By now everyone should be aware of “phishing” emails. These are the ones which look like they come from a bank or PayPal or Amazon or some other business and ask you to click on a link to verify details or to get more information. We all know to ignore these and never click on the links.

What would you do if you received an email to your business coming from an obvious false email address asking you to reply with personal or business details? You would ignore it just as you ignore the phishing emails apparently from Westpac or PayPal asking you to enter your account details and password.

If you take all this care with emails (and even physical mail), why would you ever answer a telephone call when the caller hides who they are? If you answer a call with Caller ID blocked and the person on the other end says they come from a bank, why would you give them identifying information without verifying who they are? Telephone and mobile numbers are easy to get, so it is very easy for someone to ring you and ask for you by name. If they then ask you to give information such as date of birth or mother’s maiden name to identify yourself you should think twice and hang up, after asking them for a real phone number that you can call back on.

Someone from a bank once told me that they block Caller ID because if they displayed the bank’s phone number then people would not answer. I asked how this was different from people not answering anonymous calls and got no sensible reply.

I no longer answer calls with Caller ID blocked. The “I’m not here” message people hear when I don’t answer my mobile phone tells them this. I pay money to Telstra each month to have Caller ID displayed on my home phone so I can let callers showing “Private Number” ring out without being answered. Yes there are some legitimate reasons for blocking caller identification. I have friends and relatives who work in law enforcement, for example, and there are good reasons why they might need to have silent numbers or protect where they are calling from, but they know how to get in touch with me if they really need to.

I recommend this policy to everyone. Don’t ever answer anonymous telephone calls, and if you accidentally do, do not provide the person on the other end with any information that they don’t already have. I’ve distributed a lot of business cards over the years but none of them have on them the sort of information I’ve been asked to provide to people who just happen to say they work for some organisation I might have done business with. And there is a reason that the date of birth in my Facebook profile is incorrect.

This article is based on a presentation I gave to Penrith SWAP on August 22, 2000. Most of it is still relevant today.

I was rather disappointed that the speaker who immediately followed me used what I had said to promote a pyramid scheme set up to provide “free” web sites. It was some consolation when the promoters of the scam were later ordered by a court in the US to refund 100% of the entry fees they had charged to be part of this “free” service. Australian victims received their compensation through a fund managed by the ACCC.

Anyone who has ever worked in sales or marketing or who has done any formal management studies will be familiar with the idea of the “Four Ps of Marketing” – place, product, price and promotion. In the new paradigm (there’s another “P” word) of marketing on the Internet not only do the traditional “Ps” change meaning, but a whole new set of “Ps” gets added to the mix. We are going to look here at the changes in the old meanings and how the new “Ps” change what we used to do into what we need to do now.

Place

“Place” is where the customer does business with you. This is not necessarily the same as the place you do business. You can have offices, warehouses, factories and all sorts of other locations, but what matters to the customer is where they have to go to trade with you. In the old tradition “place” was the shop or the office or the franchise outlet. It was physical and it cost you money to be there. In the Internet economy, “place” is in all those millions of computers which have access to the Internet. You still need the factories and the warehouses and the back office accommodation, but the transactions can now happen wherever the customers are and you don’t have to be there except in electronic form.

Product

In the real world outside pyramid selling and other kinds of fraud, you have to have a product of some kind before you can have a business. Nothing about this changes if you move your business into the Internet age. Unfortunately, most of the talk about internet commerce (or “e-commerce”) has concentrated on selling across the ‘net as if this was the only use of the technology for business. Whatever your product, you can still use the Internet to help your business find new customers and work better with the ones you already have. Some products lend themselves very well to direct sale across the Internet because the product can be delivered electronically. The most successful at this have been software and, alas, pornography, and music (as electronic files, not on CDs) is about to boom. Other things that sell well are commodity items where the customers know what they are getting because it is the same everywhere – books, CDs, even cars. Services are a bit harder to sell and things where the heart rules the head, like buying your dream home, can be difficult too, but changing technology has a way of making difficult things come true.

