The Jeff R Project

So, I’m going to rant a bit here. And Michael Bay is going to take the brunt of it this time!

Chris and I took our friend John to see Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen this weekend for his birthday. Sorry John.

Cineplex’s ScotiaBank Centre in Vancouver started the day wrong by opening their doors late. Forgivable. But then they had “technical difficulty” which forced us out of our chosen theatre even before the movie started. Sure we get a free movie another time out of the deal, but annoying. I chose to wait an extra 45 minutes to get another theatre presenting in Digital. We could have moved into cinemas 8 or 9 showing it in 10 minutes, but we had problems with a tandem-run before and it’s not a digital presentation, something that made Wolverine even worse for me. So we waited.

In the end, our little adventure to see Transformers 2 meant spending 4 hours sitting in theatres. My bad.

The movie was mediocre. Maybe I’m getting old. But more to the point of this rant / review it’s so bloody racist that I can’t believe people don’t call Michael Bay on it.

There’s 2 “twin” Autobots voiced by Reno Wilson and Tom Kenny named Mudflap and Skids respectively. For the record, Reno is African-American and Tom is not, which adds insult to injury. The way Mudflap and Skids are portrayed is almost blatantly racist, although it’s coated in Bay’s “comedy” to make it palatable.

I don’t even know how to describe the two of them, except to say that everyone I know saw them as trashy ghetto homies. They talk like trailer-trash, they act like it, and they apparently can’t read. Yup, you heard me. These 2 Autobots can’t even read. They have some gold teeth too.

To me, even pre-warned (thanks Gavin), I was pretty surprised to see that nobody from the writers through the entire production and into marketing thought these characters might be offensive.

I guess I could be overly-sensitive, or over reacting, but hey, it was one of few moments that brought out any kind of emotion for me.

Yeah, the effects were spectacular (what did you expect), it was big in scope and scale, it was loud and lots of things got destroyed, so it wins on that level. But it was also at least an hour longer than it needed to be.

Ok, I’m going to rag on the lowly clerks who work at retail stores, so if that offends you, please feel free to stop reading.

But I’m not going to blame them entirely.

Yesterday, I went to buy some shoes. I was feeling kinda crappy anyway, having one of those days where everything annoyed me and probably didn’t want to be there. So my dear husband and I ventured to a store downtown known for inexpensive sports shoes (note, this is not Payless!! They sell crap I won’t even touch much less pay for) to find me a simple pair of running shoes.

We enter the store and head for the shoe wall. We passed 3 employees without a single on of them making eye contact. We perused the shoe wall for about 5 minutes trying to find something I liked and finally found a pair. There was a bored looking girl leaning against the pillar about 5 feet away so Chris asked her for a size 10 in this style. She made eye contact with him, but as I watched, she actually rolled her eyes, looked bored, whispered something and wandered off.

Chris headed off to look at shorts or t-shirts while I waited in the shoe department, looking at other options in case these didn’t work out. A minute later, I notice she’s holding up the wall again. I assumed (wrongly) that someone else (taller?) was finding the shoes for her. I sat and waited. After about 5 minutes, I headed off to find Chris as I was tired of waiting. As he comes back to me, she says – “there are no 10s” to him. So I said “How come you didn’t tell me that, I was sitting there waiting for you to bring me the shoes” and things went down hill from there.

The girl in charge of the till asked us to leave. I said “Don’t you care that your employee doesn’t know how to do her job?” She told us to fill out a card to send to head office and told us we weren’t welcome back in the store. Huh?

There’s a Starbucks near us who has a pretty good staff overall. But there’s one guy who is almost never on the bar. He’s always on cash. Even then, he seems pretty stunned most of the time. I have no doubt that being a barista is harder than some jobs. Remembering how to make so many drinks and having customers customize them to within an inch of their names is tough.

I don’t know why they keep this guy on staff. He barely handles orders at the till and often needs them repeated. After going there regularly, the baristas know my order before I get to the till but he doesn’t usually get it when I tell it to him. Slow…ly.

Excellent customer service is hard, takes the right mindset, presence and thoughfulness. I understand this as I have been doing varying forms of customer service for 25 years, since my first paper route. I really appreciate the staff who really get it, own it and excel at it. My expectations are not that high. I honestly don’t expect the guy at Starbucks to remember my order. I expect him to get it right when I give it to him. If he wants to excel, he’ll remember it.

These days, whether because of high turn over, lazy management (I put the blame here), staff who have never had really good customer service to model from, low wages or whatever, your general retail experience in downtown Vancouver is less than stellar, and on the decline.

If you’ve had either great or crappy customer service experience, let me know. I want to shop at the good places.

I ended up buying shoes at Costco. Sadly, low expectations of service there and I’m never disappointed.

Tonight at 9pm in Vancouver, Facebook released their Username feature. This allows people to refer to their Facebook profile as http://www.facebook.com/myusername instead of the former http://www.facebook.com/15khgb89a1 or something else random.

This is of course an important concept for people and companies building brands. If you can’t get a good Facebook name, the world will end. Ok. Not really.

Facebook reportedly registered 500,000 user names in the first 15 minutes! On Twitter, we’ve already seen people complaining about the way it was handled and the lack of control. This lead to someone else getting Darren Rowse’s http://www.facebook.com/problogger. This is important to his brand.

My name was also taken by the time I remembered to check an hour later. The other Jeff Rose looks like a hard working guy in a suit.

So I got to pick something else. Thankfully, I was reasonably clever and got TheJeffRose so I made out fairly well, I think. I won’t likely use it directly since I can set up this site to forward http://www.jeffrose.ca/facebook there and maintain my name. Same with http://www.jeffrose.ca/twitter.

Have you got your Facebook Username yet? When it comes time and your name is taken, remember to think creatively. I could have had jeff.rose1 – which was tempting as it’s my Skype ID, but Chris commented that it reminded him of AOL accounts circa 1995. I agreed. He got ChristopherJTurner which is pretty good.

Don’t settle for jeff.rose1 or something banal. Be creative, be memorable and most of all, be yourself.