When our credit cards were defrauded a couple of months ago, I took careful steps to update all of our utility bills that are normally charged to our credit cards every month. Two of those automatic monthly charges were our cellphones, which are always charged on the same day, in the middle of the month. To make sure we didn’t miss any payments I either paid the bills by another means, or I updated the account information with our new credit card number before the bill had to be paid. In the case of our cellphones, I updated our payment information with the new credit cards two days after the “your bill is due in 5 days” warning that’s e-mailed out every month. So, despite our credit cards being defrauded, as far as I knew I had paid our cellphone bills, with the new credit card, three days before the bill was due.

So Maria was taken by surprise when in early November, about fifteen days later, she suddenly couldn’t use her cellphone anymore. Every time she tried to dial out, no matter the number, her call was forwarded to Bell’s Accounts Receivable department. Puzzled, she e-mailed me.

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Well, if the bad guys deserve some bad press then certainly the good guys deserve some good press, too. This Adventure in Customer Service is a good adventure. The tale of a company that’s clearly doing things right and that’s something we can all appreciate.

With some of the windfall from our October wedding, Maria and I brought a dish rack from simplehuman. This brand, which I haven’t really heard of before, seemed to be pretty prolific in many of the houseware chains that we visited. All of their products whether it was trash cans (which we also bought), storage units, kitchen tools or, in our case, dish racks, were priced fairly steeply but we figured that the mantra you get what you pay for might be true. So we bought a dish rack, an expensive one, and we were pretty satisfied with our purchase. At our house the job of doing the dishes is mine—Maria does the laundry—and this dish rack had everything I could’ve ever wanted. It was spacious, sturdy, fit dishes and cups of all sizes perfectly and even had a place to hang two extra glasses off the side and a slot designated for cutting boards or baking sheets. This dish rack was amazing.

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In this episode of Adventures in Customer Service I feature the exciting ordeal we went through when the car rental agreement we signed with our travel agent went sour.

Wanting to try and save money, as well as shop locally, Maria and I decided to book our Honeymoon through a local travel agent when we went last year. We chose Goliger’s Travel, a little building just a few minutes away from where Maria was living at the time. At first, we had a good feeling about it. The agent who helped us out admitted that the kind of hiking/driving vacation that we wanted—staying at a bunch of different locations as we wound our way from Victoria to Vancouver—wasn’t exactly the kind of thing he could do, but he could certainly book our flight and car rental for us, and at a good rate too. Since we felt good about it, and wanted to book everything locally, we decided on a flight and car rental and went ahead.

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So I’ve been inspired, after being rubbed the wrong way several times, to regale you with some of my harrowing tales of customer service—or rather, lack thereof, in a new series I’m calling Adventures in Customer Service. Instead of being a great big complain fest, I’ll try to turn it into positive lessons that we can all take from my experiences and maybe they can serve as cautionary tales. Oh, and I do have a few positive experiences to share as well. Need to shine a light on the good guys, too.

I have a 2007 Toyota Yaris. For what it’s worth, it’s a great car. It gets very good mileage, drives well, fits lots of stuff and people for it’s size, and I’ve only had one problem with it so far, a very minor problem, but it was an absolute headache to try and resolve. To be sure, this is not a complaint about the Yaris itself but rather the dealership I took it to to be repaired.

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