Family and Friends

Air Canada – no more?

It seems like my favorite topic of discussion is Air Canada. I flew Westjet yesterday, out of a snowstorm in Thunder Bay and landed in Toronto a hilarious THREE HOURS before the suckers on the Jazz flight that was scheduled to leave at the same time.

On my flight, I caught the CNN “Air Canada Crisis” update. Here is what I learned.

1) Air Canada had an operating deficit of 1 billion dollars last year
2) Air Canada owes 3 billion dollars to it’s employees pension plan
3) Air Canada has turfed it’s CEO Montie Brewer and re-appointed Calin Rovinescu to clean up the mess
4) Air Canada has foolishly locked itself into a fixed fuel cost of $99 per barrell or some stupid thing.

So, they are once again on the brink of closure.

I cannot imagine how this is even possible. I mean seriously, your pricing is competitive to Westjet, you have a larger coverage area, more flights, smaller planes, fewer flight attendants and you aren’t even comtributing to the pension plan. How on EARTH did you manage to lose one freaking billion dollars????

I guess it can only be because you have fewer travellers.

Well I have some advice 🙂 here it is:

Air Canada, if you want more business, BE NICE.

That’s right. Be NICE to your travellers. Because let me tell ya, travelling is stressfull enough, the LAST thing you need is crakyass airline personnel. I cannot remember the last time I had an issue with Air Canada and I was treated respectfully.

I get it, air travellers are occasionally difficult to deal with. We’re cranky, sometimes we’re late, sometimes we don’t have the proper paperwork. Do you think snapping and bitching will help? I guess it might, if you dont want to be an airline anymore.

Let’s take your archnemesis, Westjet. They are nice. See? They have friendly, smiling staff. They treat all their customers the same (no elite, you get to board first, here are special fancy bag tags etc) they don’t lose luggage, and when they screw up, they tell you they are sorry. I had bad service ONCE in my life with Westjet. ONCE. So I phoned them. I said “Hey, ummm…ya, I had bad service. I’m kinda not used to that.” You know what they said? They said “What!!! Bad service! We’re sorry! Here is a free flight.”

Take notes, Air Canada 🙂

Flyers Please

My mother has been on a rampage about flyer delivery for the past five years.

Not that she gets too many flyers and her recycle bin is overflowing, but that she DOESN’T get the flyers.  She wants them.  I told her she could have mine, but that’s not good enough. She wants them delivered to her house by the assigned flyer deliveryperson, likely a 12 year old with a less than flourishing work ethic.

Specifically, she wants the Future Shop flyers.

Now, normally, I wouldn’t care so much about this, however, since she has decided that life without the Future Shop flyer isn’t really life at all, she has taken to bombarding my husband with phone calls, email requests and has reduced camp evening dinner time chatter to her long standing fight to get the future shop flyers delivered to the house. Mike and I so look forward to the relaxing evenings, drink in hand, and the constant rambling about all the flyers she didn’t get that week. I think she assumes that since Mike is Manager of Operations at the Thunder Bay Future Shop he will somehow have a certain influence on the head office advertising department, who will in turn have influcence on the purchasing group, who will in turn have influence on the person that issues purchase orders to the Chronicle Journal to somehow go through THAT chain of command and eventually, hopefully, get the 12 year old flyer deliveryperson to actually place a flyer in her mailbox.

To me, it seems like ALOT of effort to get information that is readily available online at www.futureshop.ca but I digress. I think in the last slew of flyer ramblings I caught some notion of her bringing the flyers with her out to camp and reading them there. (Not that you can actually SHOP from camp, but again, I don’t pretent to understand her logic). A further point to mention here is that since Mike is the manager, he actually gets her BETTER pricing than in the flyers on most items to in all actuality the flyers themselves are useless to her.

Recently, she has made her way up the chain of command at the Chronicle Journal and claims to have Colin Bruce himself delivering her flyers. She has his business card, and each day for the past five years that there hasn’t been a flyer in her mailbox, he gets a voicemail. Then he gets his ass in his car, drives over to her place and personally hand delivers the flyers. Insanity at its finest.

So, Mike and I had one of those “we’ve-been-married-so-long-we-share-a-brain” moments when he found an old flyer from 2002 during a routine warehouse clean out. “Oh ya,” I said. “That is SO going in mom’s mailbox!!” Later that night, we found ourselves in stealth mode as we drove up to the house, popped the flyer in her mailbox and backed the car out of the driveway in neutral, laughing our asses off the entire way home. I could almost picture my mother puzzling over the yellowed, dog eared flyer of ’02 while wondering why on earth Future Shop would be trying to blow out VCR’s. I actually felt a teeny bit of remorse at the earful the poor receptionist at the Chronicle was going to get when mom phoned there the next day demanding why a flyer takes 6 years to get delivered.

So we waited.

By dinnertime yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore. I called her. Turns out, yes, she had checked the mailbox. Yes, she had seen the flyer and she had one fleeting thought something like “Weird, it’s kinda yellow and they seem to be trying to rid themselves of old technology” and paff! the flyer went into the garbage, thus proving my theory that SHE DOESN’T EVEN READ THEM!!! She just wants them delivered on general principle. 🙂 Love you mom!