This morning, I was listening to C-FAX (technically, watching it, as it aired on A-Channel) when Frank Stanford’s Comment ran. As I listened to him complaining about prime real estate being used as a car lot, I was convinced he was talking about the wrong property — if he mentioned an address on air, I didn’t hear it. I only heard him say it was “right across the street from Dockside Green.”
I sped to the C-FAX website and fired off this angry little tirade, direct to Frank Stanford with the subject “You got it wrong”:
The “car lot” that you spoke of in you comment this morning is on the other side of the BAY ST bridge, not the Johnson St. Bridge. It is across from the Railyards development, not the Dockside Green and is nowhere near the rail lines. Do you even live in the same city??
To my surprise, a message from Frank Stanford with the subject “geography” appeared in my mailbox moments later,
Cheryl:
thank you for writing; and thanks for listening to C-FAX.
The address of the property under discussion is 95 Esquimalt Road. It is the former Thrifty Foods warehouse site, just up from the chicane as you come off the Johnson St bridge into Vic West.
fms
OK, so I’ve been corrected, I guess. Of course, we drove past there within the past week and I still recall it being an empty warehouse with a big FOR LEASE sign on the side whereas the former Home Hardware site, across the Bay Street bridge, has been used for new car storage for several years now.
Not wanting to let it go, I popped over to Vibrant Victoria to check the forums. I didn’t need to go that far; the news was on the front page. “Vic West warehouse site to be reborn as BMW dealership.” So, yeah, I guess he was actually commenting on news, not just rambling incoherently.
There’s another issue here though, and it has nothing to do with C-FAX, land-use or geography. After sending my email, I popped over to Facebook and updated my status,
just sent an angry email to C-FAX because Frank Stanford totally botched his comment this morning. Then Mike mocked me for doing so. ;P
He did mock me, but my update didn’t make it clear why. He wasn’t mocking me for writing as much as the fact that I blasted out the email in no time but take hours… or weeks… or longer to write something more important. As I explained on Facebook, it is “because I tend to disengage the “thought” part of my brain that I use when I am composing something I care about.”
I write a lot of complaint letters, rants and protests; most are written in haste. Usually, I do give them a quick look-over and edit but that’s about it. Whereas when I write a story, a blog post, or an article, I take time to double and often triple-check everything down to the word choices. So, whatever, he can mock me if he wants. I know what matters and, in general, complaints matter a little less than everything else.
There’s also the fact that no complaint I write could hold a candle to John Cleese and the little matter of one dead parrot…
“He’s not dead, yet!”