Category: It Happened to Me

I’d like to thank all of you who came by to read the Quick Boys story and leave a comment. Your kind words and insight are appeciated. I’d also like to thank Cory for linking to it from BoingBoing (in the blog world, a BoingBoing link is a gift from the gods), Zach Slootsky for linking to it from the must-read Toronto blog BlogTO (men, be sure to read this local fashion piece) and everyone else who linked to it in their own writing. You folks are the best, and I thought you should know that.

It took over 4,000 entries and almost four years, but it finally happened: my blog has finally gotten me into trouble. I’m finally a player!

Yesterday morning, as I was working at my desk, I got a phone call:

Female voice with Eastern European accent: Hello, I have some questions about your web site.

Me: Go ahead…

FV: How do you create your website?

Me: With Blogware, our weblogging software. Is there anything in particular you’d like to know?

FV: And how are comments added to the website? Do they email you, and then you add them?

Me: No, that’s handled automatically by Blogware. Every article has a link that you can click on to add a comment. You type it in, click a button, and it’s there.

FV: And if there were a comment you wanted to delete, could anyone do that?

Me: No, only the owner and people the owner sets up as administrators can do that.

At this point, it was beginning to dawn on me that the person on the other end of the line wasn’t a customer. What was going on?

FV: I am asking because I would like a comment removed. Someone left a comment that is not true.

Me: Not true? Which one?

FV: The one in the thing about movers. Someone left a comment about our company that is not true. They said we did things, but they signed a paper clearing us. If you do not remove this comment, we will send our lawyers after you.

I sighed. I needed to get a lot of work done, and dealing with non-work headaches, especially the threat of legal action, was the last thing I needed.

I decided the best thing to do for the time being would be to copy the comment, take it down and evaluate the situation when I had more time. I pointed my browser at the Blogware control panel, found the article and called up its comment-editing page.

Me: So which comment is it?

FV: The one about Quick Boys.

For the record, here’s the comment:

Re: Anyone Know any Good Toronto Movers?
by Anonymous on 2005.06.27 02:00PM EDT  |  IP: 70.29.128.20

No good ones to recommend but two to avoid at all costs:

Moveworks: Hired them in 2001 to move between two units in the same building. They showed up 3 hours late, failed to bring wardrobe boxes, and sent two 16 year old kids with one of their girlfriends. They moved about four things into the service elevator and then took off, leaving two moving dollies behind and me to do the entire move without assistance. Thank god for friends.

Quick Boys Moving & Storage: Avoid like the plague. Hired in April to move my girlfriend into our place. They took seven hours to load a one bedroom apartment into the truck and drive about ten minutes (they were, of course, being paid hourly). Held her stuff hostage at this end until we paid for the full move. Damaged a substantial percentage of the furniture with scratches, etc. “Forgot” to unload two boxes of crystalware and took three weeks to deliver it to us. The movers were surly, unpleasant, and stank of body odour.

Good luck! A lot of the companies out there really exist to rip you off so be careful. I’ve heard good things about El Cheapo and Two Small Guys With Big Hearts but have never used either. If I ever hire movers again, I’ll just swallow my cost-saving needs and go with the big guys.

It was written by my friend Jay Goldman. I’ve known Jay for about three years and I’ve worked with him on a couple of occasions. He’s always dealt straight with me.

Me: And you say that this comment is not true?

FV: It is a lie. Let me put my boss on the line.

Gruff Male Voice with Eastern European Accent: Remove that comment. That’s all I’m going to say. (click)

Niiiiice. A real sweetheart, that one. There was a bit of an edge to the “That’s all I’m going to say” bit.

FV: So if you could remove that comment, it would be appreciated. I will check to confirm that they have been deleted.

And with that, she hung up.

I noticed that someone had recently added a new comment about Quick Boys. Here it is:

Re: Anyone Know any Good Toronto Movers?
by Anonymous on 2005.07.28 10:45AM EDT  |  IP: 64.229.26.252

I have used Quick Boys Movnig Storage i think they were the best and they have moved couple of my friends as well and they were all
happy. I belive no one is perfect even big van line make mistakes as well.

I think whats up there is not true. I highly recomend Quick Boys Moving storage.

