Author: Dan Dickinson

Cursed City: or A Tale of Two Air Canada Employees

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Back in 2018 we hit a passport snafu on our way to Amsterdam, resulting in tears and dejection at the airport, followed by a quick rally and an excellent trip, the main purpose of which was to see our friend Tess, Amsterdam merely being a stop along the way.

About a month ago, as we prepared for another trip — again heading to Amsterdam for a few days before travelling onward to see Tess — we realized my passport was facing the same problem Lindsay’s had nearly six years before: it would expire in just under six months, the cutoff for our eventual destination. At least we caught it with weeks to spare, not at the airport like last time. I procured the rush job at the passport office, and had it in my hands with days to spare. Crisis averted, right?

Except. Last night we went to the airport, all set for our adventure, but definitely running late, and traffic (even at 9:00 on a Saturday night) was so brutal we were becoming more late by the second. We arrived at the airport 90 minutes before our flight, and went right to the kiosks. We tried to check in; because our original flight had been delayed, the kiosk forced us to take some meal vouchers we didn’t want, then kicked us out of the session. We started over, this time managing to get our boarding passes (which we also didn’t want) but telling us we missed the cutoff for baggage check-in at the automated kiosks. The employee wandering around — who knew we were going to Amsterdam before we even started — told us we’d have to go to the counter to drop our bags. We ran to the counter, where the Air Canada employee told us we missed the 90-minute cutoff entirely, that we couldn’t board our flight, and there was nothing she could do.

So, look: I know we should have been there earlier. Somehow both of us blanked on the appropriate arrival time, and then were late leaving, so we wear that. We played fast and loose with time, leaving ourselves little/no buffer, and once again Toronto traffic fucked us. I should know better. We own that bit, for sure. But what rankled was the following:

  • The Air Canada employee was mean. Really mean. Like, made Lindsay cry mean. Instead of saying, “Sorry, you’ve missed the flight, there’s nothing we can do.” she led off with “Why are you late?! Why are you getting here so late? What’s the reason?” A charitable interpretation of this would be that she was looking for the magic explanation that would let her bend the rules, but she seemed intent on berating us publicly. Everyone around was staring. It felt very much like she was scolding us.
  • I pointed out that we might have made the cut off if the kiosk had worked properly, or the first employee had simply directed us to the counter. That didn’t matter to her.
    • A slight aside: she kept saying the rule has always been that you arrive at the airport 3 hours before an international flight. Never in my life have I arrived that early, and for most of my life I was a very cautious (read: early) flier. My memory was always that you arrive 1 hour before domestic flights, 1.5 hours before US flights, and 2 hours before international flights. Perhaps that memory is pre-Pandemic thinking, but that’s what was in my head.
  • At one point she said, “The flight starts boarding in 40 minutes, you’d never make it!” I looked at the empty airport, pointed out that we have Nexus and could get through security quickly, and said it would be absolutely no problem to make it for the start of boarding, let alone the end of boarding, by then. She pivoted back to, well, anyway you missed the baggage cutoff.
  • Since we had our boarding passes I asked if our bags could be sent on the next flight to AMS. She said no. She didn’t call the gate. She didn’t check with anyone. She did absolutely nothing. Back in 2015 when (once again) traffic had made me late for an international flight, we arrived ten minutes after the flight had closed and the Air Canada staff called the gate, got us on, and told us to run. The employee last night just chastised us. Only when Lindsay broke down in tears in front of her did she let up and say, “Sorry.”
  • I asked if she could help us re-book. She said no, and that we should walk to the other end of the airport where there were “white phones” that we could use to re-book. Great. Thanks. Very helpful.

We attempted to collect ourselves before setting off down the terminal. I looked for a special desk, but saw nothing. Then I realized there was a bank of unmanned white telephones, looking like they’d been bought in bulk from Radio Shack in 1992. Lindsay described it as “demeaning” and I didn’t disagree. The first one we tried didn’t work properly, so I tried the second. And that’s where the night changed.

I didn’t catch the name of the agent we spoke to, but my goodness: what a star. She was sympathetic. She was helpful. Her information was clear. And she got us on the next flight to Amsterdam the following night, in the same class, sitting next to one another…for no fee. What? WHAT? When she took me off hold and told me all this, I almost couldn’t process what she was saying. I was prepared to spend hours on hold with unhelpful agents and be forced to pay for a whole new flight (all of which happened in 2018), so when I replayed back to her what she’d told me, she confirmed it all and told me she hoped we had an amazing trip. The confirmation was already in my inbox. I can barely even remember what I said to her, but Lindsay (an uninformed bystander to this whole thing; it’s not like ancient handsets have a speakerphone option) tells me I was effusive in my thanks and praise. Seriously, that lady saved our evening, and maybe a good portion of our trip.

