jamisonprawn.net

Seeing as almost everyone has shared their workplace, I thought I would do the same.

This is my carparking spot. I was incredibly excited when my office moved out to Parramatta and I saw that I actually have my name on my parking spot. Thought it would take me 20 years to get that. I enjoy it while I can – if I ever get moved back to the city (likely), I’ll just become a pleb with no name again.

I work on Level 10 in the building.

And here’s my desk, which is incredibly messy at the moment. I promise it’s not normally that bad. On the left of the shelf is my hall-of-fame for mobile devices and data cards – all old stuff that is now long dead, but is fun to remember. And on the right is my whiteboard where I keep track of all the things that need to be done.

While it’s not exactly my workplace, it’s a very important part to starting my day – here is the coffee shop in the laneway behind me.

And that’s where I work.

So it’s quite clear that I’m beginning to suck a lot at this blogging thing. Twitter is definitely where to check in with me.

Holidays were tops. The time in Qld with family was great – Christmas was busy, but nice to see all the family, and especially my beautiful grandparents. And it was just nice to be away from the house with nothing to do! Scooter riding was also done – to my surprise, Debbie was also up for it. We spent a couple of hours one afternoon riding little 50cc Honda scooters up and down The Espanade in Hervey Bay. But apparently I’m still not allowed to get one here in Sydney.

Once we arrived back home just before new years, I still had a week and a half worth of holidays left. It was really nice to just hang out at home, see friends, do a bunch of handyman type things around the place. It was a nice week. But very quickly, it was all over and this week was back to work.

I had one of the worst night’s sleep in months on Sunday night – I had a lot of anxiety about being back at work. The past 6 months have not been at all kind to me at work. It hasn’t been a horrible place to be or anything – but in amongst all the tech stuff I do, my job is basically just a sales role, and not having made my sales target for 6 months in a row meant that it was really tough to go back.

But I was reminded of little wins I had toward the end of 2009, and also just how good I do have it… and in the end, just how much fun I do have being a nerd and doing all this IP and networking stuff. And so I ended up hitting up Monday morning with a pretty positive attitude. In the end, if it turns out that this job isn’t for me anymore, then I look around and find something else to do – no biggie!

Don’t know why I lost a night of sleep over it. :)

I’ve been discovering recently that cultural and language barriers are making it difficult for me to sell a private IP network to a Chinese coal mining company who are starting to build a bit of an empire here in Australia and looking to make themselves lots of money.

After about 3 months worth of emails, phone calls, proposals, and customised pricing, the company had seemed to give us the impression that they wanted us to build them a network, but they’d never actually said yes and wanted to sign the contracts. A meeting finally happened today (after weeks of trying to get one), and I held out a little bit of hope that after going through some points they wanted to cover, they might just sign the contract that I’d brought along.

I was wrong.

I would say it was a good meeting, and we covered lots in the two hours… but as to when they’re going to go ahead with it, it’s anyone’s guess. And apparently that’s fairly commonplace for Chinese businesses.

My boss came along to the meeting to give us a bit of “higher up” Telstra representation, just to remind the customer that they were pretty important to us. Interestingly, she’d just completed a unit on doing business with Asian cultures as part of her Masters in Business course by correspondence. After the meeting, she shared with us (the Telstra people) that everything that had happened in the meeting was much to be expected – the delay in signing, the laughing when they’re asking serious questions, etc. She told us that she’d learnt that apparently companies will focus a lot on entertaining you and dragging it on and on, when actually they made the decision to go ahead quite a while ago. It was comforting to hear…

It was just an incredibly interesting lesson in how hugely different cultures are in relation to doing business. Most “western” companies I deal with will be reasonably quick to make a decision, and certainly wouldn’t string something like this out this long.

Telstra has demonstrated over the last 5 years that it can be a leader in the world telecommunications marketplace. It went from a follower just riding on the coat-tails of a copper network, to creating the biggest and fastest mobile network in the world.

Yet this morning, the Australian government has decided that it doesn’t like an Australian company being too successful. After all the the time, money and effort that Telstra has invested into becoming the leaders, the Government has decided that it’s time to slow it down.

They announced a series of reforms to telecommunications legislation that will essentially force the break-up of Telstra. Stephen Conroy tried to make it look nice by saying that Telstra can voluntarily choose to break up the way it wants, but then swiftly added that if they didn’t, the goverment will break them up anyway. And added a boot in by saying it’ll block any new mobile spectrum acquisitions until “it structurally separates, divests its … cable network and divests its interests in Foxtel.” Talk about bullying.

