John Linton I took the evening Emirates flight out of Sydney which got me to my hotel by 2 am local time and 6 am Sydney time - having slept for most of the 8+ hour flight and it now being my 'getting up time' in Sydney I am wide awake as would be expected. I have never driven from the airport to the city at this sort of time and it made you realise how stupidly wasteful our major cities (and those of most of the world) are. Not a single large business tower block had any lights on - something that is eminently sensible and would save Australian major corporations a great deal of money if they followed this obvious example.
There is now a delayed 'live' broadcast of the Arsenal game so I will finish this later.....which didn't work out very well as I fell asleep after about 20 minutes and didn't wake up until after the game was over at which point it seemed sensible to go to bed and wake up whenever - which I did. So much for jet lag and time differences but, as I have absolutely no plans to do anything but absolutely nothing over the next two days was and is just fine. In fact - I do have one thing to do while I am here which is to buy some sapphires.
Since we opened the Colombo office (Sri Lanka being the source of most of the finest sapphires in the world) we put in place a program of recognising the performance of our newly hired sales personnel by giving them a 2+ carat sapphire when they reached one of their ongoing sales targets. As our sales personnel in Sri Lanka are 100% females and our sales staff in Australia are 80% females these rewards seemed to be very appropriate and sapphires also make very nice cuff links for our few males sales people in Sydney. It also seemed appropriate that we could buy something that a person wouldn't normally consider buying for themselves and that the retail cost of a fine sapphire in Colombo was 70% to 80% lower than the lowest wholesale cost I could find in Sydney.
We have been running this program for around two years now and we have handed over some very nice gem stones to our sales people. For the Australian personnel the target for the first stone is 50 corporate sales and for the second stone it's 100 corporate sales. Two of the first four people we hired in Sydney have now achieved their second sapphire (despite having supervisor responsibilities added to their personal sales targets after four/five months after joining Exetel) and another 8 people have been awarded their first sapphire. In Sri Lanka the targets were set at 500 residential sales for the first sapphire and 1,000 residential sales for the second. The first three SL sales people have already received their sapphires and another six have now recently qualified having made over 500 residential sales.
So some time in the next two days I will spend a few hours in the 'gem district' trying to update my knowledge of current pricing and trends and also find what new 'discoveries' have appeared (such as tsavorite that was new to me a couple of years ago but which is an extremely beautiful green gemstone from East Africa). I started buying, at first, emeralds over 30 years ago when some kind person explained to me the folly of buying jewelery in city stores and showed me how to buy much better stones via estate sales at auction (breaking up the ring or ear rings or pendant and only keeping the main stone and then having a skilled jeweler make up a new piece using the stones thus obtained) and how to understand the quality differences. Since then I have become an 'expert amateur' not only in emerald qualities but then in sapphires and rubies and other 'exotics' but, not being a 'girl' the females in my immediate family have a lot more jewelery than they would have otherwise...and more recently the 'girls' within Exetel.
I look forward to browsing around the wholesalers in the streets off Shilom Road near the Holiday Inn with a great deal of pleasure.
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