Archive for the ‘Archive’ Category

Being in an inner-city apartment, my outside windows get pretty dirty pretty quickly. However, these are cleaned as part of the building maintenance. My inside windows? Well, let’s just say they have needed cleaning for a couple of months. On a weekly basis I have seen different window cleaners cleaning the shop fronts in the street below. On approaching them all (five in total), I have told them my needs (clean inside windows), not asked about price as it was not a critical variable, given them my business card, and told them I would work around their schedule. Each window cleaner stated they would call me. Not one did. No, not one. Here I am as a customer approaching them (no marketing on their part), not concerned about price, and very flexible on timing.  Am I the ideal customer or what? How simple was that for them? Apparently not that simple! What simple opportunities are you missing?

My friend Pete wrote the “Letter of the Week” for the Christchurch Press, and won an Akaroa salmon for his troubles. Here is his letter.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe has this to say about New Zealand: “A failed socio-economic post-Victorian experiment.”

It has this to say about Victorian: “A seriously anal-retentive society with a great many adherents to a cannibalistic Mediterranean religion once popular with a group of savages calling themselves Romans.”

Pundits across the galaxy have this to say about anal retentive: “Overly feminised and politically correct behaviour common among the natives of NZ and practised by a hypocritical bunch of bureaucrats.”

Gag Halfront, the social commentator and author of the book Why Jellybeans Attract Lint in Your Pocket, describes New Zealand as “the origin of the All Blacks, a type of jellybean.”

Nine million dollars, being spent in a recession of biblical proportions on a referendum with a question no one seems able to interpret, on a law that makes no difference to our appalling predilection for child abuse?

Now that is really silly.

P A Newsome, Avonhead

When trying to change my printer settings I received a message stating that I needed a username and password for the printer application. Now I knew I was in trouble given that I had never created a username or password for the printer. After spending 40 min of totally unproductive time reading the Brother printer manual and trying everything I could think of, I emailed the online Brother support. To be honest I had extremely low expectations (a) of a prompt reply (five days ago I had phoned Serengeti Eyewear International and am still waiting a reply) and/or (b) of actually solving my problem. Less then six hours after my email I received a reply. Through a series of short email correspondences over the next 30 minutes, my problem (totally unintuitive as I had to key in computer code) was solved. Well done Brother for the prompt reply and actually adding value to my day. Are you responding promptly to your customers, and what value are you adding?

Was in Wellington Friday so popped along to the Formula One: The Great Design Race display at Te Papa. If you have a spare hour (or half hour like me if you get bored easy) then this is well worth a look. Even a lay person like me can appreciate the engineering genius, and there are some interesting facts that you will find out too.

I have been observing Alan Gray, Project Director of the redevelopment of Eden Park, over the last couple of days. Alan is a superb leader and is a dictionary definition of being an exemplar. Here are some photos I took.

Millie and I were very fortunate to be invited by City Care to Cirque du Soleil: Dralion last week in Auckland. Unfortunately you couldn’t take photos – guess the flash might be slightly off putting to someone doing high-risk acrobatics. In most organisations committees rule over teams (the difference being that in a committee a person can win or lose independent of the committee whereas in a team everyone either wins or loses). Cirque du Soleil demonstrated teamwork, where if one individual failed to achieve their result then everyone in that particular performance failed. On the flipside,  when everyone did their job to an extremely high level, everybody in the team achieved success to a very high level and the audience was treated to a truly inspirational performance.

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