Thank you Julian.m

In light of the phone call, the time when the comment was posted and its English-as-a-second-language wording, this comment seemed very suspicious, almost as if it were planted by a shill.

I Googled, using “Quick Boys” and “movers” as search terms. It turns out that the blog entry was the number 2 result. So that’s why they were unhappy.

I saved copies of both Quick Boys-related comments to deal with them later and then deleted them.

Five minutes later, she called back.

Female Voice: I am looking at your site and I see that the comments have not been deleted. I am going to talk to your employer.

Me: Have you reloaded the web page?

FV: Reloaded?

Me: On the toolbar of your browser, there should be a picture of a piece of paper with arrows going in circles. That’s the “refresh” button. Click it, and you’ll reload the page.

FV: Ah. I see. Good.

Me: Now wait a minute. I’m only doing this because I don’t have time to deal with you idiots right now. When I get a moment, I’m going to look into this. Now if your complaint is legitimate, I’ll gladly do as you ask, because I’m not into smearing people. But the way you’re acting, that’s just plain thuggery. This is a personal web site; my employer has nothing to do with this. The person who made the comment is voicing his opinion and he’s not the sort to lie.

FV: But he signed a contract saying he was satisfied.

Me: And if he did, there won’t be a problem. But if he wasn’t satisfied, his comment is going back up. You can’t go pushing people around like this. Do I make myself clear?

FV: I understand.

I gave Jay a ring. He was in a meeting, so I simply left a message. He called me back later that afternoon:

Jay: Hey, Joey, I hear Quick Boys is on your case.

Me: Heh. Yeah. So, what happened?

Jay: Pretty much what I wrote — my girlfriend was moving in and hired them. They arrived over an hour late and in the end took a grand total of nine hours to move a single bedroom a short distance. When they got to my place, they refused to unload the truck until she paid up and signed the contract.

They took so long that they had to run somewhere else and left a lot of her stuff on the ground floor of the building; we had to take it up ourselves. Plus, they damaged some of her furniture and held onto some her stuff until we complained. They say that she signed something that clears them of any responsibility. I asked them for a copy of this document, and after stalling, said they’d mail it to me. I never received it. It’s worthless anyway; I talked to my lawyer and he said that a contract signed under duress like that isn’t valid.

Me: Huh.

Jay: Hey, sorry to cause you all this trouble. You can take down the comments —

Me: No. I trust you, and they way they’ve treated me, I can’t say I trust these guys. Those comments are going back up. For me to take them down…

Jay: …would be pretty bad.

Me: That’s right. In fact, I’m going to post a whole damned blog entry about it.

As I mentioned before, I know Jay, and based on his actions and my dealing with him, trust him. On the other hand, my (admittedly and thankfully) brief experience with Quick Boys has been filled with subterfuge and threats. Thus far, I have no reason to trust them.

The worst thing I can do as a high-profile Toronto blogger, an employee of a company that makes blogging software and a card-carrying member of the EFF is to back down in the face of idle threats like those made by the people at Quick Boys. When someone kowtows to bullying like this, we all lose.

If any representative of Quick Boys wishes to respond to this, they can do so in the comments or give me a ring at the office. I believe they know the number.

One of the best ways to get up my nose is to accuse me of not knowing what I’m talking about. This happens in my comments once in a blue moon, and I usually have to become the commenter’s Dad and “take him or her to school in the car of pain”. Hop aboard, Junior!

Normally, I’d take this up in the comments, but they’ve been buried in spam as of late. Besides, I’m the captain of this blog, and if someone wants to accuse me of ignorance, I reserve the right to spank him or her in a top-level article.

Here’s the comment that started it:

I think you either have the term wrong; you likely mean traders or some other creature of Wall Street but investment bankers do things like getting money for IPOs not give out stock tips to the media.

Do you really know what an investment bank does? I suspect this is not the case.

I replied to the little snot as follows:

You’re wrong and right:

WRONG: I know what an investment banker does. I’ve met a number doing dog-and-pony shows during the dot-com days. Some of them could use a smack on the head anyways.

RIGHT: I had a brain fart while typing. The term I’m looking for is investment analyst. I’ve met these too, and shall correct the entry.

