In Slovakia you get a free upgrade to first class when you travel by train.

Several weeks ago I fell prey to an urge to look up my credit profile — I think it was one banner ad too many noodling into my subconscious, with a dash of fear of imminent worldwide economic collapse. So I went to the TransUnion website and ordered their “TransUnion Credit Profile” product for $14.95.

After going through a series of identity-verifying questions (current address, former address, etc.) I was told that my identity couldn’t be verified, and that I’d be receiving a “Tracking Code” by postal mail that I could use to unlock my profile.

While I’m all for making absolutely certain that I am who I say I am, this whole process was handled clumsily, and there was no indication at any stage but the last that there might be a delay to wait for the post to arrive.

Today, seven days later, the letter arrived, and I followed the instructions to login to the account I’d created and “when prompted, enter the following tracking code.”

But I was never prompted: the website simply told me that I was going to receive a tracking code in the mail, but didn’t provide me with a place to enter it.

Fortunately their toll-free customer service line was still open so I gave them a call, and the agent had no information at all about why I couldn’t enter my tracking code and, indeed, seemed to dismiss the whole idea of a tracking code as unnecessary, but told me that if I answered some more questions over the phone he could unlock my profile.

So I answered a series of questions — credit card number, current address, former address, etc. Then, one question before payday, he asked me what the postal code was at the house where I lived in 1993. I told him I didn’t remember. He said “if you can answer this one question” then we could proceed. He asked me if I could look it up. I said that I could. So I went to Canada Post’s website and looked it up and, presto, I was me again in their eyes.

I was told to logout of the website, then wait a while, then log back in. A few minutes later I received an email with subject line “Your Identity has been confirmed”:

Wow, that was fast (I thought), and I clicked. Only to be told that my identity couldn’t be confirmed and that I had to call customer service:

But they closed 15 minute ago, and so I’m out of luck for another day.

Not only is this inept service, but it gives me pause when I consider that these are the folks responsible for maintaining the Big Credit Worthiness Database: if they can’t manage a simple web transaction, what else are they screwing up?

Update: Turns out customer service wasn’t closed — the letter said it was closing at 8:00 p.m. but the website said it was open until midnight. So I called back again, answered some more questions (name, date of birth), and then was told to, in series, (a) logout, (b) empty my cookies, (c) log back in, all of which produced the same result and then (d) try another browser (I had been using Firefox, I switched to Safari). And this final step did it. I have no idea why. You’ll be happy to know that TransUnion thinks my job is “S/E COMPUTOR CONSUTING” for Reinvented Inc.

I’m going a little unwild here with a move further into the depths of monochromism. Please bear with me. Blame this for my impulses (it’s brilliant).

Episode 68 of Spark is online now, and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One on Saturday. It incorporates slices of the why you should have your own domain name interview I did last week.

Some tiny updates on our upcoming trip to Europe:

• This is the first time I’ll be travelling across an international border with Oliver without Catherine, so we need a Consent Letter, signed by Catherine and notarized by a lawyer. Campbell Lea comes to our rescue here.
• We’ll be in Nuremberg for two nights. I’ve never been to Nuremberg, but the allure of Playmobil is too strong to resist.
• Oliver is very excited about meeting Til in Vienna. But mostly because of the Count von Count overtones.
• Although it’s sometimes a little confusing, I’ve been finding bahn.de is a good general-purpose site for exploring rail timetables and fares. And I used it to pre-book our Nuremberg to Paris train.
• We’re spending the night of March 22 in Paris at Standard Design Hotel. We’ll be in Paris for about 24 hours. That hardly seems like enough time.
• We’re taking the Eurostar through the Chunnel to get from Paris to London.
• On our last night in Europe before flying home we’re overnight at YOTEL, right at Heathrow. I’m intrigued both by its microscopicness, and also by the pleasant thought of not having to battle our way to the airport from elsewhere for an 11:00 a.m. flight.

I love this video, shot from a sushi conveyor belt in Japan. Thanks to Til for the pointer.

I realize it’s probably been a long time since you walked down a sidewalk. And it’s probably been longer still since you walked down a sidewalk on a slushy and/or rainy day. But surely your basic physics knowledge should inform you that when you drive your automobile into a slushy and/or water-filled hollow at the side of the road it will cause the slush and/or water to be projected onto the sidewalk that abuts the road and, if there are pedestrians — me, for example — walking down that sidewalk, then those pedestrians will become covered in slush and/or water.

I think I speak for all of my fellow pedestrians when I beseech you to use more care on days like today as you make your way around town: we will be forever in your debt.

The East Coast Music Awards returned to CBC Television this year, with the four East Coast provinces picking up the tab through tourism advertising. How is this year’s tourism marketing line-up?

• Newfoundland and Labrador is back with witty, compelling, colour-saturated, ads that have me thinking we should be going there soon.
• Nova Scotia has lost the Bruce Guthro Come to Life jingle, which is a shame, but they still do a pretty good job on the stunning scenic shots.
• New Brunswick didn’t market tourism at all, but choose simply to run those annoying “I moved back home because New Brunswick is so awesome” commercials make me want to avoid the province at all costs.
• Prince Edward Island ran dreadful Canada Games-focused ads that looked like they were produced by the Grade 6 “Introduction to iMovie” class. It was not this province’s finest marketing hour.

We watched the awards broadcast on CBC’s Bold digital channel, which limited its coverage to just an hour, and cut to a commercial halfway through Meaghan Blanchard’s performance and then just disappeared, replaced by an opera broadcast. Weird.

So it’s the deadline date for filing last year’s corporate payroll remittance information — the T4 Summary — to Revenue Canada. Fortunately they make this easy by providing a web-based gateway for filing, and they sent me out a letter with a special “web access code” in January (red arrow emphasis mine):

Now you might think that, given the fact that T4 appears on this letter six times, that the “web access code” on the letter would be the one that I would use to file my T4 summary. But it’s not:

I tried several times to get the code to work on their T4 sign-in page, but to no avail. Finally in frustration I called their support line (helpfully open on a Sunday afternoon) only to be told that this letter was giving me a “web access code” to file my T5, not my T4.

Was I supposed to be able to figure that out somehow on my own?

We hear so often about how our healthcare system is falling apart, it’s important to report on instances where it actually works pretty well. For the last week my right ear has felt a little funky, and today it started to feel even funkier and, although I’ve never had an ear infection before, it felt sort of what I thought an ear infection might feel like.

So I called up the Friendly Pharmacy to see if their walk-in clinic was open today. It was, and the person on the phone said it was “very light today.” So I called myself a cab and was there in 10 minutes.

There was nobody else in the waiting room, and the clerk took my details and showed me right into an exam room. Five minutes later the doctor was looking in my ears, and five minutes after that I was at the pharmacy counter filling a prescription for Nasonex which, the doctor says, should clear up my not-too-infected-yet ear.

I was back in a cab and at home within an hour of this all starting.