OPINION: Money for nothing

OPINION: Rabid Reseller can hardly wait for the new industrial relations reforms to come out of hiding in the Senate and get onto the statute books.

There’ll be some changes around here let me tell you, as soon as those unfair unfair-dismissal laws are repealed. For starters, that nephew of mine will be out the door on day one of the new regime.

What an ingrate he turned out to be. We only hired him as a favour to my brother-in-law, and now the precocious brat expects to get paid!

We’ve never made him stay back after midnight and we always buy him pizza and coke. To tell the truth, the noise from his mother just isn’t worth the grief if he’s not home by midnight. And the lazy sod doesn’t even get to the shop until 4pm. Something to do with having to wait until the bell rings, whatever that means, and every now and then some pathetic excuse about detention.

He just doesn’t want to work if you ask me. What’s he going to be like when he’s in high school?

Lately he’s been bleating about ‘award wages’ and ‘holiday loading’ and even ‘superannuation’! Says he learned all about it at school -- no doubt from those socialists that call themselves teachers.

The only thing we ever learned in school was that you can’t get away with dropping your pencil as an excuse to look up the teacher’s skirt more than once in any given term (which has proven useful on numerous occasions here in the shop).

It’s getting harder and harder to keep good staff, what with the Immigration Deportment turning up and dragging them screaming into a bus almost as soon as we’ve got them trained.

They’re such good workers too, and they don’t mind sleeping in the storeroom in lieu of wages. Maybe we need to open up a branch office at Villawood since that’s where the sign on the front of the bus always says it’s going.

We’ve just completed our application for drought relief and we’re expecting a $10,000 cheque any day now. There sure has been a drought around here. We haven’t sold a PC to a farmer for yonks, although we can’t see how it’s the worst drought for a hundred years. We’re fairly sure PCs haven’t been around quite that long. We appreciate the increased allowance for ‘off-farm assets’ too, although we did have to reduce the size of the server-farm to get under the threshold.

Those government assistance forms can be quite daunting though. Exactly why they expect us to know how much water is in the dams is quite ridiculous. Surely the dudes at Sydney Water would know the answer to that one? Perhaps it’s a trick question to find out if we keep up with current affairs. Anyway the techs made us stop hosing out the traded-in PCs long before the water restrictions came into force, so it’s not our fault if the dams are empty.

Here at Rabid Reseller we’re having multiple orgasms over the new dual-core CPUs from Intel. Yeah, sure they go faster so we can sell a bunch of upgrades but that isn’t what’s got us excited.

What we like about the new CPUs is their built-in backdoor operating system that the user can’t disable, which lets you get access over the internet to provide support to your clients.

Of course your definition of support might differ from the one we use here at Rabid. We like to explore every opportunity to help our clients and that includes helping them to buy their software from the correct outlet, which is this shop right here. Using the new remote access we can look at their hard drives from afar and nobble any applications that are not legitimate.

Illegitimate applications are primarily those that don’t have a matching sales order in our system. We can then download the correct application for them along with our modest invoice. This new chipset even lets us remotely reformat their hard drive -- that quickly gets the attention of clients with overdue invoices. You’ve just got to love all this new technology.

Gotta go, customers waiting!