For me, this just seems like it’s going to make it very, very difficult for Australia to continue to be a world leader in the mobile broadband marketplace. Telstra’s advancements have forced Optus, Voda and 3 to play along or get left behind, and has meant that we have four 3G mobile networks in Australia. That’s massive for a country of our size compared with the US and China. And so by slowing down Telstra and forcing it to separate, are Optus, Voda and 3 going to bother making anymore advancements? They won’t have anyone to try and keep up with.

It just feels like the government has caved in to the whinging and whining of other telecommunications companies in Australia, who aren’t as far ahead as Telstra, and has just chopped it right down to slow its growth.

Somehow, the government thinks that a 100Mbps nationwide fibre network is the answer to Australia’s broadband problems… but in 8 years when its built, it will already be redundant. And in that time, Telstra would’ve been beyond that point in wireless broadband. Wonder if that will still happen, or if this will signify the beginning’s of the government’s monopoly on Australia-wide telecommunications?

And lastly, I loved the nomination that Stephen Conroy put forward for himself for the Ignorant and Stupid Comments of the Year awards:

Senator Conroy said Telstra copper network was literally “collapsing in the ground”.

“Every time there is a flood, every time there is heavy rain in northern NSW, Queensland, there is a further degradation of some part of Telstra’s copper network,” he said. “There is an enormous maintenance requirement every year to continue to just try and keep it where it’s at.”

The infrastructure in the ground was actually blocking the capacity to deliver decent broadband.

Bring on the comments telling me that Telstra is a big bully and that it’s the right thing for “competition” and for Australia – I’d love to hear them and I’m ready for a fight. Cos you try and tell me that the government isn’t being the biggest bully of them all right now.

[smh link]

It’s Wednesday morning, and yet it feels like it should be Friday. It’s been a very intense two days.

Monday was always going to be tough coming back to work after the few days off last week – I knew a lot was going on around the place and that there’d be a fair bit waiting for me. I spent a good 4 hours with a project manager at the end of the day trying to sift through a network rollout that was beginning to go a bit pear-shaped.

And it was at the end of that meeting that everything turned bad – one site of this 5 site network wasn’t able to get DSL to it at all. And that site just happened to be the head office. Without connectivity there, the whole network was pointless. Essentially, it was all my fault – I’d ordered the feasibility test, but completely overlooked the bit where it said “not available at this address”. Big oops.

So after having a pretty horrid Monday evening wondering what the next day would hold, and what the implications would be, and worst of all, breaking the news to the customer… yesterday turned out to not be so bad. There is an alternate technology I can use (which runs on fibre)… but the downside is that it costs more. Because the customer has already signed the contract, I’ve had to put some big work into getting some heavy pricing discounts to hopefully rectify my huge stuff up.

I’m not out of the woods yet – I haven’t broken any of this to my customer yet. And I’m still waiting to see if I get my pricing discounts approved. And then there’s the whole bit about changing orders in the system and sending grumpy techs back out to the site to do completely different work now.

The intensity of work in the last couple of months has just been huge… something I don’t think I’ve experienced in my job for quite a few years. Hopefully it’ll smooth out a bit as this new fin year settles in.

What was cool though, was heading to work, feeling very unsettled and anxious about what was awaiting me, and have Desert Song running through my head constantly – and I hadn’t even listened to it recently or anything. It was just one of those very clear God moments (not that God isn’t doing little things like that all the time, but this was just one moment that I noticed quite clearly). It was pretty comforting.

This is my prayer in the desert,
When all that’s within me feels dry.
This is my prayer in my hunger and need,
My God is the God who provides.

This is my prayer in the harvest,
When favor and providence flow.
I know I’m filled to be emptied again,
The seed I’ve received I will sow.

And I will bring praise, I will bring praise!
No weapon formed against me shall remain.
I will rejoice, I will declare,
God is my victory and He is here.

All of my life, in every season,
You are still God.
I have a reason to sing,
I have a reason to worship.

Such brilliant lyrics. It’s so important to bring praise to God even when things are crap in our lives, and not fall into the habit of saying how awesome He is only when we’re having a great time. And that last bit: All of my life, I have a reason to worship – heck yes I do! No matter what’s going on, I have a reason to worship, cos God loves me and has saved me. And no matter what crap comes my way in life, that will never change, and He will always be there.

