Tag Archives: Jean-François Mercier

Bye-Bye won’t go away

Quebec has two New Year’s traditions: one is watching Radio-Canada’s Bye-Bye variety show. The other is spending an entire fucking week MONTH talking about it in the press.

It’s gotten so bad the anglo media is starting to take notice, with belated articles in the National Post and Globe and Mail. Naturally, the Journal has an article talking about how there’s articles in the anglo media about this now.

Now that this is officially a thing, the media is putting together stories about the stories:

This doesn’t even include all the stuff that was written about it before it aired.

And this is just the beginning folks. Some actual news better break to push this off the front page or Jean Charest is going to have to create a commission on this.

UPDATE (Jan. 9): Véro and Louis’s mea-culpa-but-not-really has ensured at least a few more days of this.

Compagnie de marde

Via Patrick Lagacé comes this video from comedian Jean-François Mercier, reciting his saga of trying to get a $100 mail-in rebate cheque from Bell Mobility, only to have them refuse to help him because of his “unprofessional” tone.

It’s eight minutes of him reading letters back and forth, but it’s probably the most entertaining eight minutes of talking-head letter-reading I’ve seen in a while. (Be sure to check out some of his other videos).It’s also why I avoid sales based on mail-in rebates and don’t count their discounts as real.

UPDATE (Dec. 17): Lagacé has a follow-up, with comments from a Videotron CSR who says we shouldn’t be shooting the messenger.

UPDATE (Dec. 18): Another follow-up from Mercier himself, who posts a video apologizing for his rude behaviour but reiterating how customer service agents aren’t servicing the customer and mail-in rebates are a scam. Naturally, his problem was solved quickly once his story hit the media, and he got a call from a high-up VP at Bell. (Sound familiar? We’ve seen this kind of blatant special treatment before from Bell.)

I’m sure Bell bigwigs think that having a VP stepping in to personally fix a situation and offer a thousand apologies gives people the impression that the company cares about customer service. But I think it just reminds people that all Bell cares about is the appearance of good customer service, treating people in the media with the red carpet and telling everyone else to stop bothering them. If Bell really cared about customer service, Mercier’s problem would have been resolved on his first phone call. It wasn’t.