John Linton Australia is slowly 'coming back to life' in terms of business with the first two 'business' sales made yesterday and residential ADSL sales reaching the 'usual numbers' per day - both more quickly than last year and the year before. Exetel's people will not begin returning from their Christmas breaks until next Monday but already there is a sense of normality on the streets of North Sydney and all of the various food outlets in the area are open again and you have to pause before you cross the road as the traffic appears to be back to 'full on' mindlessness. Oh well....Christmas always comes with a rush and then 'disappears even more quickly. I will enjoy the light traffic on Military Road for two more days before it turns to its normal horrible state.
We continue to make progress on finalising the 'odds and ends' of the new year's planning and, with a little bit of luck, will complete it by the end of this week. We are still dithering about signing the lease for the new floor - very un-Exetel like - but with all the problems we faced last year and the continuing unknowns of 2011 it is a major expense that we need if not everything then many things to 'go right' for it to be a sensible decision to make. Perhaps we have become too conservative due to the 'slings and arrows' of the last 18 - 24 months but our business is very much in transition and, while the signs are quite positive, the future is still very much an 'unknown territory'.
From what I can see of the residential marketplaces that we are involved in nothing much, if anything, has changed over the 'Christmas Period'. As I remarked during late November/early December there continue to be signs that discount exhaustion has set in with the lies and obfuscation reaching levels I have never seen in a 'technical' marketplace before. Perhaps I'm quite wrong but it seems even the largest of the lying providers are getting appalled by their own mendacity, not because of any belated onset of ethics or morality but because the chickens are coming home to roost in that the customers who were conned by their lies are beginning to realise they have been conned. If you believe that Vodafone did anything but deliberately and knowingly under provision their 3G network for a very long time that has resulted in the current kerfuffle then you are very naive. Similarly the ever more rancorous protests from several other suppliers customers are simply more customers 'waking up' to the fact that they have been sold a pup by unethical suppliers who have made deliberate decisions not to provide the services their shrieking advertisements promise. Maybe justice will be done in terms of punishing these lying companies? If that happens it would be a first.
I suppose the ultimate idiocy that is now allowed to exist in this industry as it has become ever more tawdry is that Ms Faustus is able to proclaim that the two people heading up her 'NBN2' were not involved in the bribery and corruption the company they previously ran has just fessed up to and paid meg fines. I mean how on Earth would she or Stupid Stephen know? Clearly they wouldn't and the fact that the Prime Minister of a theoretically sophisticated country is allowed to make such a stupid assessment says it all about how dumbed down the Australian populace has become.
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