Price

Using the Internet changes nothing about the rules of pricing. You still go broke selling things at below cost, you still go broke selling nothing because it is too dear, there is still a market-clearing price where everything gets sold and everyone is happy (or so the economists say). The old adage that you can have any two of price, quality and service still applies. Certainly, you may be able to sell things across the ‘net at a lower price because your fixed and variable coats are lower, and you may be able to charge a premium for better service. You still need to know what your competitors are doing and you still need to know how much a sale costs you.

Promotion

Nobody will buy from you unless they know that you exist and that you have something they want. The traditional forms of promotion meant that you went looking for customers. You told as many people as you could (or could afford to) about what you had to offer and then hoped that they would come to you. You still have to do this, and the biggest spenders on internet advertising have been the sites with the biggest sales. The opposite applies too (and it is not the same thing) – the biggest sellers have been the biggest advertisers. It is not uncommon to hear about companies spending 25% of turnover on advertising in order to build brand awareness. The thing that the Internet adds to promotion is the ability for customers to find you through non-traditional means, and the best example of this is the use of search engines. Potential customers can now find out about you by simply looking for what you have to sell. Promotion of any business on the ‘net, whether to generate online sales or just to let people know what you do, requires that you use the search engines effectively. It doesn’t happen automatically and it might cost you some money and time to get it done properly, but search engine promotion is essential.

People

The first of the new “Ps” recognises that things really are different now. There are new jobs, new skills, new things to know and new ways of doing things. What is in short supply is the people who can make it all happen. The shortage of people brings several other problems with it. One is that it is too easy for people who don’t know anything to pretend that they do. If nobody knows what a “web architect” does, then who can know if he can do it. Another problem is the old one of supply and demand – there is a shortage so prices go up and people become more expensive. Insufficient supply also allows loyalty to be optional for many people as they chase higher and higher incomes. On a really bad day, you can hire an expensive incompetent who will leave before the job is completed. At the other end, some of the work looks easy so bargains are offered by people wanting to learn on your payroll. Remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t despair – there are good people out there at a price you can afford. Sometimes you just have to look a bit harder to find them.

Power

In 1999 it was estimated that $20 billion worth of sales took place on the Internet in the USA. This was about 1% of total retail sales. In Australia, it is estimated that there are 5 million people with Internet access, yet total Internet sales are only about $600 million per year (which represents about 10% of sales for one of the smallest national grocery chains). There is enormous potential to reach the other 99% of potential customers, both for direct sales and to attract them to traditional businesses. The power of the Internet for marketing is its reach. 5 million users exceeds the audience for the highest-rated television program in the country and probably exceeds the number of newspaper and magazine readers. The Internet gives a business access to these people at much lower cost than traditional promotional methods and, in many cases, allows more profitable transactions with them.

Plaintiff

You may wonder why this “P” is here, but the Internet changes the legal environment in which you do business. There are new challenges to intellectual property, where competitors can steal the contents of your web sites or even the product you have for sale on those sites. It is possible for people to register domain names (the part after the “@” in an email address) which look like trade names and then either demand money to hand them over to the rightful owner or to create confusing or defamatory web sites. Laws are being brought in to control the use of domain names (much as trade marks are controlled) but these laws are new and not yet tested. Another legal aspect is that the Internet creates new ways for you to get sued. What you say in a newsletter that goes to a few hundred of your customers or in a local paper that gets read by a few thousand readers can take on a whole new life when the potential audience is in the hundreds of millions. The laws on defamation on the Internet are still being worked out, but it can be very time consuming to have to defend a legal action from France for something you said in Australia even if you have committed no crime here.

Publicity

The Internet is relatively new (at least the World Wide Web part of it is) and can still be news in itself. Just having a web presence can be a news story if you are in a business where such a thing is thought to be unusual. Another advantage for publicity is the speed with which things on a web site can be changed. If you can encourage people to keep coming back to your site, you can tell them things much more quickly (and inexpensively) than you can do through conventional means. Email mailing lists let you speak to your customers when you need to, when it is convenient for them, and at very low cost. The downside of all this publicity is that it can attract people you might not want to deal with, but nuisances can walk into your main street shop at any time as well.