The new financial year has kicked off, again.

It’s always difficult having July 1st mid-week. Earlier this week was the struggle of finishing off the fin year and trying to make the overall year sales target (which I missed, just). And after that was over, Wednesday kicks in and everything’s all new again.

Wednesday was tough – two of account managers at work were made redundant. Not a happy mood in the office at all. The restructure of people in general has meant that I am only working with 8 acct managers this year, and not 14. Huge bonus for me. But overall, targets are set to go up, and I’m impatiently waiting to find out what they are next week.

Today was all about the sales incentive plan – all the ins and outs on how we get paid commission, what the rules and changes are, etc. And it was also the day when the customer portfolios were announced. Good in some respects, cos some customers came up from what we call “mass market” to be account managed, so there’s lots of opportunity to start selling to them. But it sucks cos some bigger customers moved up, and annoyingly, two of them I had big data networks on the table for. And now I’ve got 30 days to close that sale, otherwise I don’t get paid for it.

But I did enjoy a sleep in and slow start to today, which my new manager wanted us to do. And tomorrow is an outdoor BBQ, meeting, fun type day for all the account managers. That starts at 10:30, and I’ll head there briefly before heading into the city for a farewell lunch for my previous manager.

And then next week will start to pick up, I’m sure.

Having one of those days where I kinda just want it to be over.

It’s the end of the fin year today, and that means the last day to try and make my yearly sales target. Although we have monthly targets that are important, from a yearly review point of view, making 100% or more of your overall year target (the sum of each monthly target) is very important.

As of right now, I’m so close. But realistically, to make the required gap in just one day, or 5 hours, is a big ask. And I just can’t see it happening, and I’m running out of sales opportunities to try and get closed to make it.

Very frustrating to be so close.

And change kicks in tomorrow… my manager, who I’ve worked for for about 3 and a half of the 5 years I’ve worked at Telstra, moves onto a new role tomorrow, and I get a new boss. She’s fine to work for, and we get on well… but it’s still change.

I think I’m just in one of those moods where I just want it all to be over and get back to a “normal” work day. Knowing that a 3 day Blue Moutains holiday with my wife is only a week away doesn’t help.

Work is tough at the moment. After a few months of some solid results, I had to have some decent sales in June to finish off the fin year hitting my overall target (yes, monthly targets are important, but for my yearly review, hitting the year target is most important).

Things started off this month quite promising – a big network opportunity for a mining company to link their Sydney office to their mine, and then link both back to a head office in Beijing. Huge stuff. But as the month has gone on, that deal has taken longer to come together, and the chances of getting a signature this month are slim – not just cos the customer isn’t keen, but pricing and contracts for something like this take longer than usual, as you’d imagine.

And the usual simple ADSL connections and data cards that usually just flow through from different customers to make up a large chunk of my sales numbers each month are just seeming a bit slow. And there’s been a couple of other reasonable sized sales that have just faded away in the last fortnight. All in all, quite frustrating.

But I wrote the numbers that I needed (with 8 working days in the month left) up on my whiteboard at my desk tonight before I left the office. It’s a fairly huge gap… but I ain’t giving up. And as soon as I make up that H2 number, some serious commission kicks in thanks to an incentive they gave us in January for this half of the year. So that looks promising as well.

We’ll see how things pan out.

In other news… I still have bandit.fm credit thanks to Commbank, and so with Chase That Feeling in my head, and really loving that song, I bought the Hilltop Hoods’ new album. I’ve appreciated a couple of their songs before now – always loving their sampling and strong beats – and so thought it was about time I gave a whole album a go. Listening to bits of it now, but going to give it a proper listen tomorrow morning.

It’s always a bit depressing when you begin a month in sales. Especially when that beginning of the month is mid-week. You see, When I came home from work yesterday evening, I was on 178% of my sales target, and was all smiles! And then when I walked into the office this morning, I was on zero.

But you can quickly get over that depressing bit, and just enjoy the fact that you can kinda choose to just sit back and not do a lot. Today, after our tech sales meeting in the morning, I went up to level 9 of our building which is practically empty. I found myself a desk in the corner of the floor that looks out a window and just enjoyed sitting in a very, very quiet section of our offices. And I then proceeded to distract myself from most forms of work for the afternoon.

