Aeroplan should make this the new corporate logo.

A few posts ago I told you about my plans to practice WWMD (What Would McQueen Do?) for a while.  I was going to see if I could use the power of hubris to improve my life – I would discover if behaving like a gaping asshole with a deep, abiding sense of unwarranted entitlement would help me get all the things I want.

So far, it’s not going great, but not for a lack of will – I simply haven’t seen that many people.   Just as a mugger requires a victim, hubristic assholery cannot exist in a vacuum – it requires the presence of people to be manifest.    Without ears to hear, feelings to hurt, or sensibilities to offend, a jagoff trying to get his way without the benefit of an audience is little more than a tree falling in the forest.

Moreover, premeditated hubris requires a transaction of some sort – party y wants you to provide them with x,  which you’ll give so long as they meet your unrealistic demands.   So far, not a single person has needed something from me – not clients, not friends…no one.   In fact, this month has made it apparent that were I to die tomorrow, it would be several days before anyone noticed, and only because the smell reached the hallway.

The closest I’ve come to using hubris involves a tiff I’m having with Air Canada’s loyalt program, Aeroplan, and currently I think I’m on the losing end of the exchange.  It involves my efforts to redeem travel points for a trip to see my mom on her birthday –  booking the flight was so excruciating that I thought of sending a Flaming Bag of Shit to the staffers at Aeroplan.  Instead, I thought a well-worded letter would be appropriate – I figured telling someone in the politest terms possible to go fuck themselves would provoke a more meaningful reaction then flying off the handle and going full-Osbourne-Family on them. However, I’m now wondering if I shouldn’t have turned up the McQueen and unleashed the full, four-letter-worded force of my hubris.   Read below and and tell me what you think:

Dear Aeroplan:

This is probably the first time I’ve written a letter to complain about a service provider, but my experience using Aeroplan in the last few days has been so singularly infuriating,  I felt it behooved me to write.   I hope I can take some comfort in knowing this letter will be read, and lessons or corrections may be applied from it.

Starting this past Sunday, I attempted to book a flight using my Aeroplan points.   This round trip was to proceed from Toronto to Calgary in mid-March.   I chose two particular flights,  for which I would have required 45,000 points.

However, when I tried to reserve those flights,  I could not – the site would either time out and I’d be forced to log in again, or I would get an error message reading “due to an error on our part, we cannot process your request.” I may’ve attempted to do this at least 5 times before I received a final error message that said your site was down for maintenance.  I then tried to call your contact centre, only to find it closed – perhaps for the best, since I wasn’t sure if I would be able to exclude expletives from my conversation with any of your operators.

This pattern continued for the next several days, the only exception being that I made more attempts to call your contact centre, only to wait for periods of up to an hour.  Oftentimes life would intervene, as in I would actually have to live – go to appointments, visit the bathroom, sleep, feed myself, etc – and I’d be compelled to hang up.  At the end of one those interminable waits, I finally reached an operator, who either couldn’t hear me or felt I’d failed to respond quickly enough, as she said hello then disconnected our call before I’d said a word.  Additional efforts to reach an operator proved fruitless, so in desperation I returned to the website, where I was finally able to make a reservation.  In all, the process took five days, by which time the points required to book the flight had more than doubled to 95 000.

This is the first instance in my life as a consumer where substandard service has ended up costing me more than simply time and aggravation.   It’s been enough for me to reconsider my flight choices when making future travel plans – whereas before I would make Air Canada one of my primary carriers (ed: writer’s embellishment), based on this experience I believe I’ll consider others first in the future.

Perhaps Aeroplan recognizes that people have few options when it comes to traveling domestically, and from a cost benefit perspective there’s little point in providing better service.   Personally, I think it’s not enough to simply offer travelers a rewards incentive program – it should also feel rewarding to use it, if only a little bit.   That Aeroplan clients must feel grateful for even that little bit is a sad reflection on the quality of your service.  I hope the irony of a loyalty program that inspires disloyalty serves to give you pause, and motivates you to make some highly necessary changes.

