Well - got that over and done with ... Flight to Auckland was fine with a gentle touchdown .... Visited offices in Manukau city where I bumped into an ex-collegue coming out of the same building ...He lives in Wellington too..... Then off to Kingston street in the centre of Auckland ... Booked for 3 hours to sit an let anyone who wanted to cvome in and speak with us .. .One manager with a few issues come in and chatted for an hour with us and that was that ... We then met a strange PM doing work for us in Auckland and then I sat in a meeting I wasn't part of really (no pre involvement ) and nodded and blinked and tried unsuccessfully to stay awake and alert....

That evening we walked down to the harbour water front and sat outside a pub with a beer waiting for the boss and his daughter to arrive ...Daughter is now in Uni in Auckland... As I sat down and look up there was an ex-manager of mine from EDS ..also from wellington.. He was with a bunch of other EDSers ....Ex-manager on seeing me adjusted his seat to move me out of his line of vision and that was that ..... Just re-inforced all my reasons not to work for that crowd ever again ... Nor ever use them for any outsourcing I'm in charge of .......

Friday started off with the worst hotel breakfast I've ever experienced ... so Breakfast food was out .... We wandered down to our queen street offices and had a number of meetings ...One of which was cancelled so I asked my boss to bring one of the meetings forward to allow us time to get to the next destination and even home earlier ... Which he promptly did by an hour .. .The meeting still finished at the scheduled original end time overrunning by an hour ...I must speak with him and others about what to do and not do in multi-vendor meetings ..... yeh gods ....

And then we drove down to our offices in Panmure ... More a factory than offices as they are the controllers and checkers of weights and volumes machinery ...They keep the businesses honest...... They've had IT performance issues for over a year now ... and consequently endless IT vendor teckies vising the place .... My manager playing around logs in as himself to try it out ...perfect performace ...the equivalent of perfmnce we have in the head office !! ... So we now know it has to be the profile the desktops have or the install ... Both can be done over the weekend for them, and the issues will be gone ..... After a year ... .When back at the car I turned to our IT vendor national services manager who was with us the two days ... " Well that must be damned embarrassing for you !!!! A year of your teckies visiting this place and the company CxO no less fixes the problem!!!" "How embarrassing is that ??"
"yeh .... " he mutters ...
"embarrassing" ....

Flight was one of the few flights ontime that evening due to engineers work to rule....I'd eaten nothing all day .... McD and I dropped into a chinese restaurant in lower hutt ... It was the best chinese food we'd eaten in a yaks age ....
So why in these restaurants do the chinese get nice Bowls to eat from with their chop sticks and we westerners get plates ??????? Ever tried to eat rice off a plate with chopsticks !!! My shirt needs a special cleaning after that .....