Shell and The Economist are awarding $US 20,000 to the writer of the best essay on the topic “Do we need nature?”

It was a three-movie weekend. We started with a double feature of The Italian Job (on sneak preview) and Down with Love last night, and I snuck out tonight for Laurel Canyon. As I have nothing on my brothers when it comes to waxing eloquent about the movies, I’ll limit my comments to a short burst.

The Italian Job is Sneakers plus Ocean’s Eleven. It brings nothing new to the “crafty crime” genre. And if you thought Donald Sutherland would add some interesting gravitas to film, well, he doesn’t. It’s a generally well-executed picture, but you will not suffer at all for not seeing it.

You will love Down with Love only if you are a typography, fashion or interior design junkie (like me), or if you happen to like the broad, exagerated punchiness of a movie that is sort of Sports Night meets That Girl. Renee Zellweger is good, Ewan McGregor is better. Catherine laughed all the way through, but claimed not to have enjoyed the film. I didn’t laugh at all (at least on the outside), but came away mildly enlivened. Good film to see if your surroundings have got you down.

Laurel Canyon has good bits — Frances McDormand mostly, but also Alessandro Nivola. Kate Beckinsale plays a toned-down variation of her characteer in Serendipity that starts out with promise and fades into tedium. Christian Bale is simply tedious. All I can think is “thank God it didn’t star Christine Lahti.”

I would also comment on The Matrix, but we drove out on it after 20 minutes (it’s playing at the Brackley Drive-in) last weekend because (a) we were dead tired from jet lag and (b) perhaps because of (a) the movie seemed like an unintelligible morase of flying images. I’m happy to say that we did manage to sit through all of Kangaroo Jack first; the best I can say about that film is “not as bad as I anticipated.” If you are holding off going to see Kangaroo Jack because you think it might be a “talking Kangaroo picture,” I can offer you assurances that the kangaroo only talks occasionally, and then only in dream sequences.

Back in August of 1995 I ordered my first book from Amazon.com. After placing my order I sent the following email to their customer support people:

Hi there.

I seem to have sucessfully ordered a book from you folks
and I see by the order screen that it has been shipped.
One comment, though: it would be neat if you could display
the times/dates along the various stages that happen to
the order digitally, like:

08/08/95 12:56 Dave viewed your order and found the book
08/08/95 13:06 Sandy packed and shipped your book via USPS
08/09/95 12:00 Dave billed your Mastercard for the book

…etc.

Thanks for a wonderful service.

-Peter

Later the same day, I received the following reply:

Peter,

We've received several good suggestions from customers,
but I think this is a particularly good one.  We already
have one project under way which will give a bit more 
detail on the "Your Account" screen about the status of
an order, but something more like the log file you
suggest below would, it seems to me, be an excellent
addition.

Thanks for taking the time give us this suggestion.  
Feedback from customers makes it much easier for us as 
we go about the task of prioritizing which improvements 
we should make next.

Thanks,
Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com Books

In the grander scheme of things, this is like getting a personal note from Henry Ford after ordering a Model T. I found this correspondence in an archive of my email outbox from 1994 to 1996. I’m glad I kept it.

We have five rolls of film from our trip to Europe (we didn’t take the digital camera because we didn’t want to have to worry about getting photos out of it; turned out that EasyInternetCafe machines have USB ports you can use for this purpose). We want the photos developed and scanned so that we can use them as digital files.

PEI Photo Lab on Queen Street will develop and burn a CD-ROM of the photos, but you have to get prints made at the same time. CD-ROM costs $7 and developing costs $12, so it’s $19 a roll.

Wal-Mart will develop and burn a CD-ROM, again with prints required, for $9.97 for the prints and $4.97 for the CD-ROM, so it’s $15 a roll. But, to quote their clerk, “our APS machine is down today, but it should be up tomorrow.” Doesn’t bode well. Amazingly, they can return the prints and the CD-ROM in one hour (when things are working).