And tomorrow, being day 2 of the new month, is still a bit quiet. I have to go and visit a customer in the morning out in North Sydney to start planning all the details (IP addressing and such) of their new network that we signed them for last week. But after that, I’m gonna go visit a new Telstra Business Centre down in Liverpool that’s just opened up, and where some old Telstra friends are working. That will be fun. But aside from that… I don’t think tomorrow will hold a lot.

I worked damn hard last month. I’m enjoying these couple of days :)

It’s been a big year for Twitter… certainly in Australia. Media coverage has increased about 4 million times. And plenty of celebrities have jumped on board, as well as heaps and heaps of just regular people too. And after probably about 3 years [how do you find out how long you've been a part of twitter?] and some 5400 updates, I’m loving Twitter more today than any other day before it. The big increase in coverage and such has helped me find a bundle more people to follow, and it’s definitely made it a lot more fun. Following lots more people means lots more updates – a Twitter client sits on my PC at work, beeping at me every couple of minutes; I have the same Twitter client on my Mac; I have a client on my iPhone for when I’m not sitting in front of my computer; and I also have a client on my Blackberry. I wonder if I’m addicted?

@stephenconroy was a very satirical twitter account that poked fun at Stephen Conroy, the great internet filtering debate, and just politics in general really. It was cool to follow and laugh at. And if you happen to read any tech news, you will have found out that things have blown up in a big way with regards to that…

Fake Stephen Conroy outed himself as a Telstra employee, and the media loved it. There was all sorts of back and forths, and wonderings if Telstra would stand for it, etc. It blew up for a few days, and then kinda died down. And then a couple of days ago, Leslie Nassar (Fake Stephen Conroy, @stephenconroy) jumped on the end of a joke someone had posted suggesting he should be the new CEO of Telstra! His resulting blog post is here.

I thought it was quite funny. Very satirical, and I thought it was clearly satirical too. But I guess some people in Telstra had pretty much had enough of everything, and so as of this morning, he was no longer employed at Telstra. Essentially he was fired. But the wording and circumstances are a bit disputed: Telstra’s version; Leslie’s version [language warning].

Personally… well, let’s just say that I think it’s wise to perhaps maintain some form employer anonymity online. I probably don’t do the best job of that in my whole online presence, but I’m deliberately quite careful when writing blog posts specifically.

The whole thing been fun to follow; there’s been some very, very funny posts and tweets… and I hope they continue. As for Leslie Nassar – he’s one of the most famous people in Australian tech news right at this moment. I would be incredibly surprised if he doesn’t get himself some form of satirical gig writing for Zdnet or similar. Can only hope.

So it’s been a huge few days. And now, Wednesday evening, I’m feeling shattered.

We got a bunch of info from our mortgage guy on Monday morning, and then spent Monday night working it all out, doing sums, and realising that we were gonna be able to afford this thing, and sent all the info back that he needed. And then the cool thing was that at about 9:30am on Tuesday, he emailed us back saying that the bank had basically automatically approved our loan cos of our pay and savings. Very cool!

So we put an offer straight on a house that we loved. It got knocked back, and I reckon the real estate agent might be playing with me a little – she told us about another offer that they were considering, and this offer was a bit higher than we wanted to go. But we put another offer in anyway, lower than the offer they were supposedly considering, but still within our budget. So we’ll just wait and see how real this other offer is.

This is going to be a long game. As a salesperson, I’m loving this bit. As James Noble, Mr Impatient, I’m hating this bit.

Then on top of that, I’m having a pretty awesome month at work, and so many really decent sized IP networks are close to signing for a bunch of customers. So I am just insanely busy with adjusting contracts, and repricing links and bandwidths and such… at one point this evening, I was doing some repricing for a customer, and I totally priced up the completely wrong network cos I had another customer’s network in my head! But it’s all great stuff… all my efforts in previous month to get the account managers to find these opportunities is really paying off. And I reckon I’m well on the way to a head start for April… and hopefully May as well.

I spent the last week feeling like I was back in school.

As part of our education in the whole fixed data sales side that I’ve stepped into in the last few months, they sent us on a week long networking design course. Monday to Friday, 9-5 in a classroom, do some serious learning each day… it was pretty intense having not spent that long in a classroom since high school!

But the learning was great. We spent a bit of time going through the “methodology” type stuff – that is, the “how” of selling; pretty boring considering we’ve done it to death – but the rest of the time was spent going into some deep technical stuff. We nailed IP addressing, all the routing protocols, all the 802.x standards… it was great.

