Onto the next month...

But before I do, I must relay to you an email exchange my cheeky husband had last month with Telstra. Any Bigpond customers may remember a certain weekend in December where the system went haywire, you could send emails, you couldn't receive, or vice versa, and internet connections were all over the place. Of course with a big company things happen and glitches occur and you are understanding of that. But this particular night Mike received an email from Telstra and, well, he'd had a couple of after dinner drinks so decided on some tomfoolery.

Email from Telstra entitled "We are sorry we let you down this weekend" :

As you're aware some of our online services were unavailable from
late Friday 9th to late Saturday 10th December due to an earlier internal
systems issue.

I want to sincerely apologise for any inconvenience you may have
experienced this weekend because of the disruption.

Services are now back up again for the majority of our customers, and
your BigPond services should be working as normal.

The decision to temporarily reduce access to these services was not
taken lightly and I know that our actions resulted in a poor online
experience for you and was a source of frustration.

Once again, I apologise for the disruption to your service and thank
you for your patience.

Best regards,
Executive Director, Customer Service



Return email from Mike to the Executive Director:

No worries Peter, Apology accepted.

It was an inconvenience for me this weekend when it happened. What will you do to make it up to me ?

Cheers
Mike.



Email from Kylie from the Bigpond Team back to Mike:

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your email, my name is Kylie and I appreciate you taking
the time to contact us. I understand that you are querying what Telstra will
do to make it up to you.

I sincerely apologise for any downtime you experienced with our online
services and for the inconvenience this has caused.

BigPond can provide a credit of $10 for the period of time your Internet was
down and as such I have applied this credit to your account.

Kind Regards,
The BigPond Team



Email from Mike to Kylie:

Thankyou Kylie, You have reconfirmed my faith in Telstra.

Cheers
Mike.

Thank goodness the email exchange ended there, I fear we would have ended up with shares in the company. So moral to this story is if you don't ask you won't get. Sure it's only $10, but imagine if they gave $10 to every customer the disastrous weekend affected. Another moral to the story, don't let your husband loose on the email if he's had a few tipples after dinner!

Continuing on with my Book of Wisdom, onto February:

Credits Designer Digitals.


Oh that photo of Rastaman ... I don't think I will ever forget that day as long as I live. I had been practicing panning but unfortunately Lucky was way too quick for me, so that was when Mike had the brilliant idea of running for me. But oh no, he couldn't do just any type of running, he had to do it in style, and that's how Rastaman was born! Except Rastaman nearly gave himself a heart attack running all round the front yard, to the obvious delight of the neighbours peering through their loungeroom curtains!

And I swear, when I was packing up the Christmas tree yesterday, Mike looked longingly at the red velvet Christmas tree skirt, before I dumped it in the laundry basket to be washed!