I just love the new fully automated check in systems at the airport- NOT. There is nothing like that completely impersonal service. If you want to go to a counter with a human being, you are interrogated by some Airline Nazi whose sole purpose is to prevent you from having any form of pleasant human contact. But what really bugs me is excess baggage.

If my luggage is 1KG over my allocated allowance I have to pay excess baggage now. Well I think that if airlines are going to be this picky, I should get a discount on my ticket when my luggage comes in under weight. In fact I think we should have a “luggage trading scheme” where you accrue credits for those trips where you travel underweight and debits when you go over weight. Clearly there would need to be limits but I am sure we could work it out.

Just because your airfares are cheap it doesn’t mean you have to be cheap!

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I was staying at a hotel in Western Sydney recently and this hotel was next to a group of take away food outlets and a big car park. Getting up early to go to my presentation I was amazed at the state of the car park surrounding these fast food franchises – it was disgusting.

People had eaten their food in their cars and when finished, simply thrown their rubbish out the window. Now this wasn’t one or two cars – it looked like every car that was in the car park (and this is hundreds of cars) did the same thing.

I had a chat to a poor old fella who was cleaning it up, and he said “you should come back on a Sunday morning – it looks like a rubbish tip”. And what makes the whole thing so much worse, is that there are rubbish bins everywhere.

Wow, what kind of attitude to these folks have? I wonder if their homes look like rubbish tips.

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I just checked my voice mail messages, 17 in total. Out of the 17, 12 of them rattled off their names and contact details so fast, I couldn’t decipher them. This seems to be increasingly common, particularly people calling from overseas!

So my advice is simple – if you want people to return your calls, talk slowly, make sure you leave your name (slowly), the name of your company (slowly), your telephone number (slowly) and then repeat your telephone number (slowly).

OK, I feel better now. But to those people who seem to struggle to get people to return their calls – perhaps the problem is the message your are leaving!

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Welcome to the first of my “WHAT REALLY BUGS ME?” blog postings – decided it was time to speak out and become more vocal about the issues that bug me. Today’s what really bugs me is the CEO of GoDaddy’s video of him shooting an elephant. Bob Parson has a reputation for being a tough character and I get the whole need to cull animals, as hard as it is to watch, but to post it on your own blog under the guise of saving the planet is a bit rich.

The fact that the hunt is filmed, obviously with the intention of showing others, says it is much more about an ego kill than anything else, especially when you add the “I just killed this big elephant that I am standing in front of photo”. Culling should be done with respect and integrity. Neither of which are shown here. The brand GoDaddy will suffer a lot from this – and rightly so.

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