Sincerely,

Chris Nelson

So…too nice? Not enough McQueen in there? Lemme know what you think…

Being attacked by killer squirrels? There's a blog for that

My dad died before he could see how much the internet has changed our lives.  Had he lived, however, I’m pretty sure he would’ve felt grateful for his lack of options, particularly when it came to the amount and nature of information out there on how to be a Better Man.   There are an infinite number of sites out there, designed to help men live better lives. Having spent many months cruising them during my self-improvement odyssey, I can assure you most of them are bullshit.

However, after wading through the sluices of interweb, I have found a few I keep returning to, probably because they resonate with me – they speak to my sensibilities, and tastes.  I suppose it’s up to every man to find their own, but if you’re like me and you’re looking for some guideposts as to how to be a Better Man, I’ve found I can’t do much better than the following:

Art of Manliness. Perhaps the single best place to go if you’re looking to be more manly, in the truest old-school sense of the word.  AoM has articles on just about every masculine topic imaginable, with tips on everything from cultivating integrity to waxing your mustache to the best way to propose to a woman in snowstorm while making a livable shelter from loose bark and a paper clip.   Admittedly, the prose is a tad earnest, and some of the views expressed may seem somewhat puritan and quaint -  but for AoM founders Brett and Kate McKay, that’s kind of the point.  Brett refers to himself as a “retrosexual” – someone who culls man’s history for his best virtues and finds ways to apply them in post-modern life.  Unlike other men’s sites, AoM isn’t guided by commerce or moral relativism.   AoM is about men choosing to live by a code, no matter how hard that might be.

Valet. Just as the name implies, this site exists to serve.  In this instance, the service is to help guys live as well as they can on the meagre means available to him.  That means no articles or photo spreads featuring products you have no hope of ever affording.  Think of Valet as a practical guide to living the good life on a budget.  Especially good is the daily Edit, a cull of various manly subjects from other sites – basically, it finds the gems lying in the vast steaming turd pile that is the Internet, so you don’t have to waste time getting your hands dirty.  A bit lean on substance, but still smart and definitely stylish.

The Selvedge Yard.  Just as Art of Manliness tries to reverse-engineer the idea of true manliness, TSY founder Jon Patrick does the same thing with style.  Other sites can barf out trends – JP is an historian of good taste.  Through a combination of great photos and simple prose, The Selvedge Yard goes back to the source code, singling out people and events that helped define modern tastes.  The Selvedge Yard shows how true style is about more than what’s on your back.

Bike Exif. This is a motorcycle site, but it’s for more than just gearheads – I think any man who appreciates creativity (but has yet to embrace opera of ballet) will dig it.  The site culls pictures of the most interesting, beautiful bikes in the world.  I wait for each new bike pic like I wait for Christmas.

Popular Mechanics. If you can’t be handsome, be handy – and if you’re neither, then go to Pop Mec’s website.   It won’t turn you into Mike Holmes, but with clever instruction PM can show you how to take on projects around the house, and do them well enough that women won’t look upon you with pity or scorn.

Mr. Bunndini. A haiku-writing dog.  What can I say? I like haiku, and the dog is a friend.

Not that anyone would wish for a natural disaster to occur, but were I forced to chose where it happened, I’d have to pick Japan.   Not that I dislike the Japanese – there’s just isn’t anyone on earth as equipped to deal with calamities of this magnitude as they are.   That we’re seeing so much destruction speaks less to their lack of preparation than the sheer size and strength of the 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

Governments in Japan spend billions on disaster mitigation every year, the building codes are the strictest on the planet, and they have the most elaborate earthquake detection system anywhere. The readiness doesn’t stop at the institutional level – just about every Japanese citizen goes through regular disaster drills, and knows what to do in a crisis.   In addition to first responders and self-defense forces, Japan also has a volunteer disaster relief system, something akin to US Civil Defense during WWII.  There is   infrastructure in place not only to deal with disaster, but to soften it’s long-term impact afterwards – it’s unlikely that in five years Japan’s worst-hit city, Sendai,  will look as bad as a blighted, post-Katrina New Orleans does today.

