No I didn’t just swear. It is a very real question.
When something happens twice to me in very quick succession I often think it means I am supposed to take notice. I have. So you’d better too!
On Saturday while getting some last minute paint for our old office (a couple of quick repairs) I visited a commercial paint supply business to get my supplies. Half way through them preparing my order, I noticed a message stuck over their EFTPOS terminal “EFTPOS Down”. Yes Solver Stones Corner this is you.
So I asked. Noticeably before starting a $200 order they didn’t ask me if I was intending to pay electronically, they just assumed I could read their small note and that I would process it. I did, albeit a little late.
So yes their EFTPOS was down, I had a company credit card, so I asked them to do it manually.
“Sorry they took that option away, but you can walk to an ATM it is less than 5 minutes”.
(more…)
Today our first twitter recruited employee started at ireckon. Scott Hampson, aka @agent_x, has started with us in our important role as Site Producer /Project Manager.
Last year, when the person previously in that role left, to move further afield, we decided to run with our existing team and let the whole GFC thing run its course.
This role is very important, for obvious reasons, and so I had to make a tough call and let someone go from a position that had become redundant but who we were trying to get to do some of this work, and look for a likely candidate. (more…)
Over the last month, I have had numerous conversations with people about Twitter. Most of these are with experienced users, and the conversation tends to be around the web interface and their commercialisation model.
Over the last week or two some users (me included) are seeing a new interface, with some minor changes to the main top right nav and a couple of links around your avatar. Many of the people I have spoken to wonder why Twitter has such a ‘simple’ interface and haven’t done more to improve it.
The best place to start is with Twitters early days. Those of us that have used Twitter for a while remember the regular ‘Fail Whales’ and the constant tech problems the service had. When Twitter had an outage, it was for a lengthy period of time. From 30 minutes to many hours and was very regular. The Fail Whale’s popularity grew from their unique way of handling their problems and all manners of merchandise and discussion has come from it.
(more…)
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting to the members of the Cairns Chamber of Commerce. I was asked to speak more of ‘the web’ rather than web sites per se.
This was a relatively easy topic (or so I thought) for me given it is the big issue we try to help our customers understand every day (and our organisation).
I have included the presentation slides below which kind of show some of the message.
The main theme for me was “are you paying attention?”
(more…)
Recruiting in a small / medium business can involve trawling through a lot of unprepared or unsuitable applications.
Many can be close to the mark, but require a bit of digging to see exactly where the gold nuggets are hidden.
As I wrote in “recruiting with a little help from your friends“, I try to look for the people part when sometimes the documents have little life of their own.
Currently we are interviewing for a PHP programmer, and no offense to any programmer, but there are a few who happily would live without social contact, or lights for that matter, and just love to be in small groups coding furiously for hours on end.
Thus finding who has the great skill sets and can also fit into a group like ours is not always readily apparent from the applications.
Our current advert is summarised here on our recruiting site [view advert]. I won’t go into the why of that particular site (it works for us), but today I got back an application that made me smile.
I had a good chuckle for nearly 5 minutes and appreciated the effort that went into it. You need to have read the position description to see the humour, but I felt I would share this as I enjoyed it!
(more…)
