Jananas

Okay, here’s a quick update while everyone else is still asleep…

We made it out of Toronto safely around 9pm on Monday evening. It was a little later than expected, and put us into Columbus, OH just after 4am. Driving in the dark late at night after having written an exam that day (and just generally being exhausted post-school) wasn’t fun. Strangely the border guard actually recognized Jason from previous crossings! But I did manage to stay awake the entire time to keep Jason company! We had a semi-miserable night’s sleep on a futon at his place. We got up after not nearly enough sleep to run some errands – like getting a US phone number for while I’m here…

And then!! Off to Louisville, KY to see our friends Josh & Jess. We had a great time just shooting the shit and getting caught up. Especially getting caught up on puppy love, as their roommate’s dogs Ruby and Rita are awesome. Had a good dinner at Zen Garden and even managed to score from free homemade ice cream through one of Josh’s friends. I wish that Toronto had entire stores devoted to homemade ice cream and pies! We crashed out pretty early that night and slept super well on our air mattress, even getting a little dog action early in the morning. In case you were wondering, the proper order for dog/human sleeping combos is: dog, human, dog, human. Josh was awesome and made us vegan sweet and savoury crepes for breakfast. Jason did the dishes and then we were off once again!

Day Three of the road trip was driving from Louisville to Kansas City, KS. Essentially, five states (Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas) and eight hours. Surprisingly, not a bad trip overall. We did do some fun things like attempt to use my parent’s GPS to find a veg place in St Louis. The GPS failed, but did get us out of the car for a bit. I also got to see the St Louis Arch.

Then it was back on the road for the other half of the drive. We had a tonne of fun making fun of billboards and all the porn stores on the roadside. I’m also generally thoroughly enthralled by the truck stops/gas stations because they seem so over the top compared to what I’m used to in Ontario. On the way, one of the billboards we passed was for a little local yarn store. Jason said we should stop, but I’m trying to be strong on the not buying any yarn front. However… He accidentally took an exit from the interstate (the highway curved and the exit continued straight ahead) and on the way back to the highway we found the yarn store! So I picked up a single skein of locally dyed superwash sock yarn and a pretty lace cowl pattern.

Back on the road once again to make it to the KC. Thankfully we made it pretty much when we’d expected to. Hung out with our friend Bob and his ladyfriend Tamra and decompressed for a bit. Then it was out for an amazing dinner at the Eden Alley Cafe with some formerly online friends – Marilyn, Irene, and Winston. Jason and I shared the sweet potato burrito and vegan grilled cheese, and had some chocolate cake and vegan creme brulee for dessert. Scrumptious!

Now I’m up early-ish getting some internet stuffs take care of, while everyone else is sleeping. Although to be fair, they stayed up watching Night of the Dead yesterday and instead I passed out super early. Ha!

Today we’re going for vegan pizza @ Waldo’s and Jason gets to see his god-children (Ben & Anna) today for the first time in a few years and I get to meet the munchkins.

Tomorrow afternoon marks my last deliverable ever for my MBA. I have an exam in Florida’s Creative Regional Strategies. I’ll admit that its hard to care when we’re assigned 42 pages of reading to review to be question on during the exam and most of it contains strategies that are too vague to be analyzed. Although at this point its hard to really care one way or another. At 5pm tomorrow I’m finished.

More importantly is that tomorrow after my exam and once we’ve waited for rush hour traffic to die off, Jason & I are heading out on our epic road trip. Its going to be pretty packed and a bit of a whirlwind tour, but we have hard and fast dates on the other side that we gotta meet – like my cousin’s wedding back in Kingston, ON and some tattoo appointments in NYC. Regardless, we’re both really stoked to get to hang out with a tonne of friends along the way, explore new cities (if only briefly), and see a lot of the US. Here’s to hoping that things work out well and there aren’t too many snags along the way (although I expect a few, because you can’t drive 10,000+kms without some!).

I’ll try to update jananas more frequently with pictures and anecdotes, assuming that we have reliable internet access and time. Your best bet for updates, though, might be twitter. Hey, I can send updates through my phone!

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise given that I’ve mentioned it previously, but I’m taking Richard Florida’s Creative Regional Strategies course here at Rotman. Over the course of the term we’ve worked towards producing a set of final recommendations on a city of our choice, in our case we have focused on Vancouver. Thus far we’ve produced reports on: overall growth, technology, talent, tolerance, and territory assets (count ‘em and yes, there are 4T’s).

In class this week we presented our set of final recommendations. Like any set of final development recommendations, these are meant to be inspirational and to enable long term growth. One of the people asked to sit in on the presentations, [aside, to disclose this person is a member of the team at the Martin Prosperity Institute] was very aggressive in their questioning. Its been bugging me a bit, so I thought I’d write about it.

Here was our thinking & one of our recommendations:

• As with any development recommendation, the end result is that we want our region to grow. A growing economy also means a growing population.
• Vancouver has one of the highest costs of living in the world (based on median income vs. housing cost) and a relatively high density. We also found that the city has fewer young, single creative class people in part due to the high housing costs. So, if Vancouver’s population grows and they remain in the current area of the city the increase in demand will also drive up housing costs given that density cannot be changed significantly in the short term (real estate economics here). But increasing housing costs means that fewer people can afford to live in the city and more young people will be driven away.
• Vancouver is constrained by their geography: mountains to the North, ocean to the West, and the US border to the South. This makes expansion difficult.
• As a result of this natural tension between growth and geography, we recommended that they look to expanding Eastwards (so through towards Chilliwack). As with any proposal for expansion, this can only be accomplished with a simultaneous strengthening of transit and more specifically public transit (hey, we why don’t we throw out the ever popular high speed train idea).