Zellers doesn’t do the CD-ROM burning in-house, but can send film away for this. Their cost for a CD-ROM — which took them a couple of minutes to look up — is $8.99 and they were unclear on the costs for developing and printing (which is, as with others above, required); they thought it was probably $7.00. So the price a Zellers is, maybe, $16 a roll.

Japan Camera in the Charlottetown Mall doesn’t do any digital work (though they do have a digital printer in the store, allowing you to make prints from digital files). Their prices for developing APS film are $13.99/roll for 1 hour service and $9.99/roll for 3-day turnaround.

Shoppers Drug Mart (three locations: Kent Street, University Avenue, Charlottetown Mall) will develop film for $7.99/roll until tomorrow night (on sale) and $9.99/roll after that. They’ll burn a CD-ROM for $7.99/roll. Film is sent away to Moncton for developing and burning and turnaround time is 4 to 6 days. Total cost, assuming the sale price, is $16 per roll.

Just by way of comparison, I checked the prices off-Island.

At Duncan & Wright in Waterdown, Ontario, which is where my mother gets her prints and files. They will develop without prints for $10/roll for the first roll and $5/roll for the second and subsequent rolls. It takes them “about a week.”

At Carsand-Mosher in Halifax for “standard” resolution scanning they charge $20/roll and for “low” resolution it’s $10/roll. Their developing costs (which appear to be required in addition) are $19.55/roll, making the combined cost for prints and files $40/roll. I hope they do a good job.

So, in the end, if we want to stay on-Island and get quick service, the best deal is Wal-Mart, where five rolls will take an hour and cost us $75. If we send my mother the film, and have her people do it, it will be $30 and take us a couple of weeks.

Next time, we take the digital camera!

Last week I had the chance to drop in on The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill (the shop is the bookshop that Hugh Grant’s character owned in the movie Notting Hill). Given my passion for travel books, and my somewhat inexplicable appreciation of the movie, this was something of a pilgrimage for me.

The shop lived up to my expectations. I’ve visited some good travel bookshops — Globe Corner in Cambridge, Altair in Barcelona, and the formidable Waterstone’s in London — but The Travel Bookshop is the best I’ve seen: it has just the right combination of size, service, location and selection.

One of the books I found there was No Frills: The Truth Behind the Low Cost Revolution in the Skies by Simon Calder. The book is a thorough examination of the rise of low-cost, no-frills airlines like easyJet, RyanAir, and WestJet. It’s very up to date — my paperback edition was published two months ago — and entertainingly written. While it’s not quite thorough enough to be a “how to start your own discount airline” manual, it comes pretty close. Recommended if you’re interested in the new travel economy.

Local travel agent George Stewart has agreed to answer questions about travel and the travel industry in a sort of “email interview” with me. Are there things you would like me to ask him? Add your questions to the end of this post, and I’ll organize them and pass them along.

I’ve had three examples of good bad customer service in the past month that bear out something I’ve always thought: the way companies communicate about their service is as — or more — important than the actual service they offer.

The first example was an office chair I ordered from Atlantic Business Interiors on St. Peters Road. I went in cold one day, and asked for help finding an ergonomic chair. Peter Holland, the manager of the store, spent a good hour with me going over various options and letting me try out various chairs. He was friendly, and good natured, and knew his product line. I placed an order on the spot, and was told that my chair would be delivered to my door in two weeks. Two weeks later the chair hadn’t arrived, and so I phoned Peter. He promised to look into the issue, and phone me back. He never phoned me back. A couple of days later I phoned again, and Peter gave me a fairly detailed explanation of a screw-up by their supplier in Toronto that had seen my chair left on the loading dock in Ontario. A couple of days after that, Peter phoned to tell me the chair had arrived, and 10 minutes later he personally delivered it to my office, unpacked it, and showed me how to use it.

In classical customer service terms, I got bad service from the company: they were late delivering my product, and not good at following up with me. But, ironically for me, the customer service curmudgeon that I am, none of this bothered me because, well gosh, Peter Holland was such a nice guy about it. He shaped the transaction so that it was between me and him, not between me and some large faceless bureaucracy. And it’s hard to get angry at a nice guy who’s maybe a little distracted.

