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.

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. :)

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

@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.