Well I was not entirely surprised that traffic to my website increased heavily once the election was called—it happens every time—I was surprised, and shocked, and then in complete disbelief when I found out just how much it had increased by. I can only assume that being quoted in the Toronto Star during the Long Form Census bruhaha last summer meant I was squarely on the radar for political watchers and that I must’ve developed a pretty serious fanbase who were out there, in hiding, waiting to see what lucid and poignant things I had to say about our politicians this time.

Unfortunately, more traffic isn’t always a good thing and here’s the e-mail I received late last night from my service provider:

To: “Webmaster” <keith@thecorch.com>
From: XXXXXXXXX <XXXXXX@1and1.com>

Dear Mr. Little,

This automatic notification is to let you know that your account for THECORCH.COM has had unusually high traffic in the last 24-hour period and your account is being put into suspension.

Our records indicate you have used 3889% of your monthly bandwidth quota.

Charges for additional bandwidth are calculated based on the rate indicated on your price package. Your account is presently owing $7,847.33USD.

You can imagine the shock.

As I never intended to become such an important and esteemed blogger, I had never bothered to increase my monthly bandwidth cap limit to accommodate any extra traffic and thus, when tens of thousands of Canadians began flooding to my site, it wasn’t set up to handle that many visitors.

Presently, I have no choice but to take a few steps back from this site. Popular as it is, I cannot afford to keep it running. According to the e-mail (and I abridged most of the technical parts) the site will be put into suspension by 11PM EST but I can’t afford to keep racking up the bills until then! I’ve been trying my provider on the phone since I woke up this morning but their business hours don’t begin until 9AM and no one is at the office yet! You can imagine I’m in a bit of a state.

Either way, it’s been a fun ride… perhaps my next online endeavor will be a blog about spending frugally and climbing back out of bankruptcy. If anybody knows a good lawyer…

With only a handful of shopping days left until Christmas perhaps you’re still scrambling to find something for that special someone. Of course, the first place you look for for advice is my sorely neglected blog. Well, with my Christmas holidays now in full swing I finally have loads more time to write ’til my heart’s content. So, to you and yours I present my list of the greatest gifts I’ve gotten.

Criteria for making the list is simple: It has to be a recent item—something you can still purchase—and it has to be something that’s endured. To me, these are the greatest gifts: things that you continue to enjoy far into the future.

Badger Hair Shaving Brush

I’ve blogged about this here before. For those that shave their facial hair, shaving with a badger hair brush and shaving soap is probably the most pleasurable shaving experience you can have. Bar none. It’s better for your skin and it’s way more enjoyable. If you’re still shaving like a caveman with a can of foaming shaving cream you need to add a badger hair brush to your Christmas List immediately.

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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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In this new series Things I Swear By, I want to take a little look at some of the things that I swear by.

The rationale is this: we all have things in our lives that we depend upon, that we swear by. These are things: products, goods, services, routines, rituals, etc. that we’ve picked up somewhere along the way. They’ve become important to us, essential to us, and something that we couldn’t do without. I think we all have these things—we hear about them, or start doing them or using them, at the suggestion of a friend, a relative or a colleague… and they work. I thought it’d be fun to share a few of the things that I swear by, and maybe you can suggest some too.

Ricola

I first heard about Ricola from my wife, Maria, who knew about these wonderful cough drops from her aunt, a musician. Ricola are incredible. If you know nothing about them you might, at least, recall this commercial from the 90′s which featured two Swiss men alternately yelling, “Riiiiiiiicola!” and blowing into some kind of enormous horn. Does that ring any bells?

Ricola are cough drops made from all natural ingredients, some kind of mix of herbs found in the Swiss mountains, I gather, and they work great. As a teacher, I’m talking a lot so when I’m sick and have a sore throat it’s an absolute pain to try and teach. But Ricola are soothing and wonderful, and they taste good too. I personally can’t stand the menthol taste of Halls or the other alternatives but something like Ricola, which tastes pretty good and seems to be natural too, is really agreeable.

Out of all the stuff I’ve used for coughs and sore throats, Ricola is hands down the best. They’re natural. They taste good. And they work, tried and tested by musicians and teaches alike Ricola is something that I swear by.

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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If you’ve been following the stories surrounding the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) then maybe you’ve heard about today’s little press scrum. If not, let me fill you in on the events of the past few weeks to bring you up to speed.

Criticism of Toronto’s transit authority began when a picture, and then another picture, of a sleeping TTC employee surfaced online. The picture showed a TTC ticket-taker asleep in his booth, feet kicked back, having a grand old nap. Following that, videos, pictures, and anecdotal reports began appearing online depicting TTC employees engaging in all manner of bad behaviour. Some were sleeping, some were rude, and some were taking ten to twenty minute coffee breaks with a bus load of passengers.

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