It was all the stuff I went to uni to learn. But I did it in a week.

Food was supplied too.. and it wasn’t half bad. And that was my week. Now I need to head back to the office tomorrow and find out how sales have been going and what the gap is that will need to be made up by the end of March.

Off to have lunch with Debbie’s Grandma & Grandpa today… fish and chips, very good.

Fridays are usually pretty awesome days. Today they are living up to their awesomeness.

The acct managers smashed their target this month (even though not a lot of it was data, so I didn’t make my target), so their boss let them have today off. And because there’s no one in the office, there’s not really any point in me being there. I logged on and did some stuff this morning, but now I’m just enjoying some relaxation.

I didn’t make my target this month, but the frustration I was feeling earlier this week when I last blogged has subsided – essentially, my boss understands that there isn’t much more that could’ve been done this month. And the bottom line is that there’s already a lot being lined up for early March… so I should have a pretty huge month in March. Fingers crossed anyway – I have some serious gaps to make up from the last few months. So that has made me feel slightly more relaxed toward the end of this week.

But back to today being awesome… this arvo’s relaxation has led Howie and I over to Y-Yes Cafe in Hornsby. There’s free wifi here. And I’m having a Chili Hot Chocolate. I’ve never really taken chilli chocolate on… but I actually am not minding my hot chocolate having a bit of a kick. It’s only mild though, and I’m a bit worried about how full on a full strength one would be.

And the most awesome bit of today begins in a little over 3 hours: I’m heading out to pick up Kate, and then we’re heading into The Enmore to see The Cat Empire! She bought me a ticket for my birthday, and I am very excited. I was trying to count last night, using the tickets that are stuck to my wall as a starting point… and I think this will be the 10th time I’ve seen them live. It could be more, but it’s definitely at least 10. And then tomorrow The Cat Empire are playing some free outdoor gigs – one at Bondi, and one in Circular Quay! So we may get along to those as well… which would make for a pretty spectacular weekend.

So Telstra has increased the speed of its mobile network – 21Mbps is the new peak speed, with 42Mbps still looking likely for end of ‘09.

Whether it be jealously or some other reason, Optus has come out and had a bit of a go at trying to slam Telstra. I say “a bit” because they didn’t try very hard… they used some pretty weak arguments:

“The fact is customers will need to buy a new modem and live/work beneath a base station to take advantage of these ‘theoretical’ speeds.”

So how about Optus’ expansion of their 3G network into country areas that works on a new frequency – do customers need a new handset to take advantage of that coverage and high speed on the 900Mhz frequency? Hmmm.

“This is another example of Telstra misleading Australian businesses and consumers into thinking they will now experience speeds of 21Mbps across the whole Next G network.”

And how’s Optus’ 3.6Mbps 3G network going for its customers – are they experiencing 3.6Mbps download speeds when they use it? How about your ADSL2+ connection at home – are you seeing 20Mbps when you use that? Hmmm.

“Telstra is already charging $59.95 per month for 1GB of data which is way above the rest of the market (Optus offers 6GB for $59.99). We shudder to think what additional premium they will charge customers to access ‘theoretical’ speeds of 21Mbps.”

I will just double check my sales figures… but I’m pretty sure I have customers purchasing Telstra Mobile Broadband devices from me on a daily basis. They are very well aware that Optus, Voda and Three’s data cards are cheaper. But they choose Telstra because of the speed, coverage and reliability – sometimes, things like that are more important than price. The quality tends to be fairly visible in the price.

So thanks for your comments, Andrew Buay, but you should probably just focus on looking after your fibre optics up north. Wouldn’t want someone to accidentally trip over the extension cord and send QLD offline yet again.

One of the exciting things about getting a new Mac was that it was an Intel machine. I’d managed to get a copy of the image that goes onto all our work machines off a colleague in Melbourne, and I was excited to put that on a partition of my Mac so I could do away with my pathetically slow Toshiba laptop that isn’t due to be replaced for another 15 months.

I got the file (a DMG image), and looked through the contents. There was an instruction guide, which gave heaps of instructions, but basically only said that the CD (of which I just had the image of) is bootable and you just need to start the computer with it in the drive. That was all fine, I thought, I just need to get this main computer image file (a Nortons’ Ghost image), put it on a CD, and make that CD boot into DOS with Ghost to do it all.

[The next couple of paragraphs are pretty nerdy.]

