« September 2009 | Main |November 2009 »
Life's a pitch
I've sat through the interminable sales pitches of literally thousands of piffling, pointless, short-lived vendors.
Trouble is, I'm always too polite to tell them where to stick their newfangled-solutioneering-turnkey-productised WowBox. (That's a router to you or I). But I recently heard of one distributor that's started grabbing vendors' bulls more squarely by the horns.
Manufacturer sales folk are apparently led to a brightly lit room and sat down in front of a camera. They're then told they have two minutes to explain why anyone in their right mind would want to distribute their product.
Unfortunately, this gave our Gordon a not-so-bright idea. I did try telling the daft lad it wouldn't work on customers.
Happ-less
I was intrigued to read this week that Hermann Schulte-Hiltrop, boss of a builders' association in Dortmund, recently fired a long-standing employee for half-inching a meatball.
Magdalene Happ, who had worked for the company for 34 years, set up a buffet lunch for the boss and his business guests. Before the big cheeses tucked in, Happ grabbed a couple of rolls and a frikadeller, a German delicacy of pan-fried meat dumplings.
Happ was soon dismissed, with Schulte-Hiltrop claiming he could no longer trust her.
One employment tribunal and a glut of negative PR later, she was offered an apology and reinstated. Which seems like a fair outcome. Mind you, if I ever caught any of my flock tucking into my bhaji cache, a P45 would be the least of their worries.
Trick or Tweet
As if to further illustrate Facebook's inexorable rise to omniscience, research from analyst Experian Hitwise has revealed the social networking site now accounts for one in seven web pages viewed in the UK.
Throughout September, 14.5 per cent of all pages viewed in the UK were on Facebook. This was about the same amount as the rest of top five combined.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook is by far the UK's most popular social networking site, accounting for about half of all visits. Pretender to the throne Twitter was down in fourth, behind YouTube and Bebo, and accounted for just 2.2 per cent of visits.
Mind you, our Shirl's just got the hang of Tweeting. Eight hours a day of constant visits should have Twitter vying for the number one spot in no time.
Changing rumours
There's something in the air this week, Dear Reader.
Maybe everyone in the channel has finally got their feet back under the desk after summering in St Tropez. Or maybe the falling leaves have prompted us all to stop and consider the transitory nature of existence - whatever it is, change appears to be afoot in our industry. And I haven't gone 10 minutes this week without hearing a juicy bit of gossip.
Have we all heard the one about two channel firms whose lucrative relationship is rumoured to have become so strained that their next meeting could be in a courtroom?
What about the London reseller on the verge of gobbling up a tasty acquisition?
And who knows which vendor's UK channel head dreamt of becoming a "slap bass deity" before a career in IT beckoned?
Alas, my buddies at CRN tell me there's some things you just can't print. But I'll be damned if you can't have a good chinwag about them over a lunchtime pint.
Brought to (Face)book
Others have simply ruined a relationship or curtailed a burgeoning career in data entry, but Maxi Sopo's social networking addiction has landed him in a Mexican jail.
After moving to Seattle in 2003, the 26 year-old Cameroonian is alleged to have taken part in $200,000 worth of bank fraud, after which he did the sensible thing of absconding to Cancun for some well-earned downtime.
Less sensible was his decision to join Facebook and post regular updates about how he was now "living in paradise". Even less sensible was his online befriending of a former US justice department official.
Once he realised Sopo was on the run, he happily passed on his details to Mexican authorities, who soon had the hapless hedonist in custody. His final Facebook entry simply said "loving it". Maybe they should let him change his status one last time.
Shaken, not stirred
Watching Octopussy last weekend reminded me that the UK channel has its very own version of James Bond.
A director at one of the UK's largest distributors has earned himself that moniker among some of his vendors for his good looks, easy charm and cut-glass English accent. He also shares a Christian name with the gun-toting, Martini-sipping spy.
I reckon Dodgi would benefit from a bit more eye candy. My aging face may have a craggy charm and Gordon's got youth on his side, but, between us, we couldn't pull in a rope factory.
Spammer time
I was puzzled to see the quiet Hampshire market town of Alton recently crowned as the UK's spam capital.
Figures compiled by security vendor MessageLabs reveal businesses in the town are sent an average of about 400 spam emails per user per day. Curiously, just 20 miles from this godforsaken dystopia, Fareham, also in Hampshire, is the UK's least spammed town.
I was shocked to see my home borough featured in the shape of Barking, which is the UK's sixth biggest spam hotspot. I contend there's a difference between a nuisance email and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pick up a batch of factory seconds routers at a rock-bottom price.
In the pot
My hat is off to sales engineer Matt Ford and his buddy Chris Marchant who raised money for a good cause last month with a gruelling and unusual record breaking stunt.
Marchant and Ford, who works for authentication vendor Signify, arrived at Cambridge's Grafton Shopping Centre on 17 September with the intention of completing the longest pool match ever played. Some 55 hours and 40 seconds later, the pair had smashed the existing mark by more than an hour and a half.
Sounds impressive, but they've obviously never played our Gordon. Seasons have come and gone while that boy lines up a pot.
Infernal affairs
Ridiculous revenue targets, an underwhelming new product line-up - channel partnerships are wont to fizzle out for numerous reasons.
But a bit of gossip doing the rounds suggests that two firms' working relationship has become strained for more salacious reasons. A sales representative from one company has allegedly mixed business and pleasure with a string of employees at another firm, jeopardising the business relationship.
I can relate, as my own magnétisme animal has caused Dodgi many problems. It once proved such an obstacle that one firm severed ties with me by revealing: "the women here can't bear to be in the same room as you anymore."
This face of mine is a blessing and a curse, Dear Reader.
Chicken tonight
Despite appearances to the contrary, I'm assured it's tough being a journalist. Deadlines to meet, the phone ringing off the hook - it's all too easy to slip momentarily and say or write something you didn't quite mean to.
Though I'm sure my buddies at CRN have never had quite as bad a case of foot-in-mouth syndrome as Fox News anchorman Ernie Arnastos. The hapless journo was joking with his onscreen colleagues recently when he apparently decided to advise the weatherman to "keep plucking that chicken".
For reasons best known to himself, he opted to use the phrase as a synonym for "keep on trying". Unfortunately, the word plucking is only a couple of letters away from a word altogether less suitable for primetime broadcasting.
Arnastos has become an internet sensation and you can even buy t-shirts bearing his new and unwanted catchphrase. The next time a hack says something ill-advised to you, I urge you to cut them some slack, Dear Reader.
A man's work
It's official: men are more productive than women, despite working shorter hours. That's according to productivity enhancement vendor OfficeMetrics, who analysed working patterns in the UK over the past nine months.
Women's attempts to convince bosses that they work harder are 'superficial', the vendor said. Despite coming in earlier and working longer hours, women were found to be 94 per cent as productive as men in July.
Come to think of it, Shirl has been coming in at 7am every morning since the recession started. Although she's currently averaging four hours a day on Jonathan Ross fan sites.
Milking an idea
There is nothing worse than sharing a fridge with your workmates. Not a day goes by without someone pilfering your milk so, when you go to make yourself a much needed afternoon cuppa, there is nothing but an empty carton left.
Of course, when you demand to know who's responsible, everybody manages to find somewhere else to look to avoid answering the question. One canny lass, who I met recently on a business lunch, has found a clever way around it.
She labels her bottles as 'breast milk' and so far no-one has been that desperate for a brew to use it. Not sure if it would work so well in a male-dominated office though and Shirl knows we would laugh her out of town if she tried it.