Presence

On the Internet, nobody knows how big or small your business is. Just being there, however, with a good-looking web site gives you the presence of the big operators. Every new person who visits your site each day is the equivalent of a cold call or a brochure hand-out, but they take none of your time or money. Every person who comes back after the initial look comes closer to being a customer. With the right content on your site you can keep them coming back and make it easy for them to contact you. You can also build a virtual community around your business by involving your customers in promotional activities, mailing lists, newsletters, surveys, give-aways and so on at a much lower cost than the traditional ways.

To reinforce the idea that the Internet is a fundamental part of marketing your business today, just think how you would feel about a business without a telephone or fax. Certainly, there are some business which operate without these even today, but they occupy a very restricted set of niches. It has almost reached the stage where anyone without an email address is suspect, and many types of businesses already lack credibility if they don’t have at least a rudimentary web site. Of course, you can continue to operate in the traditional way, but if you keep doing the same things you will keep getting the same results. If you decide to change, you need to recognise that the rules may also change. The old “Ps” were good enough for the old days and the old ways, but the future is a foreign country and they do things different there.

Everyone hates paying tax. Of course, we like roads, bridges, railways, schools, hospitals, universities, armies, police, national parks, pensions, drought and flood relief (sometimes both at the same time), fire services and all the other things that taxes pay for. It’s just the tax we hate, and with the end of June coming up fast it’s time to do something positive to minimise your pain. As a service, I have gathered advice from various reputable sources into the one place so that you don’t have to shop around.

First up, negative gear into property. What happens here is you borrow money to buy an investment property, but you have to be sure that the rental income is less than the interest you have to pay to the bank. This way, more goes out than comes in. This may sound crazy, but the losses are deductible, so you save tax. The more you lose, the more tax you save. Simple, isn’t it?

Next, negative gear into shares. You borrow money to buy shares, but the dividends have to be less than the interest. This is much simpler than property as no lawyers are required, but as their fees are deductible as well as the interest, the tax savings might not be as good because you spend less. If the shares fall in value, you may be able to save more tax by selling them at a loss.

For the brave, who don’t mind high risk for high returns, we can negative gear into futures contracts. Here the interest rates are higher and often there are no returns (don’t tell the tax man or he may not allow the deduction). In fact there is the prospect of large losses which can be used to save more tax in the future.

The problem with all these is that the deductions don’t start flowing until the losses come in. This can be fixed simply, by paying the interest in advance. This is how it works. You borrow, say, $100,000 from someone. You look for a high interest rate (to maximise deductions), so assume 20% per year. You pay the first year’s interest before the 30th of June. This gives you $20,000 deduction for this financial year. Easy. Then you invest $80,000, which will bring in less than the full $100,000 would so your losses will be even greater next year. An even bigger deduction could be gained for a business by buying $80,000 worth of, say, copy paper and claiming the full $100,000 this year. It just gets better, doesn’t it?

All of these are a bit complicated and there is not much time to arrange loans, so I have decided to make a sacrifice on your behalf by volunteering to pay your tax for you. All you have to do is to send me a cheque for the estimated taxable income of your business. Please attach a business card or “with compliments” slip. I will send you an invoice, dated before June 30th and marked paid , as soon as the cheque has cleared. Your business will not have to pay any tax, and you will have the added benefit of not having to worry about accounting for dividend imputation.

I had a terrific investment a few years ago in an avocado plantation combined with prawn aquaculture. Luckily, the project failed because groundwater flooded the shaft in our thousand island dressing mine. We made a bundle on the tax losses, but not as much as we made on the film Seafood Salad Days, which lost millions.

A few years ago I went shopping for a new car.

For several years I was a satisfied owner of a Eunos 30X coupe. It was probably the best engineered and built car I had ever owned, and I had had a few cars over many years. When the lease was coming to an end the finance company wrote to me to tell me that they had pre-approved a loan for a replacement car, and all I had to do was get a dealer to ring them for full approval of any replacement lease. I thought that it might be time to look for something else, and as my experience with the Eunos had been all good a Mazda was an obvious choice. As I wanted a small car with some room and features, the Mazda 3 range fitted the specifications, and as I wanted something with a bit of performance it was going to be an SP23.