What a difference an empathetic and empowered employee can make. I know it was our own fault for being in that position in the first place, but the first Air Canada employee neither expressed any kind of empathy nor tried so much as a phone call to help us out — which, given my own past experience, might have worked. She stood in awfully stark contrast to her colleague.

So, two lessons learned: get to the airport earlier, and don’t travel to Amsterdam. (Just kidding. Love you AMS.)

Front-loading

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Why do the weeks leading up to vacation always seem the busiest? I suppose the pressure to pre-emptively “make up” for the weeks away (work, errands, friend check-ins, etc.) plus the actual logistics of travelling make that fairly real…though I’m sure there’s some confirmation bias at play as well.

Real or imagined, it’s certainly felt like a busy week.

I realized my passport was going to expire sooner than I thought, so I spent a couple hours at the passport office on Monday.

I wrote my WSET 3 exam Thursday, thereby crippling my own hand by having to write for 2.5 hours. With an actual pencil, readers! Like I’m in the olden times or something. Anyway, it’ll take two months to find out how that went, but I’m very glad to be done studying.

I finished season 3 of The Bear, which wasn’t nearly as good as the first two seasons, but I still thought it was okay. I also watched a lot of Euro matches, and luckily tuned into final few moments of the Canada-Venezuela Copa America match — just in time to see Davies score, Crépeau save, and Koné send Canada through.

I met Matt for lunch at Ardo. Lindsay and I had drinks at Mercantino e Vini (you can buy glasses or bottles from the shop out front, and sit in the cozy seats at the back) with Kirsten, and then we all ate a late dinner down the street at Ascari.

It won’t be a quiet weekend. At this point I’m just hoping for manageable.

Knowing that someone would have wanted it this way makes me angry

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Back in the before-times when Lindsay was recovering from her shattered ankle, I used to play her the Chicago song “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”…well, every day, during her long road to recovering from surgery and walking again. I’d hear the song a hundred times growing up, but only then did I notice something I’d missed as a kid…and now I can’t hear the song without noticing it.

The drumming at the end of the song is terrible.

I’ll jump right to where it gets bad, at the 2:40 mark where the song shifts into the fast-paced chug:

It’s a mess. Clumsy fills, flubbed strokes, missed timing. Part of me cringes every time I hear it now.

And it’s not like Danny Seraphine (pretty sure he was the drummer in Chicago back then) didn’t know what he was doing — he was an accomplished drummer. Like, here you can see him play the same song perfectly well:

Also, please note in that live version the snare drum does NOT sound like someone has wrapped it in a duvet for the song’s first half. Like, Russ Kunkel thinks that snare drum sounds too muted. (Sorry, drummer joke.)

I don’t get it. It’s like someone heard a version with no Peter Cetera mess-ups, but the worst possible drum track, and just said…yup, sounds good, press it. Like, how could this became the primary artefact of the song? It even kept surviving the multiple remasters that were released over the years. What, someone couldn’t have gotten back in there and touched some shit up?

“They’re not only getting bad advice, they’re getting illegal advice.”

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I’ve been meaning to talk about this article for months, because it infuriates me. I spent a total of 22 years working in the banking industry: 14 at a big six bank, and 8 more at a smaller challenger bank (which railed against the kind of stuff described below). Based on what I saw working at that big bank, nothing in this article surprises me.

From the CBC:

Marketplace has spoken confidentially to current and former bank employees from all the big banks: TD, RBC, BMO, Scotiabank and CIBC. CBC is concealing their identities because they fear professional repercussions. All expressed similar concerns about enormous sales pressure they say leads to potentially costly or otherwise dangerous financial products being pushed on customers.

“I had to mislead customers into getting products that they didn’t need, to reach my sales target,” said a recent BMO employee.

“It’s not a customer service … environment,” a former Scotiabank employee said. “We’re there to sell — and make money for the bank.”

While I never worked in a branch, it was common knowledge that this happened. Branch staff had monthly sales quotas. I personally witnessed — as a customer long after I left that bank, mind you, not as an employee — staff in a different big six bank offering products to a customer that they obviously did not need, not because they wanted to, but because the system prompted them to and they knew they’d be in trouble if they didn’t ask.

They will push credit products and other revenue-generating products in order to meet sales quotas, vs. giving advice which would benefit the customer. From the same article:

In a second test, Marketplace sent a colleague wearing hidden cameras to meet with financial advisors at the big five banks.

She posed as a customer with a $50,000 inheritance coming soon and wanted financial advice. If asked, she said she also had a $350,000 mortgage and $17,000 in credit card debt.

