Yesterday I was shopping in the IKEA in Boucherville. I started by returning a $12.99 IKEA 365 sauce pan, of which the handle had broken off the second time my wife used it. It had been sitting some time on my things to do shelve, but since I hadn’t been to IKEA in a while I hadn’t returned it for a replacement.

After a short wait (as you know that isn’t always the case) I showed my sauce pan to the service representative. “Do you have a receipt,” she asked. I explained that I had bought for more than 10,000 dollars at IKEA last year (I installed some kitchens and a bathroom for people) and that it probably was on one of those long receipts, but very hard to find if you don’t know the exact product code. On a previous occasion I experienced that even IKEA staff has sometimes a hard time finding things on long receipts.

She told me, and not very nicely I must say, that without a receipt she couldn’t do anything for me. I explained again that I didn’t want my money back, I just wanted another sauce pan. In my experience IKEA’s service and return policy was very good. Not now, not with this girl. I explained again that I had too many receipts to find this product. She would probably not like it when I brought them all and she would have to weed through them finding a needle in a haystack. No dice, she refused to be lenient.

Okay, off I went inside, with the sauce pan in my bag, and bought for almost $3000 worth of kitchen cabinets, the start of a new kitchen project. After that I had to wait an hour for the pickers to get all the items (110 packages) from the warehouse. So I went inside again to grab a lunch in the restaurant and to shop a bit for myself. I happen to pass the kitchen wares in the Marketplace and decided to buy a new sauce pan. I also bought some other things.

After I paid and walked towards the pickup counter I passed the return counter again and there was still the same girl working and only one other person waiting. So I pushed the button on the number-tickets machine and waited for my turn.

When it was my turn I greeted the girl and said: “It’s me again!”. I showed her the sauce pan again and she asked if I had found the receipt. I said: “No, I just bought another one,” and showed her the receipt of the new pan. She was a bit perplexed and said she was going to ask her manager. It took more then 5 minutes before she came back, much to the annoyance of the people that were waiting behind me, who saw a completely deserted Service Counter.

She wasn’t alone, but had her manager in toe. The manager spoke in continental French to me: “Sir, you have to leave. I accuse you of fraudulent behaviour. I informed security and you can never come back here again.”

“Wow,” I said, “you are a bit exaggerating here.” But she went on for a while but not all of her words reached me since I was just too perplexed. I was so upset I thought for a moment to tell her to call the police if she really thought I was a fraud. I would have liked to see the faces of the police officers that would have to waste their time with somebody who just wanted to return a defective sauce pan.

But I had more to do that day, like trying to fit those 110 packages into my car and transport them back to Montreal. So I just took my sauce pan and the receipt from her and walked away. Inside however, I was very, very angry. Angry that I wasn’t helped to my satisfaction and even angrier because somebody had dared to call me a fraud. Believe me, if I wanted to defraud IKEA I wouldn’t do it with a $12.99 sauce pan.

At home (yes, the 100 packages did fit in my car, albeit with difficulty) I was still angry and upset, so I decided to write this letter. I also published it on my weblog.

I always have had good experiences with IKEA, and with IKEA’s return policy. I buy a lot and return some of it, since there is always something that isn’t exactly like I wanted or something that doesn’t exactly fit in.

If I can’t return things anymore, or if I can’t even be in your stores anymore, you lose a very loyal and frequent customer. Over the past 5 years I think I bought for tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.

So my question is, was this manager out of line, or is this really then new face of IKEA? I surely hope it’s not the latter, since then I need to find a new supplier for the kitchens I install for my clients.

I expect an apology.

With regards,

mare

A. and I tried out Bixi today. I used my own bike but for A. we wanted to get a Bixi.

We went to “our” Bixi station and I tapped the solar powered touch screen. Two icons were visible, one of it disabled. After I tapped the big icon I was presented with the screen shown above. There appear to be 50 pages of this legalese text, with Article 1 to x, in either English or French. Rather overwhelming, and maybe at the page 10 there are instructions, but I never clicked through so far.

Instead I just put my credit card in the credit card slot.

After a short while two other icons appeared, but before I could figure out what they meant (there is plenty of room to add a text next to it, and after 50 pages of text one or two words would be really helpful here) the printer printed a ticket. It had a 5 digit code on it, and a pictogram how to enter it. After a moment of confusion I found out that next to each bike there was a small keypad where one would punch in the code. The code contains only the numbers 1, 2 and 3 only, so it’s not to hard to do. I entered the code and a red light started flashing. Not good. After three more tries we entered the code in another bike’s keypad and finally it worked: a green light lit up, the lock released and the Bixi bike was ours to use.