I was coming home from a meeting one night and saw the exact car I wanted in the local Mazda dealer’s yard. It was a yellow SP23 hatch. (I had always wanted a yellow car, and had considered having the Eunos repainted if I kept it beyond the end of the lease.) It was obviously a demonstrator as it was registered but in the new car part of the yard. Perfect! The next morning I checked Mazda’s web site to confirm the price of the new car and I noted that a demonstrator sale was starting that day. More than perfect! I set off with confidence to buy my new car.

I had thought I was entering a car yard, but it soon became apparent that I had travelled down a rabbit hole into somewhere which could only be described as curiouser and curiouser.

Once I managed to attract the attention of a salesman, the conversation went like this:

PB: I would like to buy this car.

SP: That is a demonstrator. It is not for sale.

PB: But Mazda’s web site says that there is a demonstrator runout starting today.

SP: The runout does not apply to the 3 models.

PB: So I would have to pay full price for it, even though it is a used car?

SP: That’s right, but we can’t sell it to you because it has only done 2,500Km and we can’t sell them until they have done 4,000. (This was said without looking at the car’s instruments.)

PB: I’ve bought demonstrators before and nobody ever seemed to have rules like that.

SP: If we sold it, we wouldn’t have a demonstrator.

PB: (Thinks – what about that red registered SP23 demonstrator that another customer is looking at?)

PB: I am sure you could find a way to sell it to me.

SP: There is a three-month waiting list for the 3 series cars.

PB: I’m lucky then, because I want to buy this very car in front of us.

Then – the best comment by a salesman all day:

SP: Yellow ones are hard to get.

PB: I’m still in luck, because this one is yellow.

The salesman finally agreed to discuss selling me a car, so we went to his desk. He then told me that on-road costs would be in excess of $6,000. This was made up of $1,645 dealer charge, about $300 each for registration and compulsory third party insurance, about $1000 for stamp duty and an unexplained $2,750 which was either some very expensive mats, a gouge or an attempt to make me go away. When I objected, the salesman had a chat with his boss and they agreed to drop the on-road charges to only $4,000. Apparently this discount to only $750 more than the usual new-car price was because it was a demonstrator and therefore a used car.

To keep things going, I provisionally accepted that price. I was then told that I couldn’t have this particular car but they had found another one in the same colour at another dealership. Unfortunately, as this would be a new car I would have to pay the full price, and, added misfortune, there was nobody at the other dealership who could deal with anyone wanting to buy a car until next week. It seemed that this other car was at the only car yard in Australia which doesn’t work on weekends. Again, I provisionally agreed just to keep the process moving.

They then told me about the trade-in value of the Eunos. I had purchased this car from this dealership, and they now offered me a risible valuation which indicated that it had been losing value at an average rate of about 2% per month since I bought it. This told me that either I had been seriously overcharged when they sold it to me, or that Mazdas lose value faster than some cheaper cars (my previous car was a Hyundai and its loss in value was at nowhere near this rate) or they simply wanted me to go away and stop bothering them. I went away.

What amazed me throughout this whole experience was that the dealer seemed to have no intention of selling me a car of any kind. No attempt was made to offer me one of the other cars in the yard, or to suggest, for example, a Mazda 6 which could have been supplied at around the same price. They were prepared to waste two hours of my time for no reason other than perhaps giving the salesman some practice at talking to prospects. It must be good to have a business where you can turn away customers who have already made the decision to buy and have the money in their pockets.

About two hundred metres up the road there was another car dealer. In that yard was a used Lexus IS200 at a price comparable to the inflated price that I had first been quoted for the Mazda. It was a very nice car, and an extremely suitable replacement for my Eunos. It was yellow.

When I was taken to court in 2005 by a multi-level marketing company (which was annoyed at my mentioning that the Federal Court of Australia had found them to be operating an illegal pyramid scheme) I had to prepare an extensive affidavit in reply. As part of that affidavit I had to put down some thoughts about why I don’t like multi-level marketing schemes. This is what I wrote. (I have retained the legalistic style of writing.)