To summarize: we want the city to grow, growth means increase in people which in today’s city will drive up prices farther making city even more expensive and driving out more of the young creative class workers. Because of geographic constraints, there are limited expansion opportunities.

The feedback and questioning from one of our assessors was, I felt, aggressive. The gist was we were idiots for expanding east as we were merely promoting urban sprawl. That it wouldn’t be possible due to existing infrastructure issues. That it wouldn’t work because no one would commute.

Let’s go over this.

• First, we aren’t promoting the stereotypical suburban sprawl but rather the use of satellite cities well served by public transportation to make the city more liveable. Growth has to go somewhere, so let’s make that growth be as productive as possible.
• Second, as with any set of development recommendations we suggested improving the infrastructure. Which means that we recognize that this can’t be done successfully with the current transportation system. Yeah you? Thanks for coming out and paying attention. And really, these are high level recommendations not detailed implementation plans.
• Last is the concept that people won’t commute.  Some people won’t commute (hey, I’m one of them!) but that does not mean that no one will commute. Look to any major city (for example, Toronto) – people commute well across the city in order to get to jobs. This is really just basic economics – commuting costs vs. the opportunity cost of time.

My gut reaction is that the feedback was motivated more by personal dislike of our recommendations and less by real economic analysis of our assumptions and conclusion. I believe that the person marking us was thinking “I’d never commute” rather than “no one would commute”. Big difference.

To end, I would like to take credit for having thought up this final point while I was in class and that I was tactful enough to not say anything, but… I wasn’t. In a typical life moment I thought this up as I walked out of the building.

Vancouver doesn’t have to expand East (since you seem to dislike that concept so much). Instead, we recommend that they drag over the Texas-sized island of floating garbage currently floating unused in the Pacific Ocean. I mean really, anchor that in Vancouver harbor and build on top of it.

Oh wait, I guess that would ruin those beaches that Vancouver is known for. But hey, at least all those environmental freaks would have something to protest against! I mean, we’d be adding to the economy judged only by the increase in pickets…

Sometime this summer a friend regifted some terrible rainbow coloured acrylic yarn that’d she’d attempted to learn to knit with. I’d had it sitting around for months and had no idea what to do with it. I wanted something quick and thought that a crochet pattern might work well. I wanted to do something other than granny squares. I found a pattern for a star afghan. I have a huge ball of cheap black acrylic that I’ll finish this up with.

But really, I’m not sure if words can describe how terrible this is. Instead, feast your eyes on this picture…

Yeah. That’s what I thought too…

Back in February, I’d asked Jason to buy me tickets to see Flight of the Conchords for one of their Toronto dates in April. I can’t remember the exact reasoning, but I was unable to be at a computer when they went on sale and I was worried that they’d sell out. So he, being the exceedingly nice person that he is, woke up early one day to purchase tickets for me. He used his American ticketmaster account and his Canadian credit card (he’s an authorized user on one of my accounts so that he doesn’t have to pay foreign exchange fees). Sadly, because he purchased tickets to a Canadian show on an American ticketmaster account his only option was to pick them up the day of the show through will call. Fast forward a month or so, and with travel plans he’s not going to be in Toronto the day of the concert and so will be unable to pick them up.

On March 17th he emails ticketmaster to see if we can arrange an alternate delivery method for the tickets – picking them up in advance, mailing, or printing out at home. He received this response on March 19th:

So, we’ve paid for “premium” tickets but can’t arrange another way to get them. Jason wrote back that day as this didn’t really answer our question. We received this response on March 21st:

Okay, so we don’t often actually read purchase policies before making purchases. But… We’re haven’t asked to have a second party pick up our tickets or to switch the credit card. What we have asked is to use an alternative delivery method so that we can receive the product that we have paid for. Jason emailed them back again on March 29th asking for this to be escalated, and we received this response:

So basically, because we used an American account to purchase tickets we only have one option. Sadly because circumstances have change and Jason (as the credit card holder) cannot pick these tickets up, we are being told that Ticketmaster is going to keep our money and we get nothing in return. Note, we have also not had our concern escalated and so are stuck dealing with front line reps with no authority.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but it seems like changes in delivery would be a fairly common occurrence and that as an international company you should be able to deal with these types of customer service issues. To add insult to injury, every single response we received had the following phrase at the bottom: “Did I provide World Class Service?” Thanks for adding insult to injury folks.

Jason e-mailed back on April 4th, again asking for this to be escalated. We have yet to receive a response.

The end result is that I am instigating a chargeback with my credit card company. I paid money for a product (access to a concert) and ticketmaster is being unreasonable in providing limited delivery methods for that product. As such, I will not be able to see the concert and so will have paid good money for something that they are preventing me from seeing. Here’s to hoping that my credit card company won’t provide equally terrible customer service.

To Flight of the Conchords, I’m pretty bummed that I won’t get to see you in concert. I’ve been a fan since early in the first season (I even purchased two copies of it when it dropped to dvd) and have been avidly watching this season. I was really looking forward to getting to see you live. Sadly, due to ticketmaster I won’t get the chance.