Rabid takes his selling skills to the bush

A trip to visit remote customers opens Rabid’s eyes to possible fortunes...and misfortunes.

Rabid’s on the road this week, visiting our more remote customers, to make sure they’re happy and stay loyal to the fold.

This is all just part of our ISO9002 customer service.

What? You didn’t think Rabid Reseller was ISO certified? According to the nephew we should have been certified years ago, but we don’t really understand how he knew about ISO standards before he even left school.

Anyway, we paid the appropriate fees to this US website and they sent us the certification, no problem, along with a couple of PhDs in information technology, which have proved very handy.

You don’t get a lot of arguments from geeks when they see the framed PhDs on the wall.

Well, yes, you get some laughter but we put that down to nerves in the presence of a superior intellect.

However, as usual, we digress, and we don’t really have the time since we’re out here on the highway footling along between regional centres.

For some reason we accepted the nephew’s pleadings to take the 40-year old Land Rover on this trip.

He said it needed a run to blow out the cobwebs.
Let me tell you right now, it doesn’t go fast enough to blow away very many cobwebs.

In fact there’s a huge hairy spider that’s been sitting on the bullbar the whole trip and he doesn’t seem the slightest bit worried.

When we stop for the night the spider emerges, builds a web to catch a few bugs, then takes it down again in the morning and assumes his position ready for the next day’s travel.

He’s a lot like the nephew really, only a lot more tidy.

Anyway, the Land Rover is chock-a-block full of spare bits of technology just in case there are any customers with a hankering for some new kit, or maybe just want their old kit to work again.

Some of them must have been waiting out here a long time for a computer repair man.

You can tell it’s been a while because a few of them confused us with people who do unspeakable things to their mothers.

Don’t know where they got the idea we do that, but they soon calmed down when we hauled the shiny new PCs out of the back of the truck.

The nephew’s not so silly after all – just about any technology you pull out of the back of a 40-year old wagon looks seriously up-to-date, despite the fact that it’s actually trade-ins from our city customers.

Out here people will pay serious money for a good 486 with 64MB RAM and a 2GB hard drive, let me tell you right now. It runs MS-DOS just fine.

No point offering them windows, when they don’t even have flyscreens.

About the only problem we’ve encountered has been the lack of available accommodation.

Well, there’s plenty of it really, but by the time the Land Rover gets to the next town everyone’s asleep, or they were until we drove up with the transmission wailing like a banshee loud enough to wake the dead.

We usually get greeted by a small posse of folk wielding what look very much like shotguns, and most often turn out to be exactly that.

You gotta be careful that you have two identical sets of technology if you’re doing an upgrade in the bush.

You don’t want to rekindle any ancient feuds by giving one family a serious technical advantage over their traditional rivals.

That can get real ugly, real fast.

Gotta go!

Lynch mob approaching!