I have always been suspicious of multi-level marketing schemes. In my view they almost never represent real business opportunities for participants at lower levels. There is thus a real need created on the part of participants to advance to the next level and this need can, in my view, almost lead to the same kinds of consequences as an addiction, with people becoming obsessive about the people-recruitment aspects of their “business” and the objective of advancing to a higher level to chase an ever attractive prospect of better returns. These views derive from what I see as the following classic elements of all such arrangements:

1. It is extremely difficult to obtain a viable customer base for direct sales. With sales commissions for direct sales typically in the range of 0.5% to 1% (and even less in some cases or with some product mixes) a very large volume of sales dollars is necessary to make a good living. If customer acquisition techniques such as cold-calling, advertising and the purchase of leads are not allowed then it would seem to be almost impossible to make a good income from direct sales alone. In my business, which is software sales and support, the typical discount from recommended retail price to wholesale price is 20% and there are no restrictions on how customers are acquired, serviced or charged. Even then, quite large sales volumes are required for commercial success.
2. To get around the problem of finding customers, it is suggested that participants recruit others to act as their agents or subcontractors to find more customers. The problem is that this is simply finding competitors for yourself, as the pool of potential customers remains the same. The people at this next level down are in the same situation with regards to customer acquisition so they are in turn encouraged to recruit competitors, and the cycle continues.
3. The mathematical concept of geometric progression has been known for a long time, and it applies a limit to the expansion of any multi-level marketing scheme. I have been told on several occasions that it is trivially easy to recruit five people per month to serve in a downline. Anyone starting out on the first of January in any year who managed to build a network of people who only ever recruited five people each in total themselves (not five each month) and where this recruitment rate was continued down successive levels would have the entire population of Australia working for them by November (they would not reach the full November target because the population would have been exhausted).
4. Participants in these schemes do not have the status of employees in a normal business, and have none of the prospects for promotion, job variety or employee benefits that employees usually enjoy. The only way they can advance is to rise higher in the matrix of “independent business operators”.

I would like to emphasise that the problem of financial viability applies to the people brought in at lower levels who are invariably led to believe that they are establishing independent commercial businesses. It does not necessarily apply to the organisations and corporations who construct and manage these schemes. These can be very sound businesses indeed. When Jay Van Andel, one of the founders of Amway, died he was worth $US2.3 billion and was ranked as the 231st richest person in the world.

It is also necessary to point out that, despite what many people seem to think, a multi-level marketing scheme is not necessarily legally a “pyramid” scheme. The laws of various countries (in Australia the Trade Practices Act 1974 and its successor, the Competition and Consumer Act 2010) set out definitions of what constitutes a pyramid scheme and companies generally try to stay just within the boundaries set out in the law. They usually run into difficulties when addressing point “a” above as they attempt to increase the potential income of participants in the lower levels. One way is to increase the commission percentages as people get higher in the matrix (which is contrary to the practice in normal sales operations, where the highest commission goes to the person actually making the sale). Another is to pay bonuses based on the number of participants (either distributors or end customers) brought in through the participant’s downline. Both of these approaches increase the problem mentioned in point “b” above and encourage participants to recruit to the scheme rather than find customers for the products. The second is the more dangerous for the sponsoring organisation, because one of the ways that the law defines pyramid selling is to consider the extent to which participants are induced to pay their entry fee on the prospect of recouping it by earning income based not on their own sales of the organisation’s product or service but on the sales or recruitment activities of those that they recruit and all who come after them in that branch of the “tree”.

Scratch an employment consultant or someone in HR and the subject of psychological or aptitude testing often comes up. I spent some years at university studying psychology and the way it can be used so this has been a matter of interest to me for some time, especially as it is applied in the management of businesses. Here is something I wrote as part of an article about recruitment practices for the Sydney Business Review newspaper in October 1995.

Another shortcut in employee selection is psychological testing. This provides a whole new list of boxes to tick. Before I get attacked by psychologists claiming that I am defaming them, I would like to say that, firstly, I actually know something about testing and, secondly, my objection is not to testing per se but to the inappropriate use of testing. If a proper profile can be developed for the job, and an appropriate test can be found, and it is assumed that the person will never move into any other position within the employing organisation, then testing is justified. I have just too often seen testing used as a crutch.

