The Walrus lets you unsub from the magazine... but not their mailings

I actually like The Walrus much of the time. But I got fed up after reading one too many too-clever-by-half stories. And one too many of those second-person features.

Here, I write to the the magazine in my umpteenth attempt to be removed from their monthly subscription reminder list.

Dear Matthew,

I cancelled my Walrus subscription about 18 months ago.

Since then, I receive monthly reminders that it is time to renew. I have unsubscribed from these emails, but to no avail. Why? Because your list is set up as a monthly mailing -- meaning that when I am unsubscribing, I'm actually just removing my name from the current monthly list. Since that mailing has already gone out, unsubscribing is futile. Next month, I will receive another mailing and another futile opportunity to unsubscribe.

It would be great if you could either a) reform your system so that when you offer people the opportunity to unsubscribe they can actually do so, and b) barring that, if you could at least manually (and permanently) delete my address.

Many thanks.

A fun time at the Econo Lodge -- in person and online

Coming back from a recent trip to Montreal, we stayed at the Econo Lodge in Woodstock, New Brunswick. (If you've clicked that link you'll have seen that it goes to a "coming soon" page and my bet would be that it's been up there for years.)

I have to confess that we were warned off the place by friends -- but they said they'd stayed there five years ago and we thought a) how bad could it be? and b) maybe it's changed since then.

It was an all-around awful experience, made worse when I came home and tried to complain via the Choice Hotels website. After filling in all the form fields and hitting "Submit" I got a message that I needed to fix the errors in red. I looked as closely as I could at the page and saw no errors in red. I double-checked all the required fields and saw they had been filled in. I switched browsers in case Choice Hotels does not play nice with Firefox, but I had the same difficulty with Explorer.

Finally, I gave up. I emailed a complaint about my inability to complain (via a different web form) and thought I would share the complaint with all of you, since Choice Hotels doesn't seem to want it. (Maybe they are embarrassed by the hotel; I tried to look it up on their website, but they say it does not exist.)

I would have gone on longer (and have, at TripAdvisor), but Choice limits you to 1,024 characters (which, apparently, you're not allowed to submit anyway). So here's what I had to say:

The room toilet had a very poor flush and the bowl almost immediately became blocked. I called the desk, and the person on duty (Joey, I think) said he would find me a plunger and would call back soon.

He never called back.

Later, I went down to the desk and found somebody new on duty. He said the previous person had not said anything about the problem, and he hadn't left any notes either.

The man working the desk then offered to help, walked past a family who had just arrived at the desk (without acknowledging them at all) and disappeared. A few minutes later, he came back and walked across the lobby with a plunger in hand. He then proceeded to hand it to me.

The night was marred by rowdy youths who spent hours yelling, shouting, running around and tapping on other patrons' windows. The staff seemed unconcerned. (At one point I called the desk to complain, and the noise level went down very briefly.)

Staff seemed not very competent, and our stay was not worth anywhere near the cost of the room.

Apparently the Best Western five minutes away is quite nice.

Open letter to Yak Communications

Dear Yak,

Maybe you are overcompensating. You see, last time I failed to notify you when my credit card expired. You happily continued to provide long-distance phone service for months, then cut me off and took forever to reconnect me (operating under the assumption that I had switched long distance carriers).

My credit card is set to expire again. So you start calling me 6 weeks ahead of the actual expiration date, telling me you have an urgent message, that my card has expired, and that I need to contact customer service immediately.

I call customer service. Maybe they have the wrong date? I get a friendly rep who says no, we have the correct expiration date on file. Not to worry. Just contact us when you get the new card.

Fine. So stop with the auto-dialler every couple of days already. It's even more annoying than the exhortations to renew my sub to a mag after two issues.

Nonsensical pricing policy

If I'm online, and I want to see the image of a cheque that has cleared on my account, I have to pay $1.50 for the privilege. Because I'm bad at writing down what cheques I've written to whom, I often wind up staring at the screen and thinking something like, "$203.18? For what?"

If I were to switch to paperless accounting, it would be free to view the cheque. But I don't want to go paperless. It doesn't save paper. It just means I have to remember to print my own statements and file them with my financial statements. Paperless means the bank saves on paper.

So what do I do if I'm a cheapskate and don't want to pay the $1.50? I call the bank. A friendly teller (this is Nova Scotia, remember) will then take time she could be spending serving a customer in the branch to look it up for me, and tell me -- free of charge -- to whom the cheque was made out.

I use far more of the bank's resources, and the bank lets me do it for free. Does this make any sense?

Santa probably trains his staff better

Empire Theatres in Halifax have a great idea to bring more people into a downtown cinema on Sunday afternoon. It goes by the cloying name of Santa Cinema: a different Christmas-themed movie every Sunday at 3PM.

So we head down to the cinema to see Miracle on 34th Street. We hoped it would be the original, but it turned out to be the remake.

There's a poster at the theatre entrance stating the adult and child prices of tickets to the Christmas movies. It also says admission includes popcorn and a drink.

There's nobody at the box office when we arrive -- promising -- but a kid turns up soon after. We ask for two adult, one youth, and two child tickets. There are no youth tickets anymore he says. I ask what age child covers. He says there are no child tickets any more, just adult tickets (Merry Christmas kiddies!). I point out that the poster at the front of the theatre gives a price for child tickets. He says OK. I ask what age child goes up to (we have a 13-year-old -- will he be a child or an adult?). He says, "three to seven, I guess."

