In 1982, the brilliantly-named Institute for the Future, an agency under America’s National Science Foundation, published a study that was written about in the New York Times. The aim of the study was to predict what the North American household might look like in the future. Like most attempts to see the future, the predictions run the gamut from hilarious to naive to, in one particular case, down-right accurate.

For the most part, the article deals with some technologies that never really made it out of the starting gate back in the 1980′s: Teletext and Videotex. From what I can understand, this technology allowed a television screen to act as a kind of web browser, retrieving different “pages” that were broadcast by cable companies. In some cases, these pages could be stored and read later, in other cases it was up to the provider to decide what to show and when. It sounds like one of many precursors to the Internet. It also sounds an awful lot like 1984.

But, it’s the predictions that we’re concerned with, not necessarily the technology.

What the Institute for the Future predicted a society using Teletext and Videotex would look like is, in the end, a lot like what our society looks like today.

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If you’ve been following the news—and it’s hard to miss if you’ve been listening—then you must’ve heard about the attempted takeover of Saskatchewan-based Potash Corp. by an Australian company. The bid, which would’ve seen a Canadian company being taken over by an Australian one, and the loss of a huge money-making resource for Canada, was a pretty interesting one. Watching it play out in the media and through the various levels of government was down-right compelling.

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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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