In other words, at least in my world, being nice to me will help you recover from a lot of customer services gaffes.

Case study number two: back in January I ordered an iTrip from Griffin Technology over the Internet. They were quite clear, both on their website and in the email acknowledging my order, that the product wasn’t ready to be delivered yet, and that I was pre-ordering for delivery in the spring. Earlier this week, I noticed that their website had been updated to indicate that the products were shipping now, but I hadn’t received mine yet. I phoned the number they gave me in their email message. The phone was answered on the first ring by a very nice man who took my order number, checked my order, and found that while it should have shipped, it hadn’t. He promised to find the source of the problem and fix it. This morning I got an email with a FedEx tracking number.

Again, the company had “failed” me in classic service terms, but because they answered the phone on the first ring, because they treated me like a real person and took my concern seriously, and because the person I talked to did what he said he was going to do, I leave the transaction feeling like Griffin is a good company with good service.

Final example: last Saturday morning we were sitting on Air Canada 861 at Heathrow waiting to push back from the gate. The flight was running about 2 minutes late. The captain came on the PA and explained the reasons for the delay — a passenger was ill — and promised to keep us updated. And he did. Over the next 20 minutes we heard from the captain 4 or 5 times, each time he gave us complete and helpful information. In the end, the flight left about 35 minutes late, but because we had been kept informed with useful and accurate information, we didn’t mind.

It’s odd that many companies don’t get this simply fact: keeping your customers in the loop will let you keep them as customers. Honest, accurate, regular communications will stave off all but the worst customer service screw-ups.

I ventured into Back Alley Discs for only the second time today. Like the Queen St. Meat Market (which is no longer on Queen Street), Back Alley Discs is no longer in the back alley. Perhaps the name is meant as a state of mind.

While I am a music aficionado, I have always treated Back Alley Discs with the same kind of apprehension that I treated Smooth Cycle: I simply assumed that if I darkened the door someone would say something like “hey, are you hep to Mingus, man?” and by my lack of appropriate response I would be immediately spotted as a former owner of 45 rpm records by both Shaun Cassidy and Debbie Boone (really).

With the impediment of having to walk down a seedy back alley now removed — the store has moved out into the light of day, into the same building as the Formosa Tea House — today I felt confident enough to give things another try. Besides, I had Oliver with me as cover should anything go wrong (i.e. I could always say “well, I’m hep, but the lad’s not yet… on the way though!”).

Behind the counter with the famous Chas. Guay, formidable both because he is a well-known and prolific musician and because he goes by “Chas.” which, like Wm., is one of those names open to much interpretation. He was very nice.

I purchased a copy of Fred J. Eaglesmith’s new CD and learned, thanks to Chas., that he is set to play a date at Myrons [warning: absolutely insane website] on Monday, June 2. If you like hard-driving soulfully played honest country rock, you should get tickets now: this man and his players are excellent musicians.

Now that I’m inside Back Alley Discs and Smooth Cycle, I fear I’ve reached the point where the next frontier is the local bootlegger. I might not have the fortitude to make that leap for several years. Stay tuned.

Two of the sights we saw on our trip to Spain are a testament to the lengths that faithful will take to celebrate their love of God.

La Sagrada Familia is a church in Barcelona designed by Gaudi and still, more than a century after its conception, under construction. We showed up one night two weeks ago just before closing time, and took a whirlwind tour through the church. It is one of the few buildings I’ve ever been in that left me truly in awe.

Two days earlier we drove (and partially hiked) up Montserrat, a mountain west of Barcelona at the top of which there is a sanctuary, monestary, church and museum. The mountain itself, for the son of a geologist like me, was awe-inspiring on its own: it is a jagged mountain that rises out of the plains to an unnatural height. The religious settlements atop the mountain are almost equally amazing.

If you are in or near Barcelona, a visit to either will inspire you.

Only by comparing this “new” service from Aliant to this project from silverorange et al can you understand the true extent to which Aliant just doesn’t get it. And never will.

By my rough calculation, an average month of surfing the mobile web would cost me about $10,000 under Aliant’s plan.