We adjusted the saddle and off we went. It was A.’s first ride in the city in decades, so we started on a quiet residential street. The steering of the bike is a bit “nervous” but after a while she got used to it. She liked that the centre of gravity was very low.

Our destination was the Jean-Talon Market about 1.5 km away. I had a iPhone map that linked to the map on the Bixi website that supposedly shows realtime information about the amount of Bixi’s available at every station. More importantly, it shows how many free spots there are at each stand. Because the Bixi has no lock, and after 30 minutes of “free” use it gets really expensive. If you’d use the Bixi for three consecutive hours a whopping $16.50, on top of your $5 daily fee, would have been charged to you credit card.
In order to not break the bank you have to bring back the Bixi bike to a station within 30 minutes. Fortunately you then can immediately get another bike, and use it for free for the next half hour. But this means there should be stations, with free spots, at regular intervals, otherwise you are more or less stuck.

According to the map that I checked when we left home there were 7 free spots at the Henri-Julien/Jean Talon stand. There was none. I checked the map again on my iPhone, and it still said 7 free spots. Next stand, 300 metres further away on Chateaubriand/Bélanger. According to the map, 5 free spots. In reality, none.
Finally we found one free spot on the Bréboeuf/Jean-Talon stand, 800 metres from our destination, but in another direction. Again, the map said there should have been many free spots, and there were only two. Since this bike station was almost nearer to our house than to the Jean-Talon Market we felt kind of cheated.
We decided to cancel our visit to the market and instead to go back home. In order to do that we needed to unlock another bike. I typed in the code from my ticket but got a red light. We tried all bikes but none of them would unlock. The code-ticket had a phone number on it that I called for assistance. After a short wait a man answered me in very poor English and told me to swipe my card again and I would get a new number.

Of course! The old code was only valid for that station, and had expired after I unlocked the bike. But swiping your credit card repeatedly feels quite dangerous, especially because there is absolutely no feedback on the amount actually charged. (I still don’t know, since my online credit card record shows no charge at all.)

Again, some printed instructions, either on the pay kiosk or on the ticket would have been immensely helpful. They might have been there, but buried in a 50 page puddle of legalese, it’s unlikely that anybody would find them.

After I swiped my card again, I got a new code (I now figured out the two icons meant print code and show code on screen), unlocked a bike and rode back home.

So our first experience with Bixi wasn’t that positive. The bikes are great, but the information how to use it isn’t great,worse, it’s almost non-existent.

Also, if the information on the Bixi website is not correct and up-to-date, you can’t plan a trip. Without my iPhone, I wouldn’t even have known the locations of the “nearby” stations. A printed map on all the stations showing the nearest stations would be a really obvious solution here.

Bixi is nice, but you shouldn’t want to use it to go to a destination, like the Jean-Talon market, or a cinema downtown or things like that. Chances are that you can’t drop off your bike and either you pay a lot of money or have to walk quite a bit. Or both. I later learned there is an icon that becomes active when the station has no free spots left that will extend your half hour with 15 minutes so you have time to find a station that does have room to drop off your Bixi. But since the icons have no text there is no way you would know. When there is no room for your bike you don’t go to the touch screen to find a solution. At least I didn’t.

The ratio between bikes and stations is not good. On the Bixi website they talk about 3000 bikes and 300 station. Most stations don’t even have 10 places, so when nobody uses a Bixi, like at night, all bikes should be parked and everybody should have put them perfectly very spread out over the network. That isn’t going to happen. Realistically there should be two or three times more parking spaces than bikes.

And then there are those instructions: 50 pages of legalese interspersed with instructions is just ridiculous. Quebec user interface designers are either terrible, or those things are designed by the son of the director who is studying graphic design at a Cegep. I have no idea. The same applies to the interface design of the STM Opus terminals, but that is another rant.

I know Bixi is still in its infancy and not completely rolled out yet, but many of the above points are basic design flaws that could have been easily avoided.

For know, I don’t think A. will get a Bixi pass for her birthday, and not only also because she told me she would never use it to go to work downtown. She has more reasons than the ones pointed out above but still.

I received this letter today. It is an invitation to take the Oath of Citizenship. I’m finally becoming Canadian!

But. Is it really necessary to make this notice so menacing? It looks like I’m summoned for a trial. I know there is a judge involved, but this is a nice trial.

