John Linton ....my true love said to me - "I'm going to the sales with Catherine so get your own lunch".
I don't know whether it was the dullness and sheer predictability of the cricket yesterday or the difficulties in trying to find answers to the questions that require decisions in an ever shortening time frame but I made no progress on anything yesterday. I blame the cricket personally....not the rate of scoring or the efforts of the bowlers, though it was disconcerting to see how very, very ordinary the efforts by Smith, Clarke and Watson were - they set a new low for the standard of "part timer" in test cricket. Perhaps it was just the third day of a break and also the third day of over eating accompanied by too much wine - whatever it was, no ideas of any type presented themselves. Perhaps the third day of Christmas is always marked by lethargy induced by the consumption of too much rich food over the previous two days?
So yesterday drifted by with constant showers deterring any serious effort to leave the house and absolutely no progress being made to addressing the pressing business problems that do not take holidays. I turned on the Arsenal/Chelsea game at midnight with no expectations that it would produce anything but further lethargy and promptly fell asleep before the kick off. When I woke up half way through the second half I was pleasantly surprised by the score line which remained the same until full time by which time I was wide awake again and opened up my lap top and looked at the residential pricing parameters yet again.Maybe it was the blurred state of my mind but when I checked the arithmetic this morning there seemed to be a glimmer of two good ideas buried among the silly extrapolations I had applied to some base figures. I will wait until tomorrow to check the concepts and double check the math before I
get too hopeful - but maybe there is a workable scenario after all. Maybe Arsenal should win against a major club more often.
The other major problem of finding 42 additional sales people (the 8 additional network engineers are not really a problem) remains as insoluble as it has been since we began to find it progressively more difficult to source high quality candidates over the past six months. I cannot work out what has happened since we hired the first 21 graduates
(18 of whom remain with us) and the past three months where we have failed to find anyone suitable at all despite interviewing over a dozen people. Something has obviously changed either in 'us' or in the type of candidate we are seeing or in our interviewing processes - but I don't know what that may be. Perhaps we need to find a new source other than the one specialised recruitment company we have been using, exclusively,from the start of the program? What ever the current problem is we need to find a solution in a hurry.
I have noticed one strange thing over the past two days but particularly this morning. That is the number of sales enquiries that are coming through in a period when there are usually very, very few. Right now there are three calls 'waiting' with three other calls being dealt with. To have six simultaneous sales enquiries on the 28th December is highly unusual. Looking at the call logs it has been fairly busy for the last two days and both Christmas Day and boxing day were more than twice the number of calls of last year on these days.
My computer has now had a Firefox crash for the second time in 5 minutes and the 'save' process has acted in a very peculiar way so I am going to quit now while there is some semblance of what I have written - albeit in a stupid format.
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