Author: Mr. Cheap

I recently had an unsettling experience. My landlord seems like a bit of a scatterbrain (I sent my rent check the first month, and she CLAIMED she didn’t receive it until 2 weeks later). Not wanting to have a repeat of this situation, I sent my next letter registered. It was recorded at Canada Post that they attempted to deliver it and she wasn’t home they left a notice. On the 3rd of the next month, she sends me a nasty e-mail claiming my rent is late.

After I sent her the information to track the parcel (and walked her through how to look it up), she calls me back and says that she never got the notice and the post office is telling her they lost the package.

I called Canada Post up myself, they said that the local office shouldn’t have said that, that they need to launch an investigation to try to track down the package before they declare it lost and would call me back within 5 business days. The woman assured me that if they lost it they’d refund my postage and refund what it cost me to cancel the check (I told her the package contained a check and a lease). I was a little put out that that’s the only compensation they were offering.

They never called back.

I called, talked to an unpleasant man who says they declared the package missing the day after I called and that their records showed they had called and left a message (they hadn’t). He said a check had been sent to refund my postage and that they wouldn’t refund my canceled check fee ($12.50). He didn’t even apologize for Canada Post losing the letter.

TD Canada Trust, my main bank for checking, happily charged me the $12.50, but warned me that they don’t guarantee that it will actually be canceled (huh?). Instead, they’ll try their best, but if someone cashes the canceled check, I’m on the hook for it. Nice business idea, charge people money and tell them that they MAY get what they paid for. I’m glad to be a bank owner so I benefit from some of their crookedness!

I find it shocking that Canada Post is losing REGISTERED mail, and couldn’t care less. This is the first time its happened to me, but from their attitude it seems like this is a regular occurance and they don’t really care.

To pay my rent I e-mailed my landlord money and scanned and e-mailed the lease document. My landlord wanted post dated checks for the remainder of the lease, but I’m hesitant to lose a bunch of checks (and have to pay $12.50 each to MAYBE cancel them).

How do you ship important things that you need to get to their destination? Has Canada Post / US Postal Service lost your mail? Has FedEx or any of the other commercial carriers lost mail on you? How did they handle it when the mail was lost?

Miss Manners once wrote that there’s a fundamental conflict in customer service in Western countries. We like the maxim “The Customer is Always Right” (at least when we’re the customer), but our society is built on the idea that all citizens are equal. How can one person always be in the wrong if they’re equal to everyone else?

Like most of us, I’ve been on both sides of the issue (receiving and providing customer service). Probably like most other people, I’ve been the irate customer, and I’ve dealt with irate customers. Of course, I was always in the right (I was justified in being angry, but none of my customers were).

I have never lived or done business under the motto “the customer is always right”. The brother of a friend of mine had a funny saying to unreasonable customers: “this isn’t Burger King: your way all the way!” I don’t think that’s even Burger King’s motto but it made me laugh.

There’s been a backlash in recent years where people have started “firing their clients”, meaning they stop doing business with customers who are more trouble then they’re worth. I’ve definitely done this. The more rational (and business-savvy) approach is to just charge difficult customers more until they leave on their own, or pay you enough to make it worth dealing with them. There’s a dangerous element to this in that if you get too much on your high horse and become a prima donna to do business with, you may drive away customers (and drive yourself out of business).

I found what I’m fairly sure is Violent Acres‘ old blog, and she used to work at Taco Bell (which it’s interesting how she got from there to the independently wealthy woman she claims to be now). She makes the comment in one post that she couldn’t care less when people got angry at her and said they were never going to eat at Taco Bell again (why would she care? She didn’t get paid on a per-customer basis, and if that store went under she’d be able to get a similar job pretty easily).

I definitely think all people providing services at any business deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That being said, its quite frustrating when you’re the customer and they’re rude to you just because they’re having a bad day (and there’s not much you can do about it).

In some ways, rather than a “customer is always right” environment, I think this is a healthier way to do business (when both sides stand up for themselves and either can refuse to do business with the other). Unreasonable people are rejected, whether they’re the customer or the provider. In most situations (other than fast food), after they’ve lost enough businesses partners, they’ll eventually realize that its worthwhile being civil to people they want to do business with.

While visiting the parental units for Thanksgiving, my dad told an intersting story about what happened to their van when he went to get an oil change.

There was a young man (my dad said he looked about 16) who was driving the vehicles into the bay for the oil change.  My dad thought he was acting kind of nervous when he took the keys.  After the oil change, my dad went to start the van and the key wouldn’t turn in the ignition.  After trying for a minute or two, he got out of the van and the young guy ran over and asked what the problem was.  After my dad said the key wasn’t turning in the ignition, the guy said “I’ve seen that before!”, ran off and got a can of WD-40, sprayed some in the ignition and it started.

My dad said he was doing everything but holding his hand out, clearly expecting some sort of reward for getting the car started.  My dad was suspicious about the whole situation (he hadn’t been having any problems with the ignition before this, found the guy’s behaviour quite odd, and was skeptical that the guy would have known EXACTLY what the problem was, and been able to fix it immediately).  Since then ignition has locked up again repeatedly, and each time it requires WD-40 to get it to turn (and start).

My dad’s theory is that the young guy sprayed something in the ignition to make it seize up (and WD-40 fixes the problem temporarily).  He figured the guy hits a few people each day, and tries to make a bit of money getting a “reward” when he gets their vehicle going again.

I’ve done a Google search and haven’t come across a scam like this.  For anyone who knows much about cars, do you think the guy did something to my dad’s van, or do you think he’s being needlessly suspicious (and maybe should have given the guy $20 for fixing the problem on the spot and saving him from having to call a tow truck)?

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
-Lord Kelvin

One of the most important first step before making any change in your life is to figure out how to measure it. Its so easy to delude ourselves. I’ve found coming up with an objective measure, then referring to it in order to gauge progress, is the right way to move forward with most goals in life. Logging, measuring something regularly and recording it, is an excellent way to do this.

When I was first losing weight, I would weigh myself every day. Some weight-loss approaches caution against this, as your weight will fluctuate because of things like how much water is in your system, when in the day you weigh yourself or how recently you’ve eaten. In The Hacker’s Diet, John Walker acknowledges this difficulty, but instead of giving up on measurement, he proposes a useful correction, namely to use a 10 day moving average. This is a known approach for removing the jitter (small erratic movements in mostly random directions) from data and seeing what the trend is (some people use a similar technique for “predicting” if the stock market or an individual stock is moving up or down).

Calorie count does the math for you and lets you enter your weight every day. Then they’ll provide the trend line (I used it before it was bought by about.com, no idea if its still good or not).

I credit my daily weighings and being able to constantly evaluate whether I was losing weight (and how quickly I was losing it) as being key to my weight loss. I tried the same approach when I wanted to reduce my living expenses, and was able to drop them from about $2,300 / month to around $1,300 / month.

I’m currently tracking my networth, and every month I can see how I’m doing at general wealth accumulation. I also track my passive income every month, and am looking forward to the day when it matches my living expenses.

I sometimes wonder if I’d had more metrics when I was starting my company if I might have done better. If I’d committed to trying to connect with X new customers each week, or grow billable revenue by Y% each month, it might have kept me focused on the more important aspects of the business.

Any changes in your life that you can’t think of how to log (I’m happy to make suggestions)? Have you ever used logging to enact change in your life?