None of the advisors asked about existing debt, instead recommending that our tester invest the full $50,000 in products like GICs and mutual funds, which help bank employees hit their sales targets.

When our tester raised the credit card debt herself, only BMO and CIBC clearly recommended that she use part of the supposed inheritance to pay it off in full.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of budgeting and money management would tell you to pay down high-interest debt before investing. But they get away with this predatory bullshit because customers assume that bank branch employees have a fiduciary duty to help them. THEY 👏 DO 👏 NOT 👏.

In one recording, a manager tells Jeraline that in order to make more sales, she should remember that she does not work in customer service. 

“We are investment advisors,” he says. “You have to have a bit of aggression.”

Unlike registered financial advisers, financial advisors (spelled with an “o”) at banks have no fiduciary requirement to their customers.

I say this to everyone who tells me about their investments at their bank. 9 times out of 10 it’s some mediocre bank-owned mutual fund which was recommended not because it’s the best option for the customer, but because it makes the bank the most money. Look at this list of the largest mutual funds in Canada, or this table from Morningstar.ca showing the most popular funds on their site last year.

7 of those 10 funds are from big banks, despite their largely mediocre performance. In fact, by the time you subtract the MER, 4 of those 7 big bank mutual funds earned less last year than my everyday bank account. The only reason these funds grew so big is because bank staff recommend them regardless of their performance or suitability to the customer.

Most people are surprised when I tell them the bank employee who sold them a high-fee mutual fund owes them no fiduciary duty. They shouldn’t be. Those banks are designed to maximize their own profits at the expense of their customers, in spite of their spokespeople’s protestations or what their multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns tell you. I didn’t see that — or didn’t want to see it — until I stopped working at one…and I have a Commerce degree and an MBA, plus decades of hands-on experience. My heart breaks for the people who get taken advantage of day in and day out by a predatory oligopoly.

Grande-Digue

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We’ve just gotten home from two weeks on the east coast. We wanted to be out of the/any city for a while, so we booked an AirBnB in Grande-Digue NB, about 30 minutes from downtown Moncton, so I could continue to work.

The place was right on the water, lovely and private without being isolated. We enjoyed the sunshine and salt air and gorgeous view across Shediac Bay. We saw plenty of birds (herons, ducks, even a bald eagle) and a deer wandered through our yard the first night. We relaxed on the back deck and on the lawn and on the couch and on the beach. We had lobster rolls and donairs (and donair pizza) and fresh produce from Les Digues and fried clams from local staple Chez Leo. We even squeezed in a quick trip to the farm to see my family, and one day Lindsay’s mom dropped by.

I did end up being in Moncton for work most days (and tried a few new places, like Mama’s Charcoal BBQ, the Moncton instance of The Old Triangle, and the Dolma rooftop bar) but most days I was pretty anxious to get home to this peaceful view:

It really felt like home by the time we left. I think it’ll really hit me the first time I have to commute on the Gardiner.

YOU DON’T SAY

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Toronto drivers facing a soul-crushing 250% spike in travel time on the Gardiner. [via]

A new study reveals that travel times on the Gardiner Expressway — a major transportation route that is traveled by approximately 140,000 vehicles each day — have increased up to 250% on the westbound lanes during morning rush hour and 230% on eastbound lanes in the afternoon rush hour as a result of the latest construction project on this route.

Αέρα

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Earlier this week I met up with Dan and Abtin for dinner at Aera, a new steak & sushi place on the top floor of the new Well complex at Front & Spadina. By the time I fought my way through Toronto traffic, the lads had squeaked an order of Champagne in under the happy hour wire. Good thinking.

The view was pretty tremendous — we were sat right at the window, staring at the CN tower, the lake, etc. Apparently the tables on the other side get the sunset, but we weren’t bothered. It was busy — between the view and it making Toronto Life’s list of best new restaurants there were crowds of people as interested in being seen as eating. But it didn’t feel douchey or crowded at all.

The best part of the night was seeing them both and catching up, of course. Dan even brought a bottle of 2016 Domaine Queylus ‘Summus’ for us to share. I like that we all keep wines tucked away with the idea of sharing it over a great steak.

