Sick again but the jersey's arrived

I seem to have acquired my late spring/early summer lurg. Maybe it's some kind of karmic reaction to me becoming all Machiavellian. It's a real bugger. It's virtually impossible to be menacing when your eyes are pink and your nose is running .

I seem to have acquired my late spring/early summer lurg. Maybe it’s some kind of karmic reaction to me becoming all Machiavellian. It’s a real bugger. It’s virtually impossible to be menacing when your eyes are pink and your nose is running and you can’t raise your voice without starting a coughing fit that leaves you seeing stars. The best I can do at the moment is sit in my office looking gloomy and menacing and like I’ll sneeze on anyone who gets too close.

Success

Great news! Brandon’s finally got the Canadiens home jersey he’s been wanting so badly (see Giving e-tailers some stick, Virtual NPC 1, NHL.com nil). "What?" I hear you ask, "Did NHL.com finally live up to its promise of 'fans being the #1 priority' and ship Brandon the jersey he’d been trying so hard to buy?" Well, no, his mate Will ordered it from IceJerseys.com, another US-based e-tailler.

Ironically, Brandon’s recently been back to NHL.com for a look and he’s found that it now accepts New Zealand credit cards and ships to New Zealand addresses. Pity it didn’t bother to tell him. After Will’s successful experience at IceJerseys.com, Brandon went there and spent several hundred US dollars on a Canadiens away jersey and a bunch of other stuff. If someone at NHL.com had bothered to update its most frustrated fan with a two-line email, it might have kept his business.

That’s one of the cool things about the internet -- going somewhere else to do your shopping is just a few keystrokes away.

Supping with the devil, part 2

Remember my previous rants about "services" companies (see Supping with the devil)? You know, the hardware and software vendors who, realising that they’ve screwed the margins right out of selling their actual products, reinvent themselves as consultants and make their money that way. Well, none other than Microsoft is now offering "services". Maybe I’ve been asleep all these years and I just hadn’t noticed, but I’d always thought Microsoft here in New Zealand was all about sales and marketing. Apparently not. From what I’ve heard Microsoft Consulting’s not the cheapest act in town but, because it has direct access to the internals of Microsoft, it’s really very good.

I’m sure its VAR community isn’t that happy, though. I can’t imagine that big local partners like Datacom, Unisys, Fujitsu, Gen-i, Simpl, Axon et al would be terribly impressed by Microsoft muscling in on their tastiest consulting engagements.

Supping with the devil, part 3

Sending food to people you’re trying to sell stuff to still seems to be The Big Thing. The campaign du jour is storage solutions and the marketeers are going crazy on it. Here’s what arrived on my desk this morning:

IBM sent me a tube that should have a bottle of bubbly in it -- the brochure inside says that I have to talk to it about NAS before it’ll give me the actual wine. Yeah, maybe.

HP sent me a can of salmon. Apparently this is what’ll happen to me if I don’t buy its SAN. I’m not too keen on this idea so I think I’d better give them a call right now. IBM take note -- threats work much better.

Chalk up one more point for Machiavellianism.

Swanson is IT manager at W Stevenson & Sons in South Auckland. Send letters for publication to Computerworld Letters.

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