port7 – co – uk

I have come to the conclusion that Sales Reps / Account Managers etc are the apendixes of the business world, meaning they are of no use to anyone!

Over the past few weeks I have been in numerous meetings and conferences with various companies that we may by doing business with. In these meetings there is usualy me and a few others from my company and some people from their side namely a techie, some sort of director and the sales rep.

In all these meetings the sales reps have contributed absolutly zero of value. Most of the talking is done by the director and the techie is the one we ask the questions of, but the sales rep does bugger all.

They also all seem to have the same image, namely fake tan and cheesy hairstyle. I guess its some sort of uniform. Even when you ask about pricing they always seem to say ‘I will have to get back to you on that’ so its not as if they are a fount of knowledge on that side.

My view is sack the lot of them, they are a risk to your business. They will say yes to anything, so if you ask the company if their system can do so an so, they will always say yes despite it being imposible for the company. You get more sense out of the techies, they are the people who know the products after all, the sales rep adds no value at all!

This week I did an 18 hour day, something I have not done since I worked in McDonalds years ago. My employer Speedyhire recently bought out Multi Group. With that purchase came some infrastructure, so Wednesday was the day that we went down to Croyden to get them. I was up at 3am, of too the office to meet a coleage and pick up the white van, then down to Croyden (got there at 8am) to dismantle and load up the racks and servers, then we headed up to Nottingham to our data centre to reassemble and plug them in to our network. We arrived in Nottingham at 4pm and didn’t leave there till about 7.30pm. I finally got home at 9.45pm, what a day!

One of the servers a big old dinosaur of a Dell, also seems to have some sort of weird power plug, similar to the normal kettle lead, but bigger and more square. We didn’t get the old plug, and can we find a replacement? Can we balls! Thanks Dell for sticking to standards…..

Have done a bit of driving over the past few days and have had the pleasure to see some lovley car crashes. I passed one today on the M62 near Huddersfield where the fire brigade were cutting someone out of the remains of a car. Over the past 2 days I have seen a total of 5 car accidents. It really puts me off driving, I do consider myself a safe driver, I try not to take risks, and I try to keep a cell of space around me. Though I can do as much as I can but that doesn’t protect me from other peoples bad driving and that scares me. But with my job at the moment I need to drive alot so I will stick with it and try and be safe.

On a brighter note I have been listening to BBC Radio4 over the past few weeks. There are some good programes on there, it makes a change from music.

Also RIP the legend that was John Peel, certainally I for one will miss his amazing late night shows.

Well what a week, new starter Monday, VPN’s in Derby Tuesday, Big Meeting Wednesday, Visits Thursday and Big Meeting Friday. Like I said what a week. The big meeting on Friday was about the Intranet that we are getting, unfortunatally its based on a MS-SQL solution. A real shame as we are doing so well with Open Source Stuff, but there are more and more MS-SQL servers popping up round the company, I need to put a stop to it. Thats 3 MS-SQL servers now in critical business areas, and thats not good. Lets try and make this the last one…..

Hmmm, well today was fun packed! Had a meeting with BT at Grand Island 11am today so I went straight there from home, which meant a I didn’t have to get up as early which is always a good thing…. Meeting went OK, the XDA looks promising, shame it can’t run Linux. Also discovered that BT switched the authentication from CHAP to PAP on our Hull depot, nice of them to tell us before hand!

Came home, Julie is still out so having to amuse myself by writing this blog entry! Considering getting an Openbrick-E for a LTSP client.