On the road...

I’ve been off the air lately and just now getting caught up on everything. I’m up in Inukjuak, a community of about 1,300 in Northern Quebec doing a Store Manager Relief job. The house I’m in had no telephone and it took about 3 week to convince Bell Canada that the dwelling even existed. According to their records it was demolished several years ago and they could see no reason why I wanted a telephone installed in a pile of rubble. Finally I called one of their service representatives in Ottawa and asked her if she had a telephone. “Of course,” she said and I then asked her if she had a house. When she said yes I said “prove it to me” and I had my telephone the next day so my internet connection is now up and running.

I know, they have their systems to follow and we have ours. For example, we used to have control over customer accounts at the store level and now it’s all handled by our head office people. As a result when we may have someone we know is an excellent customer with years of loyalty to us who wants to maybe just charge that one more thing we can’t approve it. To be fair, when the stores had full control things sometimes got out of hand and we can normally also get in touch with someone at our head office to stretch limits a bit but it can be a bit inconvenient on a busy day to have a customer wait in line with 10 people behind them while we get approval. Would I like to go back to store control? Not a chance because this makes things a lot more smoother and also much easier to say no to an overdue or over limit customer when necessary.

Anyway, this is one of the nicest locations we have in our entire system which stretches all across Canada, into Alaska, the Caribbean and now all the way to Guam way out in the Pacific Ocean. If you want to see some great photos of the Inukjuak area just go to WWW.PITUVIK.COM and check out the photography area. This is one fantastic place to visit so feel free to contact the Pituvik people to see about your next (or first) vacation to the north. And to you Toronto people out there… NO, Barrie is NOT part of the arctic, get out in the real world will you?