Yes, in some surprising development, I’ve had some customer service in Montreal that could rival the best that you have ever had in Brussels. It was totally astonishing.

To set the scene, I have a Canadian mobile phone with a Canadian number, supplied by Bell Telephones as they have the best coverage in the wilderness. And, as an aside, after this experience, I’ll be calling them “Hell Telephones” for ever onwards because the customer service is the closest thing to Hell that you would ever wish to find.

To cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … my credit card expired and so I had a new one, but I forgot to upgrade the card with Bell Telephones and so my service was disconnected.

No complaints with that – it’s my own fault although one would have thought that with 50 years of expiry dates of credit cards, companies would have caught up with this kind of thing – so off to find a Bell Telephone shop.

First place that I found was one of these stands in a shopping centre. The staff there were totally uninterested but they did give me a number to call customer service. THis was when I discovered that the battery in the ‘phone was flat.

Next stall that I found, the guy there was extremely helpful and if things had carried on like this, I wouldn’t be seething out of my back teeth. Anyway, he actually put me in touch with a human at Customer Service (we did have a 20-minute queue) who told me to buy a new SIM card, put it in my phone, and call up the connection service (she gave me the number) an I’ll be back on the air.

Simple?

Not if you are anything like me it isn’t.

With the battery in my Bell phone being flat I put the SIM card in my European open-access phone and tried to call the number but several attempts gave me the “not registered on network” error message and nothing that I can do would fix it. Consequently I found another Bell telephone place – the shop in rue St Catherine to be precise.

Some girl in there who clezrly knew even less than I did checked my European phone with her data scanner. “It’s not a Bell telephone” she said, as if she were telling me something. She took me to the door, pointed across the road to the shopping mall and told me where the Rogers and the Fido stalls were. “You need to go and ask them”.
“How will they help me activate a Bell Telephone SIM card?”
“I don’t know” she replied.

Yes, you can’t make up a story like that.

But I will tell you something for nothing – and that is that we would never have reached this particular point had Samsung, the mobile phone maker, had its act together. I have three Samsung phones all told, and they all have different batteries and they all have different charging inputs. What is this all about? A standard-sized battery and a standard charging input would have saved all of this nonsense. Swapping a battery from one phone to another is the work of seconds. This thing about different chargers and different batteries (and we are talking millimetres difference in size, not anything substantial) is total rubbish.

As for the rest of the day, I’ve been on the prowl again. I found Montreal’s biggest second-hand car sales places, to find that it closes at weekends and what’s that all about too?

I did find the old headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at the abandoned Windsor Station. Canadian Pacific was another in the long line of companies that moved away from Montreal following the francophonie policies of the Quebec Provincial Government. “Cutting your nose off to spite your face” is what springs to my mind – it accounts for much of the decline in fortunes of the Province but the attitude is that the Quebeckers would rather be a very big fish in a very small pool rather than an influential subsiduary player on a multi-national stage.

The station (said he, leaving the politics aside) is a beautiful building and was only narrowly saved from demolition when Canadian Pacific pulled out. It’s now a listed building.

This is an interesting car that I encountered on my perambulations. It’s a 1939 Packhard doing a wedding at the Christ Church Cathedral in Saint Catherine Street.

The colour of the car is white-over-rust, which you can clearly see even from this distance. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a “professional” car looking as bad as this one, with the rust bubbling up on the bottom of the doors and on the rear wings underneath the paint.

The paint job isn’t bad at all even if the masking off was poor, but there’s more to a restoration project than just three coats of paint.

I also came across the Latin quarter of Montreal in the rue St Denis. What took me completely by surprise was that all of the signs here were in French. I wasn’t expecting that in the Latin quarter. “Puer amat mensam” say I.

But it isn’t half chic and trendy here. I couldn’t do with any more than five minutes of this kind of place.

At the Tourist Information desk I found not only the information that I wanted about the Richelieu Valley but also a booklet on the route to James Bay – another one of my projects. But there was nothing about the Lower North Shore. Not a surprise, seeing as how the communities down there are English, not French-speaking.

The “Forgotten Coast” indeed.