Dan Makovec’s blog

Still alive

Sooo, here I am again.

What on earth have I been up to for the past..errm.. however long it’s been since my last post?

As you may suspect, the primary answer’s simple: work.  We’ve got our first project up and running for real now.  Lots of back-end work, and we’ve set up a sales call center which is starting to pull in some money, thus moving it beyond the proof of concept stage and into reality.

It’s been an enormous effort and required lots of long hours, and Brian’s been very patient with me.  Just a little bit more to go and then some holidays.

Travel-wise, we went down to Adelaide for Myk and Flea’s wedding number one, which was set at a spectacular seaside location on a beautiful day.  The buck’s night was a bit crazy, feeling perhaps a little bit crazier to me after getting up at 5am to catch the red-eye in order to make it there by lunch (and subsequently missing my flight due to a rude and incompetent Qantas checkin bitch.  But once we reached Adelaide all was great for the 10 days we were there.

The regular Sydney shit story stepped up a gear the moment our plane touched down and we turned our phones on, when we received a message from a friend that he had just arrived home from interstate travel an hour earlier to find the locks on his apartment door changed and no way for him to get in.

It turned out that his landlord had defaulted on his mortgage, so the bank had foreclosed on the apartment with no notice.  Our mate was refused entry to his own rented apartment that day and wasn’t allowed in the next day unless he paid the bank’s legal fees to get the door opened.

To cut a long story short, we hired a truck and were allowed two hours access to the apartment to remove all of his possessions. We then drove everything back here and stored it wherever we could, and he lived with us for a couple of weeks until he managed to find a new apartment.

Yes, the Commonwealth Bank acted illegally and broke the Residential Tenancies Act.  His tenancy agent at Re/Max Real Estate was completely unsupportive of him other than by way of lip-service, going as far as to blame him for the whole affair.  In short, the way he was treated by all was disgraceful, leaving him not only several hundred dollars out of pocket, but extremely distressed and homeless.  I will not ever deal with either of these companies again on principle.

Unfortunately, because he is the type of person to avoid stressful situations under all circumstances rather than fighting this sort of injustice, it doesn’t look like he’ll be following this up legally.  It’s because of situations like that that bastards like those mentioned above can get away with treating people like dirt.

Anyway, we’ve got the place back to ourselves now and are looking forward to participating in wedding part 2.  After that, we’re off for 4 weeks of travel around Thailand and Cambodia.  It’ll be our first holiday (i.e. a vacation out of contact from work) in nearly 18 months, and we really can’t wait!

Before that, we’ve got the small issue of my 30th coming up, for which we’re going away somewhere  quiet (don’t know where).  The thought of having a party and inviting everybody did cross my mind, but I didn’t want everyone spending up on plane travel right now before Christmas.  I’m thinking of a delayed birthday bash next year for a few days somewhere up in Byron with anybody who can afford the time away.
We’re heading up to Brisbane for Brian’s brother’s birthday on the weekend of the 8th, and with luck taking a driving trip to Adelaide for Christmas!

OK that’s enough out of me for now.  And enough wasting your time reading.  Get back to work!