Perth is maybe in “the middle of nowhere” on the world map. In fact, of all of the cities with more than a million inhabitants, it is the furthest from another city of equivalent size than any other in the world. However, together with the nearby port of Fremantle, it’s a glorious place to live. Beautiful parks, the stunning Swan river, and nearby superb sandy beaches on the coast of the Indian Ocean. All that, together with a fantastic climate, make it heaven on earth to live in.
After four weeks in Bangkok, where I paid my respects to Tim’s mother, as well as completing all of the formalities at the Australian Embassy, Tim and I found ourselves back in the air, together this time, bound for Perth. As Perth is on the West coast of Australia, it’s only a 5 or 6 hour direct hop from Bangkok, which was nothing for we, by now, seasoned travelers.
We were met at the airport by our close friends, Andy and Alex, with whom we stayed for about a fortnight. Although I started work the next day, we found time in the evenings to select a car and buy a house not too far from Andy and Alex. The house was actually the first one we were shown, and Tim was immediately attracted to it because it had a patch of lemon grass growing in the back garden. Lemon grass is a major ingredient in the Thai dish, Tom Yong. It’s a spicy, lemon-flavored sauce, usually served with chicken, prawns, or pork. It was all I could do to convince Tim to look at a few other houses, but, as it turned out, the first one we had seen was the best anyway, for several reasons. Not only the patch of lemon grass. The next day, with the help of the partner who had hired me, I organized a mortgage, and I was told that we could move in two weeks later.
At work, I was given a great office on the eighth floor of a building overlooking the Swan River. The view was so breathtaking that I had to sit with my back to the window, or I would never have got any work done. One day, I remember seeing two wild pelicans doing a graceful “U” turn in the sky over the river, just about level with my window on the eighth floor. They were in perfect synchronization. It was an absolutely magnificent sight.
It took me about a month to remind myself how the flexible formatting system worked and to get used to the slightly different numbering system that was in place, compared to the one I had introduced in Port Moresby. However, it wasn’t very long before I was up and running at full speed. I had only been away from the system for about a year and a half, but in the rapidly changing computer environment, many changes had taken place in my absence.
Again, I had two operators working directly under me, with whom I got on very well. Apart from very large batches of input, their job was now mainly centered around maintaining the backup system. More and more of the small business department’s employees had computers on their desks, which were linked to the main server through wires strung out through the false ceiling and down support columns. I’m sure that nowadays, it’s all done by WiFi, but remember we’re still talking about the mid to late nineteen-eighties here.
The young aspiring accountants were encouraged to make their own entries to their clients’ ledgers before carefully checking them from printouts obtainable from printers situated in the main computer room.
My job was heavily involved in training and writing the code for non-standard formats that were required from time to time. By today’s standards, each desktop computer had only a small hard disk drive, 20 Mb from memory, but everybody had a spreadsheet program. I can’t remember which one it was, but it was before the days of “Lotus 123”, never mind “Excel”. They also had a simple word processor, nothing as sophisticated as “Word”, of course, but more advanced than, say, “Notepad”. It was also my job to train users in these applications as well as the General Ledger. Within a year, most clients’ fixed asset registers were maintained on a spreadsheet, and junior accountants could submit letters to the partners for signature, without the need for a secretary to type them out.
The other advance that the firm’s main computer department in Sydney had made during my time back in the U.K. was the introduction of a mini version of the standard General Ledger. This version was small enough to easily fit on the hard drive of the standard desktop computer available at the time. It had two primary roles.
- To allow staff members to input transactions at clients’ premises, although this did mean lugging quite large desktop computers around. Trial balances could then be easily and quickly entered into the main machine at the office, ready to receive closing entries and final formatting tweaks, so that final accounts could be produced in no time flat.
- To sell to clients to be installed on their own machines. In these circumstances, the clients themselves did the inputting, and our staff’s job became similar to an audit-type role. Again, the trial balance arrived at our office for finalization. In fact, many of our smaller audit clients bought the software and, in effect, became clients of both departments.
So again, training took on an even larger proportion of my responsibilities. I not only had to train the staff of the small business department in the new, smaller version of the software, but I also had to train a select number of audit department members. In addition, there were clients to train. To help me do this, I created a case study of a fictitious company with two shops, one in Perth and one in Fremantle. This proved to be very successful, but training became such a large part of my role that it began to bore me. I didn’t mind doing a little bit, but repeating the same stuff over and over again, to many different people was not my cup of tea. I much preferred creating unique charts of accounts and writing code for unique formats. I was also at a dead end as far as the firm was concerned. There was nowhere to be promoted to, and, clearly, there was no chance of a partnership. So, over the Christmas and New Year break of 1987/1988, I decided to start looking for a new job.
The Similarities Between These Two Years of My Life and Two Years of an Average Affiliate Marketer’s Life
Whatever main platform you have selected as your preferred way of attracting traffic to your offer, you can be guaranteed that it will evolve during the time that you use it. To continue to get the best advantage from your chosen platform, you must keep up-to-date with its latest ways of working. As changes are often quite subtle and poorly advertised, the powers that be behind each application tend to rely on you, the user, to spot them yourself. When you do spot a subtle change that warrants a change, no matter how small, in the way you operate, you must make that change immediately. This is where it is useful to have a good mentor with a team, and a band of fellow clients who can communicate with each other through a chat room or a Facebook group. So, if you, or a fellow group member, notice a small change, you, or they, can communicate the change to the others.
My situation at work during those two years wasn’t an exact replica of the affiliate marketing situation described in the previous paragraph, but it was similar. Both versions of the software I used were being constantly updated by the programmers in Sydney, occasionally after one of my suggestions. Although I was always told of all changes by internal memo, it was up to me to pass on the information to current and past students in all, or some, of the many groups of people I had, or was, training. Like an affiliate marketer mentor, written instructions or training material may also have to be updated.
Cheers
Phil