It would be so much nicer if this letter was a congratulatory one. Something like this:

We are pleased to inform you that you passed the Citizenship test and that there is only one step left in becoming a Canadian Citizen. Therefore we invite you to take the Oath of Citizenship. You can bring friends and family to this joyful occasion.

It is going to take place on

Friday 06 February 2009 at 1:30 PM.

at
Collège de Maissonneuve
2700, rue de Bourbonnière
Montreal QC H1X 2A2

The way it is currently there is only one “happy” word in it: the letter starts with “Please”. But the joy is over very fast since it is immediately followed by a command: “appear”…
At the bottom there are 5 check-boxes ordering me what documentation to bring, what will happen if I don’t show up, and a big block labeled WARNING with legalese about the do’s and don’ts of obtaining Canadian Citizenship.

Then there are two more pages; one is a media release form because there might be people taking photos and another with details about parking (paid!) and a notice to use only this particular entrance of the school.

However one piece of essential information is missing: if and how many people I can bring. Since it isn’t mentioned I presume it isn’t limited so I hereby invite you all (well almost all, you know who you are). Afterwards we can grab a beer, or something non-alcoholic if you prefer. The first drink is on me.

— Hello?

— Yes.

— Is this the complaints department?

— It is.

— I want to file a complaint.

— You’re at the right address.

— I have a very bad day. It’s the aniversary of my mother’s death today.

— I’m sorry to hear that.

— I was going to go cross country skiing with a friend.

— …

— But first I had to dig out the car from under the pack of snow and the thick layer of frozen snow, soaked with freezing rain. Then I found out that the second-hand snow blower we bought this fall —together with our neighbour— doesn’t want to start. It worked fine last fall, but now it doesn’t want to budge.

— I’m sorry to hear that.

— The I started to remove the snow by hand, hit a large plaque of frozen snow and then the handle of the snow shovel broke off.

— Sheesh.

— I removed the handle, re-attached it —it’s 15 cm shorter now— and went on removing the snow off the car. The car is covered in a thick layer of ice. I have to run the engine and the heater for a while to be able to remove it.

— Yeah.

— But first I have to defrost the doors because they are frozen shut. And then I found that Alison had left her door open the last time we used the car (2 weeks ago). So the battery is completely dead and possibly really dead. And I had just bought a new one a month ago.

— O my.

— So now I have to defrost the door, get into the car, try to open the hood, remove and try to charge the battery and then start the engine, defrost the windows and hope for the best. O, and I still have to dig out the car as well.

— Wow, that’s a genuine complaint. I’ll pass you on to my superior.

— I don’t think we’re going to ski today.

When I cycled to my doctor yesterday on the Maissoneuve bike path I noticed this sign when I entered the borough of Westmount. Apparently cyclists need to wear a helmet there, I’ve no idea since when.
Now I do think wearing helmets in Montreal’s traffic is generally a good idea. I always wear mine especially since my accident, but I do think it is a good idea to introduce this requirement in all the boroughs on the island of Montreal at once.

In the current situation Westmount is an island, and legally inaccesible by the majority of cyclists that don’t wear a helmet.

Of course I saw a lot of people breaking this by-law and I’ve no idea if it is enforced. But having laws that are just laws is worse than having no laws at all.

After yesterday’s Canadian elections (aiaiai, the Conservatives won a lot of seats) it is now time to pay our full attention to the presidential elections of the United States. The elections are three weeks away and Alison has already received her absentee ballot. Last time (4 years ago) she received her ballot 9 months too late. It had been “mistakenly” sent to St. Thomas, one of the US Virgin Islands and it took a very long while to finally reach us. And it didn’t even arrive in a bottle.

Anyway, Alison is a dual US-Canadian citizen and it’s time to vote. Just as with the Canadian election, her vote doesn’t really matter. I don’t think McCain has much chance winning in the state of New York, but if they’ll ever use the popular vote for statistics it might show up. If they actually open those absentee ballot envelopes. I heard they are only opened and counted if the outcome is too close to call.

Alison always lets me vote since I’m more au courant of the political news than she is. [Okay, that’s not true, and she wasn’t happy with it. See her comment below.] Not that the choice at hand is particularly difficult this time around.

But filling out the ballot actually is difficult. So maybe my American readers can help me. Let me explain. I’d have expected to find entries for the candidates of the parties on the ballot: Obama for the Democrats, McCain for the Republicans and maybe one or two others that are running as independents. But instead there are 10 choices for president and vice-president. (click on the picture above to read the entries)

McCain & Palin have three entries and Obama & Biden two, and then there are no less than 5 independent candidates, four I’ve never heard of and Ralph Nader.