I thought that would be easy. Turns out it isn’t. The Mac’s CD drive isn’t compatible with the standard DOS Oak CD driver. Even drivers I found that were supposed to work wouldn’t. So I moved onto USB and trying to put some USB ASPI drivers into the config.sys file, but they wouldn’t work either. (And by this time, most of the week had passed.) Last night, I tried a couple more USB drivers, but still no luck. And I was getting to the point where I thought I’d give up.

And then my colleague sent me a Twitter message, basically implying that the DMG file that he’d sent me originally was already bootable and that I didn’t need to do anything. That was a pretty important bit of information that I’d completely missed when he first gave it to me, and I hadn’t even thought to check.

ARGH!

And so, after checking this morning, sure enough, all I needed to do was to burn that DMG file to a CD and boot. And it would work! And I could’ve done that last weekend!

So I’ll be doing that on Monday… cos once it boots, it needs to be connected to our LAN to register itself to the Active Directory server and pull down all the programs I need.

It was a bit of a waste of a week… but it was still a heck of a lot of fun playing around in DOS and remembering how config.sys and autoexec.bat files work. Made me fondly remember the days of Westfields Sports High. :)

Been back at work for a couple of days now. Beginning the third right about now. Didn’t sleep well last night – I went to bed a bit late, and had to get up early to come into the city, so ironically, I think I slept badly because I was thinking too much about how little time I had to sleep.

Monday was a pretty relaxing day at work - I didn’t want to do a lot. My theory after having three weeks off last January was to take the first day back fairly easily – there was no way I was going to be able to accomplish everything and catch up on everything in one day after being away for a while. So in my mind, there’s no point in trying to do that and stressing yourself out. So I just took it easy, read through all my emails, caught up with people, and had a bit of an early home time.

But then Tuesday I really need to kick it, cos I had stuff that needed to get done. My half-yearly review is happening today, and so I had Tuesday to get prepared for it - get together all my sales numbers, the number of mobile services in the portfolio I look after (and growth percentages), the revenue for the portfolio (and its growth), and heaps of other stuff. As well as to self-evaluate myself… always a bit of a tough one.

On top of that, I had to work out how January was going as far as sales go – in the sales world, being on leave doesn’t mean your monthly target changes at all… you should still be able to hit your sales numbers because your pipeline should be full. And then to start giving people a serious push because at more than halfway through the month, I’m less than 20% to target.

So Tuesday was a pretty full on day! And with the sales meeting and half yearly review today, I’m thinking today might be equally draining… but we will see. I know that I want to head home after the review to have an afternoon nap.

Ahh, this time of year is always fun working in a big company. Everyone wants to have Christmas lunches!

Today, myself and the three colleagues who work in adjacent sales teams doing the same role as me went out for lunch. The four of us were pioneers for the merging of the mobile data and fixed data roles, so we’ve become pretty good mates through it all, and so it was tops to go out and have lunch together. We headed for Bankstown, and went to Summerland Family Restaurant - a fairly huge Lebanese restaurant. We ordered the banquet, and then out came heaps and heaps and heaps of food. But gosh it was good. Reasonably priced too. But happily, today is the only lunch for the rest of the week I had to pay for ;)

Tomorrow is off to Wagamama for lunch with all the Sydney-based technical sales people in Telstra. Should be great fun. And then Friday, the two Parramatta sales teams decided they wanted to go out for their own team lunch… cos the Parra guys generally enjoy being quite separate from the city sales people :) So score for me, that means another corporate Amex lunch!

And then I won’t eat all weekend.

And other things making me happy include a few pretty reasonable data sales that have meant I’m very likely to hit my sales target by the end of the week. That will mean the last days of December will be even more relaxed!

I am feeling quite flat today. I am thinking it’s just the knowledge that there is a house out there somewhere for us, but that it’s going to take quite a bit more before we find it. As the days pass, it’s looking more and more likely that Bellamy St is not the place God has for us. I’ve begun a bit of a search today for some places, and we will do some looking on the weekend and see what happens.

I went out on Monday afternoon and traded my long faithful Xbox 360 in for a Nintendo Wii. The 360 had been great fun, and it was a tops system. But I just don’t play it much anymore, and I wouldn’t see that increasing once I’m married. But a Wii is always good fun to have as a party console, and I think it will get more use. I’m looking forward to the fun times and laughs ahead. :)

My numbers have come along in a pretty massive way toward the end of this month in sales. At the start of last week, just halfway through the month, I was on about 2% of target, and things were looking scary. As of about half an hour ago, it’s sitting on about 190%. And that’s not thanks to any one massive sale – just lots and lots of little ones. I’m so eccstatic how the month has finished out!

