I needed to join a down pipe which went no where in the backyard to the existing piping, to do this obviously I had to dig a trench. I tried to leave it until it had at least rained a bit so that it was at least a little bit soft. I finally got around to digging it last weekend. The long weekend just finishing was going to be when I finished the job but I hit a few snags. Firstly I started cutting the pipe to make the join only to discover the pipe was full of water - because it actually rain up hill. This filled the pipe trench and was a major hurdle. Second minor hurdle was that I found the electrical conduit was directly below the water pipe, electrical is supposed to be 600mm deep & this was about 150mm deep - it could have ended very badly if I had of cut straight through it.

Eventually I got around that and sorted out all the piping and the joints etc, however during this sorting out and overnight we had a significant amount of rain the trench had filled up. It had so much water in it to the point that I need to extend the trench otherwise it was over flowing. I eventually extended the trench about 3 metres and hopefully that will be enough to last me until next weekend.

Below are some photos of my weekend exploits.

Was watching Cleveland v Orlando and saw Dwight Howard create some havoc

This was a pretty spectacular start to a World Touring Car Championship recently is Pau - they sort of completed a lap

I’ll start with some info before I get into the Fun and Games. I am not entirely sure how the whole Modern and Bramalco works but I think Bramalco are owned by Modern, only in SA are they known as Bramalco elsewhere they are known as the Modern Group.

They have fairly regular “competitions” to win something, the most recent was to win a chance of winning a Million Dollars. I entered knowing that I would receive a phone call about getting their services - this didn’t bother me because I wanted to know how much roof restoration was going to cost anyway.

I received a phone call from them telling me I hadn’t won, but I was one of the lucky consolation prize winners and I had won $500 off any of their products (I think everyone would be offered this I am sure). I told them I would be home the next day with another contractor coming around and if someone could come around then they would be able to other than that it would be too hard to organise.

Eugene came around they got up on the roof and inspected the roof and said it was bad. He did a few measurements then came inside and started the whole sales spiel - how their product was better than everyone else etc. I told him I was just after a price - he proceeded to give me a price of $8,400. I said thanks but I wasn’t prepared to spend that sort of money. So he started the push and talking about making it into a display home with a sign up for 20 weeks and that I would have to provide names of 3 people and 3 before and after photos as part of the deal, for this they would knock off $1,500. He rang his boss to confirm that and it was fine at their end.

I told him thanks but I was just after a price and it was still too high to proceed with anything today. He wasn’t happy with no for an answere, so he rang his boss again to see if they could do anything else for me in regards to the price. I mentioned $4,000 (thinking there was no way they could offer it to me for half the price) as a decent figure, he told his boss that also. They managed to get the price down to $4,400 - the display home sign had to be up for 32 weeks, I had to provide names of 6 people and 6 before and after photos. I said its a good price but I am not signing up today it was never my intention too I was after pricing and that was all. He wasn’t particularly happy but he accepted it in the end, he rang his boss to inform him and this is where the fun really ramped up.

His boss (Phil Brooks) wanted to speak with me, he explained rather rudely that he had gone to extreme lengths to get the discounts he got for me (extreme lengths in 2 x 30sec phone calls is interesting) and proceeded to ask me why I wasn’t signing up today. I explained to him that I told the initial call operator I was only after pricing so I knew how much I needed to budget and that I wasn’t ready to put $8,000 on the table today. His rudeness then went to the extreme by telling me that he no longer wanted to deal with me and the company did not want my business - not sure what he said after that because at that point I hung up and nicely asked Eugene (the salesman who attended my house) to leave.

It actually gets better - about an hour later there was a knock at my door (I still haven’t got a door bell yet). It was a lovely lady with a Bramalco shirt on - what was she doing here I thought. Well she was actually from Bramalco Streamline (or Streamline Bramalco not sure which) trying to sell me a different Bramalco product - I told her my sob story about Bramalco then asked her nicely to leave because I wanted nothing to do with Bramalco ever again.

Since all this occurred my brother in law came over and doesn’t reckon the roof is too bad and says there are probably better things to spend my money on around the house than doing the roof at this stage and I would take his word over some Bramalco salesman any day.

Well it is interesting times with the whole Global Financial Crisis we are currently experiencing. At work February was a record month for sales (sales to us equals jobs we invoice in a month ie we finished a job and invoiced it in February which was ordered about 6 months ago) which is quite astounding considering the plight of the mining industry at the moment. Why did we do so well and will it continue these are very big and important questions.

Why? We had a major job finally completed which I believe was about 16% of total sales for the month but even without that sale we would still have had a month which would have been in the top 3 months of recent times (last 4 years of records I have).

Will it continue? Yes and no, we are pretty much in a niche market, we service sections of the large mining trucks that are used mainly in open cut mining operations. We have customers including OZ Minerals, BHP, Rio Tinto and others. I mention those three because they are regularly in the news. Many of our customers have made announcements that projects are being put on hold including construction, exploration and some have even started to reduce the amount of ore they are digging up. They are doing this because the current price of many of the metals they are digging up has reduced so much that it is costing more to dig holes than they are getting on the market for their product. If they are stopping the actual mining process this is where we start to get hit. If they used to run 20 trucks 24 hours a day, and now they are running 10 trucks 12 hours a day that is a significant reduction is hours the trucks are doing therefore their maintenance schedules are being extended. To add to that they have trucks parked up which have parts on them they can remove and replace once maintenance is due further extending our maintenance schedules. Luckily for us we are able to be very price competitive against the OEMs which makes us a better proposition than the OEMs - also as we manufacture many of our own parts our costs aren’t really increasing but as the OEMs import into Australia and the reduction in the value of the AU$ vs US$ we are able to further stretch the $$ savings we are passing onto our customers.

I believe we will continue through this current greed driven mess and come out a stronger better performing company through the processes we are currently implementing. We are currently in the process of integrating one of the other companies within our group within our systems to be able to seamlessly compare data and grow both of our businesses beyond our current scope. It is going to be a fairly major focus shift for us from a service driven company to also focus on general parts sales, but I believe with the correct planning and people in place we will be able to significantly grow our business to within 5 years double sales - but only if the right people are recruited to drive the parts sales side of the business. However we can’t let our service drop or else within 5 years our sales could stagnate which isn’t a good thing either.

As a side note, OZ Minerals are in an interesting situation at the moment, they are $1billion+ in debt and due to markets crashing and in turn base metals pricing crashing they cant afford to repay their debts, they are currently awaiting the outcome of the Financial (or Federal I cant remember which) Investment Review Board (FIRB) investigation into a total purchase by Minmetals (a Chinese government owned company). Of course this will release OZ Minerals of the debt but will also hand ownership of one of the biggest mines (Prominent Hill) to overseas ownership.

At Adelaide Oval for probably the last day nighter before the old grandstand comes down

A car which was burnt out around the corner from my house last night about 10pm

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