My friend [[Stephen Good]] took a trip to Winnipeg once many years ago. His return trip, on the now-defunct Canadian Airlines, was cancelled or delayed or over-subscribed. I can’t remember which — but something went wrong and Stephen couldn’t take the flight.

This would be a “bad customer service” story but for the fact that the airline bent over backwards to make up for the problem. If memory serves, they communicated well about the problem, put those affected up in a very nice hotel, fed them, and generally made them feel extremely well cared for. They also offered everyone some sort of “free flight anywhere we travel.”

So rather than returning home to tell a “that Canadian Airlines is horrible” story, Stephen told a “wow, Canadian Airlines is amazing!” story. And I expect that, if those he told are anything like me, the story got repeated many times over. Canadian Airlines came off looking like a generous, caring company.

Indeed they probably came off better than if there had been no problem to begin with.

Of course this sort of “turning lemons into lemonade” story doesn’t happen all the time: my friend [[Oliver Baker]] has been experiencing problems with several HP computers over the year to the extent that I expect he could now write a book on how bad HP’s customer “support” is. He’s certainly convinced me to never consider buying HP products in the future.

Happily I had a “lemons into lemonade” experience myself this week.

[[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I went out to dinner at [[Just Us Girls]] last night. While the food was excellent, and it was nice to sit outside on the patio, the service at the beginning and end of the meal was, well, non-existent.

Nothing bothers me more than a restaurant that doesn’t properly manage the “bookends” of the eating experience: I hate it when I have to search out a server to get a menu, and I hate it when I have to try really really hard to pay the bill.

Last night we suffered both problems: we waited out on the deck for 10 minutes before we were served, and when it was time to pay we had to jump through several hoops. It cast a bad light on what was otherwise a good meal.

Mindful as I am of brother [[Johnny]]’s insistence that we customers have a responsibility to let restaurant management know about bad service, I sent off an email about the problem this morning. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a well-worded personal email back from the chef at Just Us Girls apologizing for the lapse. The email said, in part:

I was greatly dismayed to hear of the poor service you and your family received at my establishment yesterday evening. Oliver has become a well known face around the café this summer, I remember him enjoying my desserts at Mavor’s in the Confederation Centre of the Arts last year and was very tickled when I started seeing him appear in the Café this summer. Although Jodi, Susan and I always take customer criticism very seriously, we were doubly disappointed to hear that one of our favorite little customers had encountered poor service.

It’s easy to win me over with kind words; add in some kind words about my son, and you’ve got a customer for life. So here I am writing a “wow, Just Us Girls is great” post rather than a “wow did we ever get bad service last night” post.

There are at least two or three other Island restauranteurs that know the importance of customer service follow-up. As I recalled in this post back in 2002, Bruce MacNaughton at the PEI Preserve Company. And my friend Scott Linkletter at [[COWS]] has always been quick to react to concerns I’ve raised with him — for a while there last year I felt as though I was leading the “Iced Cowpuccino” R&D team for him. And I heard from several members of the Zakem family when I raised concerns about Angels back in 2003 (and then followed up later that fall with what I think is my best post title ever).

Every time I get a personal response to a customer service problem, I inevitably tell others, and I inevitably forgive and forget the details of the “bad service.”

Which prompts me to wonder whether it’s as important — maybe even more important — if you’re in the customer service business to concentrate on good, personal communication with customers. After all, no business is going to bat 100% all the time — things go wrong that you can’t control. But you can explain what went wrong, and in doing so demonstrate that you care about your customers. Doing that, I think, can mitigate almost any evil.

As you might expect, we’ll eat again at Just Us Girls.

This quote, taken from a letter sent by CFCY radio to local funeral homes and quoted in the CBC story Death notices cancelled after 70 years, about the decision by CFCY to stop broadcasting daily funeral announcements, is a brilliant example of heartless corporate-speak:

The letter said the station’s new format would be “looking to the positives we can point out in our community.” It went on to say “the unfortunate event of someone’s passing” would no longer be possible in this format.

Look for the upbeat new daily 12:30 feature “Islanders who didn’t die today.”

A question sent to Industry Canada’s Saint John office elicited a pointer to a very useful resource I’d not seen before: Spectrum Direct, a sort of “one stop shop” for spectrum management-related data in Canada.

The most interesting resource for me is the Geographical Area Search: you can enter a latitude and longitude and get information on licensed uses of radio spectrum in that area. This means you can get information on the location of mobile phone towers, radio broadcast towers, and so on. And it outputs HTML, ASCII and XML!

