search result for a Casa Camper Berlin review search.

None of the articles in the “greatest international publications” cited in the release appear anywhere in the first five pages of Google search results.

I point at this not as proof of my own greatness, but simply to suggest that if I was a hotel spending public relations dollars, I’d have to wonder whether it might be time to stop courting the same old “greatest” and consider courting the attention of less great, but perhaps more prominent, real people relating real travel experiences.

That said, in the 48 days since I published my Casa Camper Review, it’s received a grand total of 156 pageviews, including just 34 visits from Google. So maybe “greatness” shouldn’t be measured in terms of Google Pagerank.

When we first moved to Charlottetown in 1993 if you asked someone on the street where the nearest sushi place was they’d be as likely to punch you in the face as point you the right way. Seventeen years later, not a week goes by without an “opening soon” sign going up on a new sushi place, and I’d hazard a guess that it will soon be easier to get a California Roll than it will be to get a Shawarma.

For the record, here’s the list of places where you can get sushi in Charlottetown, open now and opening soon:

• Formosa Tea House, 186 Prince Street
• Monsoon, 79 University Avenue
• Tai Chi Gardens, 119 Pownal Street
• Café So-Ban, Charlottetown Mall
• Zen Sushi, 62 Queen Street
• Sushi Express, 193 Kent Street (opening soon)
• Ta-Ke Sushi, 92 Queen Street (opening soon)
• Sushu Jeju, 260 Grafton Street (opening soon)

The Robertson Library at UPEI is getting one of these snazzy robotic book scanners (see it in action in this video) and one of these snazzy robotic book-making machines (video) under the aegis of the IslandArchives.ca project. The mind boggles with possibilities.