Got to work
I finally did some real work today. In about five minutes, I explained to my counterpart how to use ASPmail to send emails from a website. I think he got it!
The past week I haven’t put much time into my partner business. One reason is the Mongolian way of doing business, the other is the inconvenience that the Dotmaker office is waiting to move to a different building. However, there’s still some other company occupying the new offices.
Many Mongolians carry a GSM and although this is a luxury item, it really isn’t. Nobody seems to be able to make or keep appointments, so everyone has to call each other all the time to adjust or postpone agreements earlier made. I did bring my own GSM but for the time being decided against getting a local phone number, I just didn’t want to be too reachable. Now, however, it does seem to be useful. Yesterday, I basically waited by the phone all day for a phone call from my counterpart that never came.
We still haven’t finalized the work plan for Dotmaker. This was supposed to happen tomorrow, however, after the trip into the countryside was canceled yesterday, it now is scheduled again and we’re leaving tomorrow morning. So, for the time being, still no work plan.
Dotmaker seems to be eager to go into offshore business and it seems Amaraa, my counterpart, considers me the holy grail for this objective. Although I’d be happy to help him with this, it wasn’t part of the original plan and, what is much more, this generally isn’t something you can ‘just’ accomplish in a couple of months. Most certainly not in today’s economy.
Meanwhile, virtually everyone is wearing mouthcaps because of SARS. Two days ago, I tried visiting the other geeks at their jobs but at Claudia her place, a small woman banned access for me, Soviet style because I wasn’t wearing a mask. However, the six people that are now suspected of SARS are still only that, suspected.
This morning, BBC World announced that ‘they’ are now certain SARS is nothing more then a cousin of the common cold. Each year, hundreds if not thousands of people die of a common cold so, in effect, a handful of people are suspected of having a cold and the whole country starts wearing surgical masks.
And, finally, I had my first phone interview yesterday with Radio Rijnmond. They had tried to contact me a number of times already, but hadn’t been successful in contacting me yet.