I’ve uploaded more pictures from my trip here. These are of the certification classes from Sydney and Melbourne, so you don’t get much view of the cities themselves. In fact, the main feature of these pictures is my oversized, Charlie Brown-style noggin.
I’m off to take more interesting pictures now. Check back in about twelve hours for more shots.
In my attempt to write some amusing observations about Australian culture, I neglected to mention the day’s activities.
I met Naomi from the corporate office here at 8:30 this morning. We drove over to a place she said served the best coffee in Melbourne, a worthy coffee indeed in light of the large Italian contingent which lives in the city. We then walked over to our first (and, it turns out, only) customer meeting of the day.
I was there to provide technical resources to this particular customer. It turns out this happy customer really didn’t need any. He figured out things himself and couldn’t have been more pleased with the product. We left him after a half hour of pleasant conversation and headed back to our office.
The customer meetings planned for this afternoon didn’t pan out, as the short notice of my arrival here didn’t allow for much certainty. Instead I spent the afternoon at the office, configuring my VoIP client and answering emails.
The office here is a small thing. Only three employees work out of it. Two of those employees were away today. You would think this would have made it a nice quiet refuge today. Of course, you would be wrong.
The telephone literally rang off the hook! Naomi took one call after another, most of them orders for our new product. Her lunch was actually cold by the time she got around to eating it! It was absolutely crazy. I couldn’t stop chuckling at the response. I’ve been doing this for three years now and this response beats all I’ve ever seen.
To say the presentations of this week were wildly successful would be an understatement. The response has far exceeded my expectations. I’m really excited at the momentum that I helped build for the product, though all the credit goes to the great team here in Australia. I’m glad to have been here and to have helped get things going.
One thing about Australia is that it takes a long time for things to get here. To just visit takes fourteen hours by air and weeks by sea. Indeed, its one of the most remote places on earth.
One thing that surprised me is that, due to Australia’s position below the equator (or some other phenomenon not well understood), entire decades have simply disappeared. You see, the 1990s and 2000s never made it to the Land Down Undah. Here it is still the Eighties.
You get a taste for this right away on the radio. Men At Work, a band that flew to the top of the American pop charts before quickly boomeranging back to Oz, can be heard every hour on any station of your choosing. This will be followed by one by Kylie Minogue [Warning: annoying Flash music] or even the Bee Gees. It’s nothing short of scary.
The craft brewing craze of the 1990s never arrived, either. I’ve been in a half-dozen drinking establishments and not once have I had a decent craft beer. I did enjoy a Guinness, but that’s as foreign to these shores as I am. Aussies are quick to say they don’t drink Fosters, but what they do drink isn’t much better.
That wonder of modern navigation and one of mankind’s greatest inventions, the Global Positioning System (GPS), is just now appearing on store shelves, only thirty years after it was first implemented. Not that it matters, though. There are no electronic maps of the cities here, anyway. No Mapquest nor Google Maps. The closest thing is Street Directory and it doesn’t even give directions.
Australia is home to supermodels like Elle MacPherson, yet fashion is stuck in the 80s. Young men walk around with their shirt collars flipped up. Women walk around with oversized sunglasses. I saw no parachute pants, thank goodness. Perhaps they got stopped at customs.
The Internet made it to Australia but most hotels provide their guests the retro 80s experience of dialup speeds. The idea of flat-rate access never arrived here, either. In fact, internet access in Australia may actually be regressing. Aussies call telephone poles “telegraph poles,” after all.
The biggest Eighties flashback came on my way back from dinner tonight. I walked up to a group of Asian teenagers kicking out the jams with a ghetto blaster. Getting closer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were breakdancing! For a moment I truly was back the Eighties. I even looked around for time-traveling DeLoreans or shrimp tossed on barbies.
So next time you think of Australia, think of Crocodile Dundee, the Bee Gees, and all that goes with them. That’s what life is still like here because the Eighties live on in the Land Down Undah.
