Well I'm moved in to my new apartment, but life is not by any means becoming routine or "normal". A week after moving in my boss Greg Marshall came down to NZ to talk with a potential new client who is looking to build a new 42.5m yacht. Though I have been working for Greg for almost 6 years now and often do a lot of work in preparing proposals for Greg to take into these meetings this was the closest I have ever been to the actual deal making, and I must say it's pretty exciting. With the work that we do, we are not just trying to sell a product, we are trying to sell a experience. When your product is another person's dream you have to get them excited about what you can deliver, not just prove that you can deliver it, it's quite an art and Greg really knows how to paint it. Because privacy is VERY important for many of our extremely wealthy I will refer to this client as simply PC and if you can find out any more from that I will be quite impressed as this person seems to be able to keep under the radar quite well. No one can even seem to tell me how he managed to acquire his wealth other than high level real-estate development. It's not important anyhow, what is important is that he is does have a lot of money and that he wants to spend some of it with us.
A couple of days after Greg arrived, Matt Delay, our systems engineer designer also came down to Auckland to spend a week here helping wrap up the PC deal and sort out a few issues with the current project. Greg being close friends with the Porters (owners of McMullen and Wing) has been staying with David Porter for the duration of his stay thus leaving the spare bedroom at my place for Matt. Little did I know that the day Matt arrived would be the most unfortunate day for anyone to pay me a visit. Early Friday Morning (5:00am) I head down to Auckland International Airport to collect my Canadian comrade, after a short stop at the apartment to clean up and drop off his stuff we head off to the ship yard. At 3:00 that same day I get a message from the property management informing me that there has been some minor flooding at my apartment and to contact them when I see the situation for myself. My first thought was "how do you get flooding on the 10th floor of an apartment building? When we arrived back at the apartment I found out, the fire sprinkler system had been set off my bathroom and was left on long enough to flood the entire apartment and spill out my front door and seep into the two floors below me as well. Walking down the hall towards my room I have to avoid a bustle of activity as workers set up fan driers and dehumidifiers in my apartment to dry it out. I quickly sourced out the building manager and asked him what happened, apparently the painter (who was supposed to come an paint my bathroom ceiling 2 weeks ago) came to finally do the job, he started by plastering the ceiling and then to expedite the process put 2 driers in the bathroom and shut the door. This however did not help dry the plaster because the 2 driers in the enclosed space quickly raised the room temperature beyond the 60 deg C that is takes to activate the fire sprinkler and instead of drying, the plaster got wetter along with the rest of my apartment.
Fortunately most of Matt's and my stuff was up off the ground and so little damage was done to any personal possessions however Matt and I found ourselves with no place to live for the next couple of days, while the apartment was drying out. After a bite of dinner we proceeded to try and find a hotel to stay at for the weekend, this proved to be difficult because not only was the NZ Ironman on that weekend but the Auckland Boat show was scheduled to start the following week and both brought in a large amount of clientele for the hospitality industry in Auckland. After about an hour of wandering around down town Auckland we finally found an available room at the Sky City Hotel, it wasn't the cheapest but it was available and that's what mattered.
