John Linton ...for a brief stop over before returning to Australia in two days time.
It is not 'fun' to get 2 am in the morning short flights (three and a quarter hours) with time difference that means you land at 7 am in the morning and arrive at your hotel at 8.30 am with every expectation that you will be greeted by the apologetic "I'm sorry sir but your room will not be ready until 2.00 pm". However the smiling people at the Mandarin said that "of course we have made your room available" and promptly delivered us and a complimentary bottle of (real) Louis Roederer champagne to the room which, after a quick shower we opened and demolished and retired to bed, mildly sloshed, to recover from being up for 24 hours only waking up at 3 pm.
Of all the hotels in the world of which I have knowledge and that are within my financial means to stay at once a year or so - the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok is not only at the top of the list, it's daylight to second place. Today also happened to be our wedding anniversary and we had a celebration dinner in what I think (including Bentley's, Wilton's and Darwin's wharf ) is the best fish restaurant in the world (that I have experienced). The hotel must appreciate our ongoing patronage because, as we lingered over the last drops of a particularly nice white wine at our window table over looking the river at 'Lord Jim's', they arranged a short, but beautifully spectacular fireworks display from the terrace below us - which seemed to be equally appreciated by the large wedding party assembled there for their own less august celebrations of their own event.
So after a walk round the grounds of the hotel and an hour or so at the hotel's exquisite Bamboo Bar listening to a more than acceptable jazz quartet with an adequate singer we ended a particularly nice day. Anette to watch some tennis while I write this blog entry. As the proximity of our return to Australia is now less than 48 hours away our thoughts and conversations have returned to a much higher percentage of Exetel related issues - particularly the problems we discovered in Sri Lanka but more and more the issues confronting Exetel in Australia.
In some ways the issues are linked - at least that is what occurs to me. Exetel is still a small company (in any sense of that word) with the slim, largely inexperienced and stretched management structure that is an inevitable part of being a small company. Yet we now have around 100 personnel almost evenly divided between two different countries and with over 120,000 customers using ten different 'products/services' generating over $A5 million a month in revenues that are under 'attack' in all sorts of ways by all sorts of different 'influences'. In my opinion, Exetel is still not big enough to have 'a proper management structure' but is probably now too big not to have such a thing - a problem faced by every company that grows 'organically' and recruits mainly from university graduates....more along US start up lines than those commonly found in Australia.
So among our reminiscing of the good times and significant events we have experienced over the past 32 years there was a fairly heavy interspersion of 'what on Earth are we going to do about.....' topics which quite rightly diminished in frequency as the bottle levels receded. However tomorrow will dawn soon enough and the problems will still be there long after the restaurant staff have cleared away the detritus of our very, very pleasant dinner. So despite the fabulous food, fine wine and ultra impeccable service our high spirits were dented just a little.
Let's hope heads are clearer tomorrow and better decisions can then be made.
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