collecting opportunity (big presentation part 0)

T-Minus: 20 days...

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Location: Octagon

Objective: Signature

man with time ticking away it is getting more and more stressful people of the innerweb...

i've wasted nearly a month trying to meet the government's criteria, and still no success. i figured i'd switch tactics altogether here today. thus far i'd been going for material things on my list, and due to their being big i'd been failing. time to scale down i thought, and try biting off smaller pieces (which is a little silly for a t-rex. an average t-rex could eat something like 200 cheeseburgers in one bite... if only i were an average sized t-rex...)

that meant going for the one objective i hadn't aimed for yet. getting some signatures or referral and/or endorsement...

for this i already had a good lead (granted i'd had leads on homes and jobs too, but i hadn't messed this criteria up... yet...)
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to get it though i was going to have to contact that nice guy andrew i met at the beach last week...

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he gave me a number for his "cell" phone (still don't get what that means), but the problem was craig is so cheap he doesn't have a phone in his room at salmond. as of such i needed to hike all the way into town from his place (a good 30 minute walk) JUST to find a phone...

getting there i met with a different, yet equally annoying challenge. i needed money to make the phone work!

fishing around in my pockets i found i had no change at all... which i guess is to be expected. what with my having never had any new zealand money of any type at all!

then i remembered a trick i'd seen on a movie once. i called "collect"...

now it didn't work quite the way i thought. movies sadly are never quite as real as you'd think.

see i thought when you called collect you had to collect the number of the person you were trying to reach. instead what it is is a game to try and find someone stupid enough to pay for you're call. now it took me a few tries, and the operator got kinda mad at me, but i finally got someone to cover my call...

craig was surprised when i called him at skool collect... he answered it expecting to hear some big emergency. once he accepted the charges i immediately had the operator redirect my call to andrew...

getting through, andrew was kinda "keen" that i'd called (cool my first exposure to kiwinese!). turns out that he was in bit of a jam.

he had to do a presentation on new zealand sports on the weekend, and his public speaking skills weren't so "hot". he remembered from our conversation the other day though that i had a ton of working with people telling them stuff experience from the tyrrell.

andrew asked if i could help him with his presentation. i totally said yeah! not only was andrew about to owe me a favour, and i was about to make him my friend for sure (cause hey who else would help you in a bind like this but a true friend), but maybe i could make even more contacts at this presentation thing!

so agreeing to meet up with andrew this weekend to help him with this problem we hung up. perfect i thought i was finally on the right track to fixing some of my problems in life!

right then the phone cut back to craig who was on the other end of the phone, and man was he NOT happy with me pulling that collect trick... oops.

why is it i can never do anything without something going wrong?