But why does McCain/Palin have three boxes? So their chances would triple? To confuse the uneducated or first-time voter? I’m well educated and I do find it highly confusing.

Of course I’m going to vote for that one, but which box on the ballot should I check?

Should I choose: Democratic Electors for Obama/Biden or Working Families for Obama/Biden?

What is the difference? Will it affect the outcome of the election?

If you have the answer, please let me know in the comments. Thank you.

I saved a lot of money today.

For over a year I’ve been eying an iPhone, Apple’s hot touchscreen gadget. Recently it was announced that the iPhone would come to Canada and also that developers would be able to write applications for it. I have some ideas for a couple of cool iPhone games so that would be a reason to justify the purchase.

But today Rogers, the only carrier that has a GSM network in Canada, announced their subscription rates. But their 3-year contract and exuberant high monthly fees would mean that an iPhone would cost me 5700 dollars and that without unlimited use of the Internet, my main reason for getting it. There’s no way I’m going to pay that. No iPhone for me.

But I saved even more money. I planned to go to an outdoor concert of one of my favourite bands, Sigur Rós from Iceland. So this morning I called Admission, the Québec Ticketmaster monopolist, to buy some tickets. My ears fell almost off my head when they told me there was a surcharge of 8 dollars per ticket for their services. Eight dollar for picking up the phone! And 5 dollar on top of that as a fee to pick your tickets up at the box office. So I told them that was ridiculous and hung up. No Sigur Rós for me.

If I’ve the time and inclination I might check tomorrow if I can still buy tickets in a brick-and-mortar music store in town. Support your local businesses.

And I might look into buying a hacked phone when/if they come available but for now the deal is off.

I feel so frugal now.

Via illicit channels I stumbled upon a yet unreleased movie about the thesis subject of a fellow web-logger. I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD-ROM and gave it to her. And since I had it on my hard drive I decided to watch it.

“Noise” is about a man (Tim Robbins) who can’t stand the noise in New York, especially the blaring car alarms, and he decides to do something about it. I won’t give away the whole plot here, but it involves breaking car windows and cutting battery cables.

Now is this a subject that lies close to my heart. During my last years in the Netherlands I was kind of obsessed with cars. I didn’t mind their noise that much, but I couldn’t stand them driving through red lights, not giving priority to pedestrians and bicycles on crosswalks and generally breaking traffic rules. So I actually had more of a gripe with their drivers than with the cars themselves. But since they were hiding in the sacred cows it was easier to hate cars, period. This all originated to a few incidents I had where I told (or gestured) some cars that they shouldn’t drive over my toes and was subsequently assaulted and beaten up by the driver. And this, instead of making me more timid and restrained, made me even more vocal and focussed on car’s errors. I once threw my bike in front of a car to stop it from entering the one-way street I lived in from the wrong direction (this happened a lot because it was a huge shortcut between two main streets). And I could get totally worked up when I saw cars jumping red lights, even when they were far away from me. I was a totally self-righteous asshole, stopping for every red pedrestian stop light, even in the middle of the night when there was no traffic at all. If I followed the rules I could critique everybody else who didn’t.

This happened only when I was riding my bike or was a pedestrian. When I drove a car myself I could stand traffic violations much better. So for a while I drove to my studio, even though that actually took more time and was a hassle with parking.

During the worst period I couldn’t even watch out of my window, in fear of getting totally worked up over cars running in the wrong direction. There were days I couldn’t leave the house. I suffered from a special case of agoraphobia. During the nights I was plotting evil plans involving setting cars ablaze that were parked illegally and acquiring a rocket launcher to, as in Doom, blow cars into pieces. Just the thought that I couldn’t afford being apprehended because it would affect my immigration process, withheld me from actually doing these things in reality.

When I was visiting Montréal I had none of these symptoms, probably because I didn’t have to “defend” my territory, because I was a visitor. But even now, when I’m not a visitor anymore, I only rarely have the urge to fight cars. I even jaywalk sometimes!

Anyway, the movie wasn’t a masterpiece but watching it brought back a lot of not so nice memories. Not so much that I started to hyperventilate, but enough to cause a slightly elevated heartbeat. But I was also relieved that this period was over, that I was “normal” again.

When we paused the movie we heard the neighbours dogs barking very loudly and we started to laugh about the coincidence.

It became even more hilarious when two of our tenants came down and rang our doorbell complaining about our dogs. I pointed them to the neighbours house and had to close the door fast because I couldn’t hold in my laughter.

