Up at 7am on Monday morning (not too early) to catch a flight up to Auckland. However, it had snowed all night and the entire airport was closed!
So on Tuesday morning we caught the 05:45 flight up (which is a whole lot earlier). The reason Andrew and I went up was for the annual TUANZ Contact Centre conference. It was pretty interesting, there were some excellent presentations (esp. on the growth of the Asian market.. there are some interesting times ahead).
One of the talks was on how to get your workforce physically active again (something I think that really needs to be done). And there was this excellent company called azion. Actually their website is a bit lacking on detail – but the jist of it was that you split your workforce into a number of teams (4 per team). Each person is given a pedometer and each week the total number of steps taken by the team is entered into the website. Once they hit the goal for that week they are shown a flash movie of what they would have seen if they had actually been walking. So you get a virtual tour of NZ.
It’s really a very cute idea. If it’s not being done in Ireland & Europe then I reckon it’s an idea which could *really* take off (and easy to do too). With the way our sedentary lifestyles are going you might even be able to get serious government funding to get set up!
Anyways.. dressed up in Tux’s again for the awards, good times (but no pics). Then a day in Wellington on work, and then spent the weekend up in Palmerston North with family. Met a very nice English couple – Jim & Abby – on the way up (thanks to a text asking me whether I was sitting next to anyone interesting.. as otherwise I would have happily kept on listening to my mp3 player!). Totally interesting pair – backpacking around doing WOOFING and making houses out of renewables (straw) etc.
It was great to catch up with the cousins. A much needed break. Now, the reason for the A change in attitude title. Well, it came to dawn on me (and I’ve been avoiding this for the longest time) that I really do need to get back into real career / job mode. I have had the best time over the last couple of years, and I have really enjoyed and have no regrets whatsoever! about taking it easy and just cruising for a while. But I have felt over the last 6 months to a year that my concentration and skills have been turning to mush.. and so I came to the uncomfortable realisation that I need to start pushing myself and upskilling myself again. So less long holidays I suspect, more hours in the office, but hopefully get some good stuff done – and make myself employable again.
Well, that’s the idea.. we’ll see what happens eh ;)
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Excellent plane ride back down. Everyone got both a window and an aisle seat ;)
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