Polite inquiries were answered with the news that the matter had been referred to Head Office, and apparently the letter made its way up and down Education House while the implications of the issues it raised were kicked around.
When the response eventually arrived I’d almost given up on the idea, and if the letter had contained a flat No I would probably have accepted that without question. What arrived on my doorstep was a highly conditional Yes and in view of the amount of time and effort that others had expended to bring things to that point I felt I was obliged to go ahead.
The business, however, never really got off the ground.
The school was looking at installing a computer laboratory, and I was obviously going to be putting in a quote to supply hardware and software. Granty and I worked through the details, I put in the quote and sat back to wait, only to discover that I’d been beaten by someone from the Brisbane office of the same company that I represented!
And he’d undercut me using an outdated price list, so while I missed about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of business Brisbane actually incurred a loss on the deal. Strange. To rub a bit of salt into the wound, as the resident Apple enthusiast I had to do most of the set up and administrative stuff associated with establishing the computer lab.
While I still managed to sell a bit of software to the school, and a couple of computers to various friends, acquaintances and total strangers, the business never really got off the ground, and when I was forced to spend the latter part of 1996 off work due to depression-related issues that was, more or less, that...
That unsuccessful business venture did, on the other hand, put a couple of significant factors into place.
For a start it wasn’t appropriate to conduct my business from Government teacher accommodation, so I moved into the flat I referred to as The Full 360 and began the process that led to the construction of the Little House of Concrete.
Secondly, one of the selling points behind the computer business was this newfangled thing called the Internet, as part of setting up the business I bought a new computer and a modem and started to investigate the on-line world.