As an example, I have taken one particular set of tests at least three times. In all cases the comments made about me by the testers indicated that they were not even aware of principles and theories taught as part of any first year university psychology course. One supposed psychologist told me that this test could predict exactly how people would behave in any given set of circumstances. He had no answer when I asked him why it was not applied to all 10-year-olds to weed out those who were going to become murderers and rapists. By the way, the validation for this test (the proof that it works, if you like) was that it had, with hindsight, reasonably accurately predicted the promotion prospects of a group of 70 Los Angeles firemen, yet it was being used by high-priced consultancies to select candidates for sales, management and software development positions.

It’s probably just a coincidence that I revisited this matter exactly ten years later in this article in the October 2005 edition of Australasian Science magazine.

Every so often the matter of psychological testing comes up in discussion among skeptics, with opinions varying on where such tests fit on the spectrum of scientific activity. Usually the majority think that psychological testing is about as scientific as the study of alien abductions or the memory of water, but there are sometimes a couple of people prepared to defend the tests. I topped my class at university in the course about the design and interpretation of psychological tests, and my take on them is that they may be very useful if used appropriately, but they are also a very good way of illustrating the meaning of the terms “reliability” and “validity”. “Validity” is the relationship of the findings to the real world, and “reliability” is the reproducibility of the results. It is possible for something to be reliable but not valid, but it is impossible for the opposite to be true. You can print out this page and use the ruler below to measure things. It won’t matter if you use it to measure feet, firkins, furlongs or femtometres, it should produce very close to the same measurement each time and is therefore a reliable measuring instrument. Its validity would be useless (unless you were a crook selling something by length to someone who had never seen a ruler).

I remember being asked once by an employment agent if I had any objection to being asked to do a psych test for a potential employer. I told them that I had no objection at all, because unless they could tell me what the test was and how it predicted any aspect of job performance the requirement for a test disqualified the potential employer and saved me the wasted time of interviews. I didn’t get the job. In one case where I did a test, it was simply a process of following some logical paths to reach conclusions based on information provided as part of the test. I was told that it would take about three hours to do the test. I finished in about 45 minutes, so I thought that I must have done something wrong. The only way to test the answers was to do the test again, which this time took three-quarters of an hour.

I was told that I was the first ever applicant to get all the answers correct, but even this wasn’t enough to get me the job. I didn’t care, really, because I didn’t want to work with people who were so dumb that they could get any of the test answers wrong. This appeared to be one of those tests which was highly reliable, but had no validity in the situation in which it was used. (I later found out that the person who would have been my boss was a misogynist creep who groped women at parties and all the programmers employed there really were brainless nincompoops. Lucky escape!)

In one of those discussions between skeptics recently, the matter of the Myers-Briggs test came up. This is a multiple-choice test which purports to place test subjects along several spectra or axes of personality traits. I went off and did a Myers-Briggs test and I am ENFJ:

moderately expressed extrovert (44%)
moderately expressed intuitive personality (50%)
moderately expressed feeling personality (38%)
moderately expressed judging personality (56%)

That sounds like me, especially all those “moderately” measurements. To get these results I answered the questions more-or-less honestly (and I do know something about self-serving bias in personality tests). The danger in using the results of a test like this, however, are at least twofold. First, it is only a single test and can be done in a short time. For it to have validity requires other tests to be taken at the same time which can be used to corroborate the results. I do know of people using just a single test for employment selection, and this makes the choices suspect. Secondly, it has an inherent reliability problem. Two actually – results can vary from time to time just because people feel different on different occasions, and anyone who knows how the test works (and which questions have special significance in scoring) can adjust the results. This is another reason for using batteries of tests – if each has a different reliability, the overall reliability of the collection can be improved. I know that if I were to be interviewing next Tuesday for the position of Promotions Manager for the Anthony Robbins outfit, my Myers-Briggs results would look nothing like the table above. And on Thursday, when I was going for Nursing Manager at a palliative care hospice there would be a different picture again.

As I said above, there can be no validity without reliability. That is why we demand that experimental results in all areas of science be reproducible. It is specially important if those results suggest that the world is not as we think it is. Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He forgot to add that the evidence needs to be found more than once.

My boss came into my office to tell me that an emergency meeting had been called to discuss a problem with the way that the computer system calculated extended prices for a product with very significant sales. I checked the program code and it appeared to be doing the arithmetic correctly, but I would have to wait until the meeting to find out the nature and extent of the problem.

