marc.vic.max.elliot

Merry Christmas everyone!

It’s mid-afternoon, rainy, miserable and the kids are in bed - ahhhh This year we are not going any where and people are all coming to us so things have been a bit hectic so far. It doesn’t help when you don’t get to bed until 00:30 and are up at 05:45…………

We hope that you all have a great time over the festive period and we look forward to seeing you over the coming year.

PS: Max’s t-shirt says “Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is EVERYTHING, please”

written by Marc

So here I am sitting in a cafe next to Giovanni Ribisi as we speak.  You may recognise him from shows such as friends and the x-files……

written by Marc

A very nice man from our telecom provider visited Vic at home yesterday.  He said that he had changed where we connect to the broadband service and that we should see an improvement in our connection speeds.

Our modem, which was connecting at 700kbs, is now connecting at 7600kps and downloading, which averaged 50KB/s, is now averaging 300KB/s

Happy days!!

written by Marc

In the “on this day” section at the side of the blog I noticed a link to this article from the same day in 2004 complaining about the amount of travel that I had coming up.

It’s bloody nothing compared to what I’m doing at the moment!

The funny thing is I’m not even complaining about the travel I’m doing - well not much…..

PS:  We’ve signed up a sales person in Auckland!  I’m not the only one in New Zealand any more and in a few months he might even be useful!

written by Marc

You know you fly far too much when this happens:

The Koru Club lounge at Wellington airport has a barista on-site from 6-9 in the morning.  I walk in to catch my flight yesterday morning and walk up to her and before I can say anything she says “a long black today sir?” to which I reply “yes please” and then she says “and one sugar?”

When I get back from the breakfast bar there is my my long black (one sugar) waiting at the table where I had left my bag.

Good service but bad sign that I spend too much time at the airport!

written by Marc

With this new role and the changes in the country staff (maternity leave and redundancies) the amount of travelling that I’ve been doing has been more than I imagined when I took the job.  To give you an idea of how much travelling is involved there are a couple of things.

The first is the fact that it’s only taken 7 months for me to reach Elite status with our national airline.

The second is my travel plans for the next three weeks.  Here they are with dates and the city that I will be in:

Mon 15 Oct Home
Tue 16 Oct Auckland
Wed 17 Oct Auckland
Thu 18 Oct Auckland
Fri 19 Oct Auckland
Sat 20 Oct Travel to Tokyo
Sun 21 Oct Tokyo
Mon 22 Oct Tokyo
Tue 23 Oct Tokyo
Wed 24 Oct Tokyo
Thu 25 Oct Tokyo
Fri 26 Oct Travel from Tokyo  
Sat 27 Oct Home!
Sun 28 Oct Travel to Sydney
Mon 29 Oct Sydney
Tue 30 Oct Sydney
Wed 31 Oct Sydney
Thu 01 Nov Sydney
Fri 02 Nov Auckland

So as you can see the next few weeks is going be a tad busy with only two days at home!

written by Marc

It’s a bit tardy but as I’ve just started to update again……

On the 18th of September our very good friends Ian and Ngahuia welcomed Charity Elizabeth Polly Barrs into the world. These photos were taken on the 21st

written by Marc

So one of the reasons that I stopped blogging is that I was so busy.  In the last few months the company that I work for has gone from three staff in-country to one, me.  What this has meant is not only has my workload increased but my travel has increased as well.  The original plan was for me to travel to Auckland two days every week to manage the business up there.  Great in theory but it’s ended up being three days often and even four days at time.  To give you some idea of what Vic has to put up with this is my travel coming up:

Next week 8th-12th October:  Not too bad - Auckland Thursday and Friday

The week after is where it starts to get fun :)  On Thursday I fly to Auckland and spend Thursday and Friday on my normal Auckland stuff.  I stay Friday night so that I can get up early to fly to Tokyo (a nice little 11.5 hour flight)  Mon-Wed is spent training in Tokyo and I leave on Thursday to get back to Wellington on Friday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon (yep, 48 hours later) I fly to Sydney so that I’m there for Monday morning and the start of a three day sales meeting.  Wednesday afternoon it’s a flight from Sydney to Auckland and after two days there it’s back to Wellington on Friday evening.

So as you can see things are a bit hectic…….

Even so I’ll try to keep up the blog, even if it’s just  to point out interesting things I find on the web

written by Marc