For example, I grabbed an ASCII file of “PCS/cellular stations” for 50km around Charlottetown, did a little regular expression magic in BBEdit to reformat and filter out all but the Rogers’ ones and, with the help of GPSVisualizer, created a map showing their location:

If you’re a closer follower of the radio dial here on [[Prince Edward Island]], you may have noticed that where you once found country music from CJRW at 102.1 FM, you now find “SPUD FM,” a new “classic rock” station.

And if you’re extra-curious, you may have gone to the CRTC website to look for the application by station owner Maritime Broadcasting to change formats. And found nothing.

A quick call to the CRTC office in Dartmouth reveals that “format change” by radio stations no longer requires CRTC application nor approval — several years ago the decision was made to leave this up to “market conditions” and not to “micromanage” the industry.

Stations can actually apply for a new license proposing one format, get approved, and then launch using a completely different format, as happened recently with CHNS in Halifax, which proposed an “adult contemporary” format when they applied to move from AM to FM, got approved, and then launched as a “hard rock” station.

So while we began 2006 with two private FM stations on PEI — “Magic 93” and “C102” — 9 months later we’ve got five, “Magic 93,” “The Ocean,” “KROCK,” “SPUD FM,” and CFCY, which moved to FM just this month. Is there really that much radio advertising money floating around?

I learned this morning that Mark Leggott will become the University Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island starting October 1, 2006.

I’ve heard Mark speak several times, and his take on technology, information systems, education and librarianship is impressive and inspiring. UPEI is lucky to have him, and I’m certain Good Things are to come.

Over the last 7 days I’ve developed an annoying deep, throaty cough. I have no other symptoms: I’m not congested, itchy, fatigued, or achy. My cough is, in medical parlance, “non-productive” — I’m not “coughing anything up.” It’s most noticeable in the morning and in the evening, and disappears to almost nothing by midday. If I can get to sleep, I don’t cough through the night, and I sleep soundly. Any ideas what I might be suffering from?

I had a chat this morning with Brenda Brady and Don Moses, the midwives of islandlibraries.ca, and was reminded of the hidden gem of the service: the online reference service for Islanders called isle@sk.

Anyone — or at least any Islander — can go to the isle@sk page and submit a reference question. Questions get automagically doled out to the most appropriate librarian at Holland College, UPEI or the Provincial Library Service, and answers come back to you by email.

I’ve used the service several times, and have always been overwhelmed with the quality of the replies I’ve received — I ask a simple question, and receive back several pages of pointers and references and suggestions for further research.

I told Brenda and Don that, from my perspective, the biggest hurdle to wide adoption of the service by Islanders is the notion that using it would be “cheating.” Why should I tie up the time of professional librarians to answer questions that I could get the answer to with a little research of my own, in other words.

The thing is — they reminded me — librarians are actually trained answer finders. That’s what they do. And so they know not only where to look, but how to look. And so the results of their searching are, at least in theory, broader and deeper than a simple “type keywords into Google” would come up with.

Given that most of my friends and family are or have at one time been reference librarians, I can say with some authority that having a meaty reference question to dig their teeth into is a great gift, and not at all an imposition.

So, what are you waiting for… @sk.

As a result of various summertime adventures, the OpenStreetMap data for Prince Edward Island is starting to actually look like the Island:

Five years ago we made an impromptu summer road-trip to Prince County. It seemed like the time was ripe for another visit up west, and a combination of [[Catherine]] needing time alone to paint various things, and [[Oliver]] and I needing to spend time together before he gets flung into the maw of kindergarten sealed the deal.

So after our regular Saturday morning visit to the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]], we headed west into the Island’s hinterland.

Our first stop was Island Chocolates — I’d been lusting after one of their Factory Coffees (coffee + chocolate) since we were there last month. Oliver had a hot chocolate; as the glasses of hot chocolatey liquid look almost identical, we almost mixed them up and Oliver almost ended up downing a cup of coffee. Which would had made for a wilder afternoon. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that the Factory Coffee is the best thing in the world, at least in the “things you can drink that are hot and involve chocolate” category. Mmmmm.

Next stop: L’Exposition agricole et Le Festival acadien de La Région Évangéline in Abram Village, the heart of the Island’s Acadian community. What with all the “tourism by demographics” going on in Charlottetown these days, it was nice to attend an event that was held for no other obvious purpose than to bring together the community for a celebration. We watched pole climbing, log rolling, horse pulling, cattle showing and music making. Oliver rode a pony and bounced inside an inflatable train. We watched the lobster-eating contest, and watched Mustang, the intelligent horse, wow the crowd with his antics. It was a great way to spend the afternoon, and an excellent reminder that there is another solitude on PEI.

Around supper time we headed northwest to Alberton to the Northport Pier Inn, our home for the night.