If this weren’t enough, every third person in Japan must be a trained professional cameraman, judging from the amazing (and increasingly harrowing) footage that surfaces every day.  Anderson Cooper could’ve stayed home for this one – not only is there no abject poverty or outright government incompetence (yet) to inspire his usual righteous indignation, he’s simply gonna get outclassed in the news gathering department.

One can’t understate the scale of the disaster, but the fact is had it occurred anywhere but Japan, it would have been much, much worse.   The earthquake in Haiti wasn’t as strong as Japan’s – 7.0 magnitude, compared to 9.0 – yet recent estimates put the casualty rate as high as 300,000 people.  Think of what’s happening in Japan as a catastrophe done right…or as close to right as any catastrophe can be done.

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If you’re a late night talk show host – any kind of talk show host, for that matter – it would be hard to look at Charlie Sheen’s behaviour this week and not feel as though God loves you and approves of what you’re doing.   MaSheen’s drug-addled media rampage will keep comedians, commentators, and mash-up enthusiasts busy for years – his shit practically writes itself.

So many people are having a laugh at Charlie’s expense that I’m forced to wonder if his bowl-circling turd of an existence isn’t really a brilliant and calculated marketing ploy. He’s been the biggest trending topic on Google for weeks now, his maniacal appearances are ratings gold for whichever talk show he’s on , and reruns of his contemptible sitcom 2 1/2 Men are in some cases attracting even more viewers now than the first time they played.    Take this into account, and his demand for a $1 million raise (he’s already the highest paid actor on TV) seems kinda modest.

At least – I hope this is a marketing ploy, because the alternative is far too sad to contemplate, and says a lot more about us than it does about him.   Here is MaSheen – a broken man immolating himself – and we are rewarding his efforts by lavishing him with more attention than he’s enjoyed at any other time in his life.   Sure, we all love good Hollywood washout stories, but most of them usually play out like morality tales – Robert Downey Jr. is arguably one of the best actors of his generation, but because of his addiction and self-destructive nature his career completely cratered (he was on Ally McBeal, for chrissakes).   He had to clean himself up, atone for his actions, and prove himself worthy again before we accepted him back into the fold – which, I suppose, is as it should be.

MaSheen

Sheen, on the other hand, is currently the biggest circus sideshow in the world  (wayyyy bigger than the Elephant Man) which proves that, deep down, we still haven’t lost our primitive taste for grotesque public spectacles, like hangings.  At some point, the angels of our better nature intervened, and we realized that paying attention is the problem.  At the very least, we’d get bored and move onto something else, but that doesn’t seem to be happening here –   Masheen is everywhere and he’s bigger than ever.   He’s even become a role model – I listened to one radio DJ (no doubt trying to be as ironic as he could)  saying that if he was ever fucked up, he’d want to be as fucked up as Charlie Sheen, because apparently being that fucked up can make you rich.

Assuming Charlie isn’t out Joaquin-ing Joaquin Phoenix, and playing the biggest practical joke every perpetrated on American society (and again, I truly hope he is), what then are we left with?  This is a man who desperately needs to get better, but where’s the incentive to be a Better Man when we reward his lunacy?  Admittedly, Sheen is the one who’s gabbing away to whomever will listen, but that doesn’t mean he needs our attention.  I would say it’s absolutely the last thing he needs. If we choose ignore him and he eventually destroys himself – well, that’s tragic.  If we watch intently and only applaud every time he smokes rock, beats a porn star then comes up with another of those amazing non-sequitors – that makes us culpable, if only a little bit.

Trust me, I realize I sound like a prudish stick-up-his-ass moralist with hints of hypocrite thrown in.  All this week,  I’ve had some amazing laughs because of the man.  But as the week ends and I watch Masheen stray into Colonel Kurtz territory, I feel a little ashamed for finding it funny.   Which is not to say that I like Charlie, or think he’s a good actor, or that he’s worthy of grace or redemption.   All I’m saying is that a Better Man would hear the shit coming out of his mouth and at some point have the decency to stop paying attention.  Enough of us do that, and maybe then Charlie can shut up and start getting the help he needs.