Rogers and Me: The Film*
(*If you haven't done so already, you'll need to download Quicktime to view the videos on this page.)
On February 8, 2006, I sent Ted Rogers a letter in which I referred to the signage on the door of the Rogers outlet on the ground floor of Corporate Head Offices. I wrote:
"The signage on the door of that outlet reads "The Experience Starts Here." My own experience with Rogers since August 26 - which has been a hellish one - has given that phrase a whole new meaning for me."
And then poof!
Within one week of the letter that I had couriered to Ted Rogers on February 8, 2006, the door with “The Experience Starts Here” on it had been taken down.
As I had spent so much time at that Rogers outlet, on the ground floor of corporate head offices, disputing my various invoices and other indignities, I had gotten to know the customer service representatives (CSR's) quite well. Way back in September, 2005 in one of my fits of pique, I had told one of them - a very helpful and extraordinarily professional CSR called Erin - that I was going to give that phrase a whole new meaning by the time I was done with Rogers.
When I discovered that the door marked with “The Experience Starts Here” had been taken down within the week after I had sent Mr. Rogers that letter, I returned to the video outlet to inquire as to what had happened. Erin told me that it had been taken down earlier in the week because, apparently, “the door window had shattered one windy night.”
So there would appear to be little record that either the door or the signage ever existed.
Except that…
…I happen to have an unimpeachable record that a Rogers door, with the sign “The Experience Starts Here”, used to exist on the ground floor video outlet that is under Rogers’ corporate head offices at 333 Bloor Street:
In the fall, I was taking film production and film editing courses at Ryerson University as one of my undertakings for my sabbatical research for the 2005-06 academic year. As my battle with Rogers was intruding upon all of my waking hours at that point in my life, I decided to economize and do a film called Rogers and Me for one of my assignments and kill two birds with one stone.
The film was a riff on a children’s book, by the brilliant French children’s author Philippe Corentin, which I used to read my son when he was younger.
The book, Mademoiselle Sauve-qui-peut (or Little Miss Run-for-Your-Lives), is itself a riff on the Little Red Riding Hood story.
One of the opening scenes from the movie shows the lead character entering the Rogers video outlet at Jarvis and Bloor Streets in Toronto. As the door closes behind her, the camera zooms in on the signage, which was intended to be a recurring theme in the film, and lingers upon it.
Although I completed the film course, unfortunately when I was out of the country over the Christmas break working on my other sabbatical research agenda, someone broke into my home and stole my son’s saxophone, the hard drives on which the film was saved…and the Rogers-serviced cell phone that I had bought to replace the one that had been stolen in the summer.
Happily, I had removed the phone’s SIM card before I departed so no illicit charges could be fraudulently incurred on THIS phone. But the hard drive, and the original Rogers and Me film that was saved upon it, have never resurfaced. All I have left is the raw film footage.
Here, then, from that raw footage, are sample shots from the now evaporated film Rogers and Me, shot on a windy October day in 2005.