He then sells us our tickets. I ask about the included concessions. He doesn't know anything about that and calls off-screen (I was starting to feel like I was in a bad movie myself" to Ian, the manager. He turns up, says, "Do you know how to sell Santa Cinema tickets?" The kid and I both say "No" at the same time, and the manager proceeds to train him on the spot, as the line behind us gets longer.

"Three to seven I guess." I loved that. If you don't know the answer, make it up, in as unconvincing a way as possible.

After the show was over -- yes, it was the remake, but it was fun -- the kids decide to hit the arcade. The change machine would not accept the paper money it was supposed to. The "In the Groove" dance game was broken. The claw ate the tokens put into it. The air hockey jets were so weak that the puck kept getting stuck mid-table.

All this to the soundtrack of a broken machine, endlessly repeating (in a sing-song): "Prize error, prize error, please call attendant.... Prize error, prize error, please call attendant..."

Yak: Great prices, sucky service

Well over a month ago, my long-distance stopped working. When I called my carrier, Yak, they told me it was because I had switched to a competitor. No, I said, I haven't. They gave me a number to call to confirm my long distance carrier. I called: "Your long distance carrier is Yak."

Back to Yak. Turns out they'd cut me off because my credit card had expired, and they'd never bothered to ask me for the new expiry date. I gave them the new card number. It was declined. I called the bank and confirmed there was nothing wrong with the card. Not only that, the bank guy said that when a transaction is attempted and declined, it shows up in their system. There was no transaction showing -- meaning the Yak person hadn't run the transaction properly. I was shocked to hear this, considering I'd had to repeat the card number three times for her, slower each time, and trying to remain polite as she hesitantly repeated the numbers back to me, with varying degrees of accuracy.

I tried emailing Yak. Ha! No acknowledgment of receipt. I figured it went into the vast junk bin where all those "info@" emails go.

Eventually, I got my long-distance running again (I was using a phone card in the meantime), after confirming that I wanted to "switch back" to Yak. (At this point it seemed hopeless to try to explain I'd never switched away.) I was told it would take 5 business days. A week later, still no long distance. When I tried to make a call, I got taken to the music you hear when you are on hold at Yak. I called customer service. I was told the problem was that I had not informed my previous long distance carrier I wanted to switch away from them. There was no previous carrier, but never mind. I was on the phone with perhaps the one competent person at Yak customer service. She actually opened my file and realized the company was still blocking my access because of the old, expired credit card. Voila.

It was all just a bad memory. Until yesterday, when I received an email -- twice -- from Yak customer service. Apparently the automated response to emails sent to the black hole of "info@" kicks in after a month or so. Here is what it said (italics in original, my commentary in bold):

We apologize for the lengthy delay of answering your customer request. Due to the overwhelming popularity of our recently added yak products & services, we have been inundated with email and telephone inquiries. (Translation: we do not have enough customer service reps. We are apologizing, but we don't feel bad enough to actually do anything about it -- like hire more people. Plus: "delay of answering"? Huh?)

If you still have an outstanding customer service issue, please accept our apologies and contact us by dialing toll-free to 1-877-445-0835 or resend your original request to info@yak.ca. (We have ignored your original request. If you would like the illusion that there is a faint hope your problem will be solved, send it to us again. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!)

We appreciate your enduring patience during this exciting time.

That last line really got me. "Enduring patience" is probably more apt than they realize. But "exciting time"? Exciting for whom? I tell ya, I am filled with excitement waiting for them to actually solve the problem they caused. And I am sure the poor souls in their call centre are brimming with excitement trying to do the work for which they have clearly not been trained.

Why I hate Purolator

Here's how FedEx works. When someone sends me a package with FedEx, the company's local driver comes to my house to deliver it. It used to be that if I wasn't home, they would call me to see if I would be around soon so they could drop it off. If I wasn't, they would come back the next day. (Now the way it works is they leave it in a pre-arranged spot whether I'm home or not.) When I want to send something via FedEx, I call them and they come pick it up. Or I take it to the local drop, and they pick it up from there.

Here is how Purolator works. They come to my house with a package. If I'm not home, they don't try to deliver it again. Instead, they leave a note saying the package is available for pickup at their local agent. Is their local agent the post office? You know, an outlet of Canada Post, which actually owns Purolator and has convenient hours, like opening at 8 AM?

No, their agent is a local business that sells wine and beer-making supplies and bottled water, and offers dry cleaning and a Sears pickup service. They open at 10 AM most days.

I take the note off my door, and naively head down to the local agent to pick up my package. "Oh no, it won't be here today. He'll drop it off when he comes back tomorrow." Because they only open at 10, of course, if you have a job in the city or somewhere else to be that takes you out of the community earlier in the morning, you are screwed.

How about using Purolator to send packages? 1) Go to the post office (a branch of the corporation that owns Purolator, remember). 2) Hand over the package. 3) Be told that Purolator won't deliver to that address. 4) Listen to suggestion that maybe the UPS store or the local weird little bottled-water-and-whatever store might know if there's a way to get Purolator to deliver that address ("They really don't tell us anything about Purolator") and 5) Send package using another company before 6) Remembering to ask clients to please use FedEx instead.