Just got a call from Bell. Not an actual person but one of those automated calling machines. The voice tells me it has a message about my phone number, and to please call this toll-free number to talk to us. Bell wants to sell us something? We’re not spending enough time on the phone? We’re using Jajah too much?

So I called said number. Turns out that someone stole our phone number. And since it is an unlisted number they were giving us the option to get a new unlisted number, free of charge. Of course they wouldn’t pay for new stationary, messages to notice all our friends, relatives and other contacts and all the time it would cost.

So I declined.

After I hung up I did a search on Google for this story and found out that we weren’t the only “victim”, but that someone got hold of 3.4 million telephone numbers, 5% of which are unlisted. That’s a lot of new phone numbers to give away, more numbers than are currently “free” in our area code. So the likelihood we get an unlisted number that was recently used by someone else is very high. And then you get all these people calling and asking for Jean-Marie, Claude or Sophie. No thanks. I previously had that with my cell phone which is of course far worse because it costs me 40 cents each time I pick up the phone.

I’m not too worried about the fact that our number is now in the wild. We mainly have an unlisted (strangely enough it cost money to have an unlisted phone number; you’d think that it would cost less because they don’t have to list it) phone number because we don’t get as much unsolicited direct marketing calls around supper time. If they will increase now, I can finally play out this anti-telemarketing script.

Let’s start with a joke:

A man in Chicago calls his son in New York the day before Christmas and says, “I hate to ruin Christmas this year, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing; forty-five years of misery is enough.”

“Pop, what are you talking about?” the son screams. “We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” the father says. “We’re sick of each other, and I’m sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Atlanta and tell her.”

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone. “Like hell they’re getting divorced,” she shouts, “I’ll take care of this.”

She calls Chicago immediately, and screams at her father, “You are NOT getting divorced. Don’t do a single thing until I get there. I’m calling my brother back and we’ll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don’t do a thing, DO YOU HEAR ME?” and hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife. “Okay,” he says, “they’re coming for Christmas and paying their own way.” Via.

It sounded vaguely familiar.

The funeral was Saturday and it went well except for the hot air balloon that we tried to launch as a ritual but that nearly went up in flames, ripped open and finally ended being buried with my mother’s coffin instead of flying. I read a poem, and didn’t choke nor stutter. I almost started to cry when I made eye-contact with my best friend in the audience, but I changed my aim and it went away. It’s not that I’m afraid to cry in public, but I don’t like to do it in plain view. I also cry at funerals of people I don’t know, I even cry when there are funerals in movies. In short, I don’t like funerals.

There were a lot of people, considering my mother’s age and quite a few family members that I hadn’t seen in decades and probably never will see again. Not much to say that the usual “So you live in Canada now?” phrase. Many people asked me when I’ll come back and I honestly can’t say. I don’t envision attending the funerals of my brother and sisters and their spouses and offspring but maybe I’ll change my mind when that time will come. But the frequency of my visits will definitely go down. And the death of my mother will make me more Canadian, since there is one link less that ties me to the Netherlands. I will make less trips to Europe and spend the time and money on other trips. Hopefully I can explore the rest of Canada a bit. But I’m also a bit afraid of doing that; I might like it and secretly wish I had moved to Vancouver or Calgary instead of Montréal.

While in the Netherlands I can’t stop comparing: this is better, that is better, that is worse and OMG! this is really awful. I should compile the definite list someday. Seeing signs on the street like in the photo above doesn’t make this country more appealing. This was just after I wandered through a 99% Muslim neighbourhood where every apartment had their own satellite dish to watch Turkish or Moroccan television. In Québec there are currently discussions about integration of minorities, but that sight proved for me that in the Netherlands that integration clearly has failed. Or am I just watching the Netherlands through really dark sunglasses so everything looks dark and gloom? I honestly don’t know. What does suck is that my bike, borrowed from a friend, was stolen yesterday, probably because it had a very bad lock, but maybe also because I parked it in the wrong place. But Alison’s bike, also loaned to somebody, was also stolen in Montréal recently, so I can’t really claim Rotterdam is worse in that respect. The weather is far worse however, it rained every day last week and now it is dry but extremely cold. Only minus 1 degrees Celsius but it feels colder than -10 in Montréal because it is very humid and it is always windy here.

I’ll stop now, sorry for all the complaining. It is about time I do something constructive again. A few more days and I’ll fly home again, as a free man. I miss the dogs and Alison, and I want to see if I’m still able to ski.