Mobiles Overseas

You need to be careful when you use your mobile overseas. I did the research before I escaped for a few days in January. Whilst I was over there I made two mobile calls. The first was to my friend who once again missed me when I arrived at the airport. This 10 second call cost $1.88. Then I called my father in Australia for 13 seconds for $2.44. When he rang me back that night to my mobile, I paid $6.48 for a 24 minute call which was much better value. As was the 10 minute call the next day for $2.84.

The same bill has GPRS charges for one of my SIM cards. The cost for GPRS for the month was $0.155. That is right. They charged me 15 1/2 cents. For another SIM card they were more reasonable, charging me $1.37. The reason is that GPRS is charged on this plan at 0.5 cent increments. Plus GST of course. My telecommunications bills always make good reading before visiting the scanner and shreader.

GST

For another client I quoted $2,800 for a particular job. I have got the work, and they sent me a purchase order. All the line items are listed, without GST, with GST added for each item. This is fine, and all the numbers add up, except that my invoice for $2,800.00 is now $2,800.01. No matter what I do I can just see the paperwork involved with that once cent. I can only guess at the number of phone calls it is going to consume.

At Pacific Power we used to have internal billing, which really was funny money. It was just internal accounting. In my younger days I suggested that we replace the billing systems with monopoly money, and pay for things that way. After all it was expensive to run billing systems. With monopoly money you could have armed roberies, forgeries – the ideas are endless.

Anyway we had one client who had been billed $400 internally for some drawings for one of the power stations. There was no question it was work related. This client tried wanted to drive to the central coast and investigate this expense. It was going to cost the organization more than the bill to investigat. In the end she saw the sense in accepting the charge.

I was running the billing system for my branch in my spare time at work, and most months I was sending out over $100,000 in bills. It was always amusing seeing a $10,000 facility charge next to a $0.14 photocopy charge on the bill. Each month I would give my boss an overview on how his part of the oganisation was going, since many of the things that we were doing with technology were significantly reducing the bottom line improving the performance of the business. I did learn a lot about how businesses operate at Pacific Power

Music:

San Andreas Fault by Natalie Merchant. I love this song. All her stuff is cool, but this is great. Dido’s Take My Hand on now.