The Inn is part of the “Northport Pier Development,” one of those zany ACOA-backed projects, the funding of which boggles the mind:

The Government of Canada contributed more than $2.47 million to the project with ACOA providing direct contributions of $750,000 through the Strategic Communities Investment Fund (SCIF) and $495,000 through the Business Development Program and an additional $204,000 for operating costs. The Canada/Prince Edward Island Labour Market Development Agreement, co-managed by Human Resources Development Canada and the provincial Department of Development and Technology, also contributed $750,000 to the project. A further $400,000 was contributed through the Canada/Prince Edward Island Regional Economic Development Agreement (REDA), a 70/30 cost-shared agreement between ACOA and the Province of PEI. The province contributed an additional $300,000 through the Department of Development and Technology. The Community of Northport and the Northport Development Corporation have contributed $132,000.

The fact that the restaurant next door is “closed until further notice,” that the “sea rescue interpretation centre” is little more than some panels on a wall in an old shed, and that the “eco-tourism centre” and “retail shops” are nowhere in evidence suggests that the development isn’t exactly taking off as planned.

That all said, the Northport Pier Inn is extremely pleasant: well-designed, clean, modern, and run by friendly staff. The beds were comfortable, they had Dora the Explorer on the cable TV, and the view from our room’s balcony took my breath away:

We got settled, and then headed into Alberton for dinner at the Sidewalk Café, a serviceable restaurant on the main street with a surprisingly broad dessert menu and very nice servers.

After supper it was down Rte. 12 to the Princess Pat Drive-in in Cascumpec:

Every year that the Princess Pat stays in business is another gift to the community: it’s in such an unlikely (albeit stunningly scenic) location and has projectors that are seemingly at the edge of their life. Playing on Saturday was Garfield 2, proving yet again that I will see any movie given an interesting enough setting. Actually, the movie was much, much less bad than I thought it was going to be: it was a stock “city cat, country cat” story, with an interesting cast that included Bill Murray (as the voice of Garfield), Tim Curry, and Billy Connolly. Oliver loved the movie, and stayed away until the very end, which was a first for him at the drive-in.

We made it about halfway through John Tucker Must Die, the second feature on the double bill, before I realized that staying to the end would compromise our awakeness for the next day, so we headed off to Northport around 11:00 p.m.

We started off Sunday morning with a hearty breakfast at the Inn (included with the night’s stay) and then drove north to the very, very end of the Island (or the very beginning, depending on your politics) ending up at the North Cape Wind Farm:

We found the interpretative centre there much upgraded since our last visit: it’s now a combination of science-centre like “here’s how wind works” displays, lots of pro-wind and pro-hydrogen propaganda, and the requisite “useless interactive multimedia presentations on expensive PCs.” There’s money dripping from the walls (yes, it’s ACOA money too), but the end effect is a pleasant and educational way to spend an hour.

From North Cape we headed right down Route 14 to West Point, stopping at the Seaweed Pie Café in Miminegash for an excellent lunch (seafood chowder plus scallop burger), at West Point simply for the lighthouse photo opportunity, and ending up at Glenwood for a visit to the Pioneer Farm in Glenwood, a place we’d been turned onto by friends who’d visited a few weeks ago.

Pioneer Farm is sort of “back to the land: the next generation.” It’s operated by a couple who, “as the result of a series of downsizing and in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center … became disillusioned with the life they were living.” So they moved to the Island, bought 150 acres of forested land near the shore, and have developed a sort of petting farm cum demonstration farm.

At their farm gate you drop $5 in an honour box, pick up a brochure, and then take a little self-guided tour of their turkeys, cows, chickens, horses and llamas. While the experience was a touch ascetic for my tastes, you have to admire their efforts, and their willingness to share their experience (to say nothing of their entrepreneurial pluck). If you want to drink the Kool-aid in a more serious fashion, they have a cottage for rent right on the property, and guests are invited heave and pull along side them during their stay.

The sun getting low in the sky, we made a bee-line from Pioneer Farm to Kensington for a stop at the Frosty Treat (where we found an exciting new set of signage — very well designed) and then headed home to find Catherine covered in paint and stain and wood oil.

It was a nice weekend, all in all: Oliver and I got to spend a lot of time together, we reminded ourselves of the many wonders of West Prince, and I got away from the keyboard for 48 hours. We’ll have to go back in 2011.

I post here simply to memorialize the incident, earlier this week, where [[Bruce Rainnie]] suggested, during a live [[Compass]] broadcast, that the 2002 Olympics were held in “Salt Lake Shitty.”

Bruce handled the “incident” with such humour and aplomb that he should win some sort of award.