Not happy with having lost some debating points, the commenter fired back:

You can acuse [sic] investment analysts of many things (I am an economist and the party line on them is that they must either be charlatans or they should not be talking to you) but they dont really shuffle wealth around, mostly they give their opinion on the value of an asset. that is they are Appreisers [sic] who happen to specialize on assets that pay dividends and which have payouts linked to the fortunes of some legal corporation.

I cant see how it could be true that “shuffling it [wealth] around.” is all they do without it being true of all people who work as appraisers, can you?

Whacked-out assumptions and failed analogies: this person really must be an economist!

Claiming that they are charlatans and then saying that they aren’t shufflers of wealth is contradictory. Shuffling wealth — into their pockets and those of their friends — rather than creating it is what charlatans do!

Secondly, I don’t think all appraisers are shufflers of wealth; some actually provide useful services, and those services are the creation of wealth. The commenter’s assertion is the classic “confusing the whole for the part” tactic from high school debating. Here’s an only-slightly-more-ridiculous statement using the same line of reasoning:

• I have a dim view of investment analysts
• Investment analysts are carbon-based life forms
• Therefore, I have a dim view of carbon-based lifeforms

I shall close by addressing the commenter using the terminology of his/her field of “study”: the supply of your babble exceeds the demand.

Bonus reading: Economist Jokes!

[via Fark]

Okay: I’ll admit that during my move, I bought some replacement stuff at Wal-Mart. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of buying a Costco membership just yet and I needed a good deal on a few hundred bucks’ worth of replacement items such as a microwave oven (my old place had one built in, my new one doesn’t), a few replacement pots and pans to tide me over until the wedding presents come in, some closet organizers, a new king size comforter, and so on. I’m trying to maximize my dollar, especially in light of the money I spent on movers and my newly-doubled rent (at least until Wendy is eligible to work here).

Shopping at Wal-Mart is something I try not to do often, as they treat almost everyone — customers, employees and even their own suppliers — like mere links in a “value chain”. The only true human beings in the system are its shareholders; the rest of us are merely there to contribute to the share price.

(I could’ve saved on money by getting a bunch of friends to help for “free”, but that invariably leads to furniture damage, takes longer and is hard to do in the middle of a Wednesday.)

Costco, on the other hand, does a much better job. The staff are generally nicer, the selection of stuff is generally better, and the employees are considerably more helpful, probably because they’re better paid. So much better paid (42% more than Sam’s Club employees), that some Wall Street analysts are annoyed.

From a New York Times profile on Jim Sinegal, Costco’s CEO:

Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers — and epitomize why some retail analysts say Sinegal just might be America’s shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart.

But not everyone is happy with Costco’s business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco’s customers but to its workers as well.

Costco’s average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club. And Costco’s health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.”

A quick note to parents: If you ask your kid what s/he wants to be when s/he grows up, and s/he replies “An investment analyst!”, feel free to smack them really hard and then say “That was from Uncle Joey, who’d rather you actually CREATED wealth rather than merely shuffling it around.”

But I digress.

Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street’s assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street’s profit demands.

Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco’s customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like the fact that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense.

“This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.”

Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation.

“On Wall Street, they’re in the business of making money between now and next Thursday,” he said. “I don’t say that with any bitterness, but we can’t take that view. We want to build a company that will still be here 50 and 60 years from now.”

If shareholders mind Sinegal’s philosophy, it is not obvious: Costco’s stock price has risen more than 10 percent in the last 12 months, while Wal-Mart’s has slipped 5 percent.

Also notable is the fact that Sinegal’s salary is a mere $350,000, which is small considering he makes less than a tenth of other CEOs whose businesses are performing on par with Costco. He says “I just think that if you’re going to try to run an organization that’s very cost-conscious, then you can’t have those disparities. Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong.”

When I next do some big-box shopping (and yes, there are times it’s the best thing to do), it’s going to be at Costco.

In addition to being Bastille Day (which resulting in a less-than-whelming seven prisoners being freed), July 14th also marks the anniversary of my employment at Tucows, where I hold the company’s longest title, Technical Community Development Coordinator.

Even after two years, the job still passes the “dread test”: I still

look forward to going to the office rather than dreading it. I’m

looking forward to Year Three.

In honour of the occasion, I present to you an MP3 of Rush’s Bastille Day [4.3 MB, MP3].