When I arrived at the meeting I found that the other attendees included the national sales manager, the head of finance, the Managing Director’s assistant (and heir to the MD position), a senior representative of the accounts department, the person responsible for managing physical distribution of products, and the head of IT (me). This amount of executive power cost a lot to put together even for a short time, so it was obvious that this must be a very serious problem indeed.

A major product manufactured and sold by the company was distributed in two ways – bulk sales and bags stacked on pallets. There was no problem with bulk sales or bagged sales to large customers which were all done on account, but there was a problem with cash sales of bagged product to casual buyers. The problem was that it was not always possible to reconcile the cash actually received for a sale with what the computer system later determined should have been the extended price. (This was before the days of online, immediate sales. Sales were completed and the paperwork sent in to head office for later entry into the computer.)

Pricing was always per tonne of product, and while there were 25 bags to the tonne there were 36 bags on a pallet. The sales clerks at the depots would divide the price per tonne by 25 and multiply by 36 to get the price per pallet, and sometimes they got this wrong. Specifically, they didn’t do the rounding properly and this caused discrepancies of fractions of a cent when the sales were finally recorded in the computer system.

Yes, I said “fractions of a cent”.

One idea came from the national sales manager who suggested that pricing per tonne should always be in multiples of 25 cents, but this was vehemently rejected because “the computer department is not going to dictate company pricing policy”. Various other suggestions were made, but all were quashed by the order that I was to return to the IT department and make sure that the necessary programming changes were made to fix this enormous problem. You may remember that I had already checked and could see no error in the price calculation code.

I finally decided that I needed to know the exact extent of the problem. The company sold about $200 million worth of this product each year, and only a small proportion of this was by cash sales of bags, so I had to ask: “How much money are we talking about here?”.

$20. Twenty dollars. Per year. Out of $200 million sales. I was so glad that we had devoted several hours of executive time to this.

The office accommodation was being completely overhauled and a new room was being built to house the computer. As soon as the computer had been moved and settled in, the staff of the IT department were to move into their brand new offices surrounding the glasshouse containing the technology. On one side of the new computer room was an office with no windows and no line of sight to a window. On the other side was a smaller room with a floor-to-ceiling window offering a magnificent panorama across Sydney Harbour. The view of the Harbour Bridge was particularly pleasing.

My new office was to be the one without windows. The other room was going to be used to store stationery.

As politely as I could I suggested that it would be preferable for the stationery to live in the dark and the human to have the million-dollar view, but I was told that the office with the window was far too small to be suitable for an executive of the company. I replied that all I needed in my office was space for chairs for me and a couple of visitors, a bench or table to hold my computer and telephone, a small bookcase for those few books which always had to be at hand, and possibly a small coffee table and a pot plant. Anything else could be put in the other room with the boxes of paper and I could go there and get it as needed.

There was much discussion about the propriety of allowing a senior manager to occupy a space which was smaller than a manager’s status dictated, but I persisted. I finally seemed to get across the point that, as a manager, I would not be the least offended by having such a small office, although I would have thought that this point had been made clearly when I asked to use the room. Eventually it was agreed that I could use the office, but I had to have a real desk like real managers use. I have always hated sitting behind a desk so I suggested that if I had to have a desk it should be put in the corner of the room so that I faced a wall and had the window at one side. This was too much, and the final word was that I could only have that office if the desk went across the room and I sat on one side and visitors sat on the other.

It was better than nothing, so I graciously accepted. The minimum of chattels necessary for me to do my job were moved from my old office to the new one, the rest was put in some cupboards in the stationery room, and everyone seemed satisfied. When I wasn’t on the phone or using the computer and there were no visitors sitting on the other side of my desk I sometimes took a peek over my shoulder at one of the best pieces of scenery in the world.

Some time after I left the company I was at a dinner function and I ran into someone whom I had worked with some years before. We swapped some small talk about what we had been doing since we had last met and he told me that he had been going through some files at his new job and had come across my name. In fact, he now had the management job that I had held at his new employer. Rather sneakily, I asked him how he liked the view from his office. He told me that he didn’t have a view, and, in fact, couldn’t even see a window from his desk. I was too kind to ask him if the boxes of paper enjoyed looking at the ferries and the Harbour Bridge.