John Linton ......that seemed to be enjoyed by everyone. One of the advantages of being part of a small company is that even with your Christmas party lasting only two and a half hours you get to speak to practically everyone and everyone gets to speak to everyone else they wish to. For the sixth year in our seven Christmas Party existence we have hired the same room at Star City and have followed the same 'routine'. Bus from the office/drinks ready to be poured on arrival/food offered by waiters bearing trays soon thereafter/Christmas presents of casino chips handed to each person by Annette/short speech (<5 minutes)/Caricaturist/Tarot Reader/Close Up Magician 'touring' the room/copious and high quality finger food/more than adequate amounts of high grade alcohol. 8.30 people leave with most going to the casino floor to use their Christmas chips to play the tables with their co-workers or party on in one of the several bars in the casino or nearby.
Annette and I enjoyed ourselves and I am pretty sure, judging by the increasing noise levels and continually increasing gales of laughter (generated by the many caricatures drawn, the still amazing 'magic' tricks' and, of course, the rivers of alcohol) and the smiling faces everywhere that every body else did too. I then played craps for around half an hour - almost all of that time I was the shooter rolling 29 consecutive 'numbers' (remarkably not a single 2,3 or 12 ) and during which period I trebled my starting stake and left when I finally rolled a seven to much back slapping and 'onyas' at both ends of the table - apart from the sour faced woman who continually bet against me and seemed to lose the best part of $5,000 in that short space of time. Annette had drunk very little so we were able to drive home and even the traffic seemed to be sparser than usual for the time of year on a Friday night.....a highly enjoyable night.
Sales were remarkably good, across almost all product/service types yesterday which is unusual for this day in December but I doubt that it means anything other than a discrepancy between this day this year compared to other years due to other events completely beyond our ability to know. We will attempt to complete the first draft of the 2011 business plan by the end of next week but based on what I see now we will need today some very serious work on it over the remainder of the month. It seems inevitable that the drastic changes to the ways we offer residential services will have to be made and that will be a daunting and 'dangerous' task. Unfortunately it will almost certainly have to be done when the personnel resources are going to be at their scarcest which is something I am not looking forward to.
Our lawyers commenced the formal proceedings against the TIO yesterday with the first directions hearing at which, strangely, the TIO's counsel made a request for anonymity in terms of the perpetrators of the spurious complaints that are the basis for the action.The judge rejected that application,at least for the time being, as he couldn't understand why it was made any better than anyone else could. It seems this issue is going to take even longer than I had, pessimistically, expected it to.
So only 14 days to Christmas with about 28 days of work to do. One day I must learn to plan my time usage much better.
PS: And in the "I told you so" vein:
http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/43835-acma-report-shows-australians-going-mobile-big-time
my predictions starting three years ago continue to be supported by the ongoing statistics made available by the various federal departments that track trends in Australia - so to all the posters who said it would never happen and it was my own self serving personal fantasies - I told you so. Still think the premises on which the'NBN2' are being built are sound?
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46