Last night I was running some firmware upgrades on a customer’s server in an office about an hour and a half away from here when it turned itself into a vegetable. No response to pings, no KVM connectivity anymore…it just sat there. I figured there was a stuck key or something, so I let it sit over night and when they called in the morning, I had them check that the keyboard was clear and did a reboot. Nothing. Veggies!
This is one of our bigger customers at work, so that means…Jetta time!
All in all, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a day. I spent 3 hours driving, one hour going through some steps that I would consider truly obscene to determine that the motherboard was truly dead-ish so that Dell would dispatch new parts, and 2 hours waiting for said parts to arrive under the four-hour service contract. This time the first set of replacement parts worked, and I was back home and in bed for a hardcore 2 hour nap by 5. Not a bad way to spend a day.
Tomorrow I’ve got a lunch with someone I met rather randomly at a social event for a professional organization I’m part of, and I’m still trying to figure out the nature of the lunch. The guy I’m lunching with works at a large financial firm, so it’s probably not a job offer…and he’s too new to be a decision maker, so this couldn’t be some weird form of the new client lead…which leads me to only one likely option: Amway pitch.
For those of you who have never been Amway pitched, let me give you a rough idea of how it begins. First, there’s the intro. This is usually forced in some rather odd way; my first time was some guy in a Target who thought he had gone to high school with me. By the end of a brief 5 minute chat covering what I was doing, I was left with the impression that he might have some freelancing web-type work for me to do. But when I got to the Panera to talk with him about it a few days ago, he immediately proceeded to fire up a laptop and demonstrate that becoming an Amway business owner would be an awesome way to make some money, and could he interest me in a few samples?
I’m not a fan of these pitches. Probably because I am not a big fan of sales, and that’s pretty much what is required of an Amway independent business owner. I admire the fact that people have the guts to basically cold-call someone and pitch it to them, but having been through my one Amway pitch, I am really, genuinely hoping that tomorrow’s lunch is not an Amway pitch, because I will stop the show right there. And it would be a shame. They have waffle fries at this place.
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