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Saturday, 10 August 2002 |
I got one of my two pairs of RM Williams black elastic-sided boots back the other day. These are the only boots I own that do not damage my feet nor cause pain when wearing them. And I have some other far more expensive boots; the best brands handmade in Northhampton, England. I took RM Williams’ boots so much for granted I forgot how good they are, for a while.
I had worn through the soles of both identical pairs, and they had to go back to the factory for repairs. RM Williams charges you less to do the job right than your local boot repair shop charges to do the job badly.
The factory offers the option of leather soles or Neoprene. I chose Neoprene. I am glad I did. It is much harder wearing, and the boots will need fewer trips back to the factory as a result.
12:18:01 PM 
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The Caroma stool, an Australian design icon born sometime in the 1960s or 1970s and still alive up to the present day, seems to now be under threat.
I wrote about this product in When We Had Quality. The stools have been priced ridiculously low throughout their history, most recently being available for $12.95 each. Compare that to the $100 or so that you pay for a Philippe Starck-designed Italian-made stool in Oz.
The only place I have ever seen Caroma stools for retail sale is the Perth-based nationwide Bunnings hardware stores. They always seem to have them in the Plumbing section, sitting in a heap, in pieces, without a sign or price sticker on them. The stools are made up of three parts—a lid, and two identical central bits that snap together. If you did not know what the parts went together to make up, you would be forgiven for thinking they were a funny kind of plastic plumbing fixture, or parts of an odd kind of flower pot.
I found I need to have a good supply of sitting devices handy the other day, so I came to the obvious conclusion and decided to supplement my collection of Caroma stools.
I went to the local Bunnings store, where I had bought them before, and looked for the white ones. Bunnings only has the white and the beige stools, and I loathe beige. Sure enough there they were in a heap in the Plumbing section, covered in dust, in parts strewn around on a low shelf, without a price sticker or a sign. However, the white ones were all missing their caps, the part you sit on.
I finally found an assistant who grasped what I was asking about, and he told me that Bunnings will no longer be stocking the stools. Little wonder, given how cunningly the store has been displaying the products. So I went off to another larger branch of Bunnings where they had better stocks in the past.
Same problem at the Morley store. A couple of centre parts of the stool, no caps, in bits on the floor in a dusty corner with no sign nor price sticker, in the Plumbing section. I asked the assistant to help me locate some stools that were complete, and as many of them as possible. At $12.95 each I am quite happy to buy all that I can find. Their resale value will probably radically escalate anyway, like most design icons of their birth era.
The assistant eventually located 4 in the Balcatta store. I snapped them up. Now I want many, many more of them. I would be crazy not to buy them wherever I can find them. I have never seen them at any other store than Bunnings.
11:21:20 AM
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As a sideline I intend to direct retail Apple Computers and other devices, ergonomic input devices like trackballs and art tablets, the best cases and bags, ergonomic high quality split keyboards, RAM and so on.
I have already made a few sales of these kinds of things, but because of the new business scheme’s strictures I cannot charge a markup on these sales. I was surprised at how easily I have been able to sign up as a reseller with the distributors in the east for all these products. Piece of cake. Or if you are a sandgroper, piece of paper.
Walk into the average Perth computer store, ask for a trackball or an art tablet, or an ergonomic keyboard, and they will tell you they do not exist. Whenever I show any of the devices I use every day to someone, they try them out and then ask where they can get them. Until I began selling this stuff myself, I had to tell them “Nowhere”.
Every time I pass by a regular computer store or AppleCentre I drop in and ask about trackballs, art tablets or ergonomic keyboards. For the most part the people behind the counter tell me such things do not exist. Or if you don’t get that answer then they will have another convenient fiction handy as the reason to give for not bothering to supply this stuff.
9:49:40 AM
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The grey and damp days that have been prevailing this winter in Perth have not helped at all. The weather has reminded me every day of being in England.
That web design project I was doing during the course, that I was not meant to be doing according to the rules and regulations, still has not been completed. The client is still pondering whether they want more content in it, and the creative director has been pondering more illustrations to go in it.
Because of the rules and regulations, I am forbidden from invoicing for my usual 50% advance, and certainly am forbidden from sending the client the final bill. This client normally pays on receipt, electronically, straight into my bank account. I have done this job for a fraction of what it is worth according to the amount of work that has gone into it.
But I can’t even collect any of the money due until the committee sits and pronounces judgement.
9:26:30 AM
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I was told late Friday that I will go before the committee next Thursday. Meanwhile I must rewrite my business plan and financial projections yet again. I have been told to inject what in my book are more lies.
We have to lie in these documents because the people on the committees do not actually seem to understand business, or at least the kind of businesses many of the people trying to get into the scheme intend to conduct.
My meeting last week was with a scheme staff member who seemed to understand nothing whatsoever of New Media, advertising, publishing, design, or in fact anything I do. He had constructed an edifice of fantasy around them, and the meeting was excruciating to say the least.
9:14:21 AM
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For the past two months I have been enrolled in a federal government program to assist people into starting their own businesses. Sounds great in theory, but whenever government gets involved in things it fails to understand then it always screws up to some degree.
First came 5 weeks of a mostly boring and repetitive small business management course. We were required to attend all day every day, and if you did not turn up for four days then you were unceremoniously ejected out of the scheme.
Having received our certificates, and having written many, many versions of our business plan and financial projections, it has now become a waiting game while the various committees convene and sit to examine them. Until they announce a judgement, we are forbidden from doing any business, and certainly cannot do anything for which we must accept payment. Show any sign of doing so, and you are ejected from the scheme. When you begin this course, you sign a document permitting the government to watch your bank account for monies in and out.
So we sit and sit, waiting and waiting, turning down every opportunity for doing business because if we do business then we will be out of the scheme that is intended to assist us to get into business.
I am in limbo. I just want to scream.
9:03:49 AM
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“This is easy—it’s a piece of paper!”
“I did it—it was a piece of paper!”
“Yeah. Piece of paper!”
8:40:59 AM
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Something a shop assistant said to me yesterday in a hardware store where I was buying some plastic storage devices:
“It’ll be so easy to assemble this when you get home. In fact, it’s a piece of paper!”
D’oh. Isn’t that meant to be cake?
8:35:21 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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