Tonight is band practice for the Wisdow For Women event at church. It’ll be my last one helping the ladies out with the music. But I’m playing my electric guitar again, so I’m looking forward to it… should be great fun :)

I battled the pricing approval geniuses at work today.

To backtrack a tad… Friday’s big meeting to get me some good pricing for a customer to win a huge deal was not what I expected – I went in expecting either a yes or a no. I got a maybe. Annoying. Basically, everyone on the forum was supportive and thought it was a good deal and that we needed to get moving on it. Problem was, no one there had the delegation to say yes. It was quite a unique opportunity and there weren’t really any precedents, so perhaps they were all just a bit scared. It just needed someone to take a step out and go, “yeah, let’s just do it.” Frustrating somewhat. So that left me with an even shorter deadline and with different people to talk to.

I spoke to the customer and found out that I kinda had a little bit more time, but time was still was very, very short. So this morning I filled in some forms, sent them through to some pricing guys who were going to help me get what I wanted. And we back-and-forthed a bit during the day when we got rejected, trying to find more info and a way to work things from a different angle to get what we wanted, without straight-out lying to get what we wanted. There may have been slight exaggerations about some things…

But the good thing is that as of tonight, I’m still not out of the game – the customer has given me til the end of tomorrow, and I’ve told the pricing guys that deadline and I didn’t hear from them in the last couple of hours… which may be positive and mean that it’s just gone somewhere to get sign-off now that it looks like it could make our company some money. (And by that I mean, “look the way they want it to look.”)

Oh it’s so fun to work for such a huge organisation with so many different approvals that are needed, and you don’t know who to get it from til you’ve consulted your handbook and found out which astrological period we’re in, and whether or not the planets are all aligned…

edit: got the approvals today! That’s part 1 done. Now I just have to sit back and wait for the Government to accept my customer’s proposal and everyone will be happy. It’s gonna be a nervous two weeks.

I began listening to a talk on the differences between Catholicism and Protestant beliefs on the way home from Debbie’s tonight. Deano preached it a couple of months ago while I was at Kedron, and so I missed it. But I got myself a copy on Sunday and thought it would be interesting to listen to… and it has been thus far. But my drive home is only a bit over half an hour, and apparently I’m only about halfway through the talk – perhaps I’m glad I’m listening to it in the car now and not on that Sunday evening ;) hehe.

Looking forward to hearing the rest of it though. Perhaps I will blog some thoughts about it later.

Been a bit of a crazy week at work.

Tuesday night was a bit shocking – I had one deal on my mind that really didn’t make my evening all that enjoyable, neither for me, nor my fiancee. And then I don’t think I slept well at all. It’s probably the first time something from work has been that much on my mind that it has stopped me from sleeping well.

Tuesday arvo was when I visited this customer, and found out that them asking us for 7000 new mobile numbers was in fact very real, and that they wanted them fairly soon. Problem was, that even though my wonderful company has brilliant mobile coverage, we suck at being cheap. So even though this customer wants to do business with us cos of coverage, we’re still too expensive, and I need to give them something cheaper if they’re going to go ahead with us. And the problem is that I can’t just give them discounts off our standard data pricing. At all. No matter who approves it. So tomorrow afternoon, I need to attend a forum of managers of different segments of my company, and present my customer’s case, and explain to them why we should waive one of the contract rules which will, in the end, make it cheaper for the customer.

I’m hoping that it’ll be very open and shut and they’ll just go, “Approved. Next!” But there’s a chance they could fire a heap of questions at me, asking why I didn’t sell the customer the value of our network, why can’t we win the business based on the fact that we have more coverage, etc. I’m prepared for all that… but when it’s very high-up managers in Telstra, it’s a bit nerve-racking.

Just to put it into perspective… this one deal is worth about 8x my monthly target. It’s huge. Man, the commission that I get from it would be sweeeeet.

So the reason Tuesday night was so crap was because I was up against a heap of roadblocks, and was trying to work out how I could get this customer the cheaper pricing they need in 3 days time (the cutoff that the customer gave me). Now that that’s all sorted, the only thing on my mind is presenting my case tomorrow… :)