Here’s what we ate & drank:

  • Bubbles
    • NV Veuve Clicquot, Brut, Champagne
  • Appetizers
    • New Brunswick oysters
    • spicy scallop roll: avocado, spicy scallops, chipotle mayo & tobiko
    • 2022 Domaine de la Pépière, Muscadet Sur Lie, Loire
  • Mains
    • 16oz US Prime ribeye
    • 8oz Australian A8-9 Wagyu
    • whipped potatoes w/ buttermilk, butter
    • crispy brussels sprouts w/ garlic, chili, sherry
    • wild & tame mushrooms w/ thyme, pearl onions
    • 2016 Domaine Queylus ‘Summus’ Bordeaux blend, Niagara Peninsula, Ontario
    • 2008 Olga Raffault ‘Les Picasses’, Chinon, Loire
  • Dessert
    • 2019 Château Coutet, 1er Grand Cru Classé Sauternes (for me; the other two were still finishing their red)

L’ours

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Between sickness and lack-of-playoff-making by my favourite teams, I’ve been able to catch up on a lot of TV over the past few months.

  • Drops Of God was like beautiful catnip to a wine nerd (and would-be travel nerd) like me.
  • Silo felt like it had so much promise but turned into a slog by the end.
  • Similarly, For All Mankind started out very strong and medium-high-concept (how would history have changed if the Russians landed on the moon before the US?) but then it got stretched into four seasons.
  • I was utterly mistaken about the premise of Black Earth Rising (I don’t know why, but I thought it was about aliens, not about Rwanda) and I ended up really liking it. As much as one can like a story about genocide. I appreciated it, I guess?
  • Season 3 of Slow Horses was a good as ever — the story kind of doesn’t matter nearly as much as the charisma of the actors. The scene where Lamb asks Roddy, “Can you talk me through your thinking here?” was comedy gold.
  • I love Band Of Brothers, so it makes sense that I liked Masters of the Air. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are doing their best to tell all the WWII stories they can before that war fades from collective memory. (Though, this Substack post by Dan Gardner suggests we might already be there.)
  • The Bear lived up to the hype. I actually liked season 2 better; “Fishes” was the star-studded flashback episode that garnered all the hype, but for my money “Forks” was the real magic. Glad I watched it just in time to feel momentum heading into season 3 next month.
  • Speaking of: I am extremely excited for the start of season 2 of House Of The Dragon in a few weeks.

Highs and Lows

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The week started off well but got progressively worse.

Last weekend Lindsay’s brother #2 arrived for a week. Always fun when he’s in the house. I’d just completed my WSET3 week 3 tasting (more on that in some other post) which meant there were a bunch of delicious white wines available. We ordered Thai and drank grand cru Alsace Pinot Gris and Tokaji for dessert.

On Sunday night we went to White Lily for dinner, and stopped at Chez Nous on the way home.

On Monday I met someone for a work drink at The Chase, then hustled back home for dinner at Wynona with Lindsay and Laura. I don’t remember exactly what we had, but I think it was something along these lines:

  • Grilled focaccia
  • Ontario burrata, forced rhubarb, wild fennel, brown butter & pistachio vinaigrette
  • Honey roasted carrots, chermoula, tahini, pumpkin seed dukkah $20
  • Ramp tonnarelli, Manila clams, Calabrian chili
  • Ziti, braised shortrib, mustard greens, Parmigiano-Reggiano
  • Blood orange posset, white chocolate & thyme ganache, salted honey crumb, meringue
  • Bottles of Nero d’Avola and Syrah

Tuesday and Wednesday were mostly unremarkable, but by Wednesday evening I was starting to feel sick — sort throat, stuffed up, etc. No one else in the house was sick even though we’d done everything together. It was probably too soon to develop anything I’d picked up the day before at the office, so…I guess it was that work drink on Monday? Who knows. Anyway, Thursday was very tough, and by Friday I was barely able to work. We had reservations for the three of us at Ricky + Olivia’s but I was so sick I had to bow out. I was in bed by 8:00. Today hasn’t been much better; I’m definitely scuffling.

As always, the lone bright spot about being sick is that I sit still long enough to catch up on some TV, so I’ve watched all of S1 and half of S2 of The Bear.

Parapont

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Earlier this week I had a work dinner at Paradise Grapevine on Geary. I’m rarely impelled to travel to the west end of Toronto (little wonder: that Uber trip took 47 minutes) but I’ve always wanted to check out the urban winery, so…off I went. It turned into a fun little evening. We ordered just about everything on the menu; the duck leg, heirloom carrots, and beef cheek were the standouts. We got bottles of Cremant de Jura, Paradise Grapevine’s own skin-contact Pinot Gris / Muscat Ottonel, as well as their Cab Franc from the Wilms vineyard, and finally glasses of Don PX.

Afterward, a few of us walked down the street to 915 Dupont for a couple of cocktails. My old fashioned made with Japanese whiskey was decent, but a little too smoky. But my Negroni made with coffee-infused gin was very tasty indeed. I had a sip of somebody’s Big Wave cocktail, and wish I’d ordered one. I was not nearly cool enough to be in that place, but I liked it.