Category: General

I was just MSN’ed by an old friend who’s in the UK working and needed a hand with a SQL query.  Isn’t technology wonderful?  Who would have thought that I’d be problem solving, real time, across timezones and continents.

Anyway I managed to help him with his query (more about that later), and then we got to talking about marriage and how there’s a lot of our friends who are getting married now.  When out of the blue he came out with one of his usual wise thoughts on life, and here it is (scuze the format/spelling, but I lifted it straight out of the MSN conversation… it came split over a few messages so I put it together in “paragraphs” as I thought it should go):

in my opinion there’s tone of things that can corrupt and degrade a person in his adult life.  but for me… one of the few things / events that can truly change a person for the better…. is marriage.

it’s maybe the only comittment still, that gives u the platform to become what u never dreamed of.  i dunno why, but society sees marriage as the ‘end’

for me.. it’s just the groundwork …. one can really, honestly, tranform him/her self in marriage i reckon. there’s such union and support… and growth.  it’s almost impossible to stagnate….

how the world sees it the other way i don’t understand….

Wow… That’s Dharmesh for you… In the middle of a regular conversation, he drops in a few sentences you don’t want to forget. (and thanks to MSN :), I could save the conversation)

Yay (again), we might have found a place to stay that’s just around the corner from Christie’s work… in fact we might have found 2 places. 🙂 Christie went to look at a place in Chobe Sands this morning, and will look at a place in Riverlair this afternoon.

This must be a good day for me.  I think I’ve just found where to stay!  I was looking at PrivateProperty.co.za and I found a place just round the corner from where I want to stay, at just under what I’m wanting to pay (including levy and electricity).  Its about 3-5km from Christie’s work, and on the route I’d use to get to my work. AND its just being built, so we’d be living in a house that nobody else has lived in yet.  Anyway, we’re going to check it out over the weekend to see if its all I hope it will be. 🙂

Here is why I love Edgars:

1. Edgars have Edgars Club.
2. Edgars Club has various options.  One of which is “Lifestyle”
3. The “Lifestyle” option has “Legal Assistance”
4. “Legal Assistance” has given me advice on how to start getting my money out of the guy that owes me cash.

The first thing I need to do is to basically write a letter demanding payment. (Unfortunately my phone died as Tracey (the nice lady from the Legal assistance) was explaining to me what to do after that.)  I’ll try again on Monday to get more info, since 4pm on a Friday is really not the best time to be doing this.  Anyway, the tone that Tracey was using when basically dictating the letter to me was very official and quite intimidating.  So maybe this will help speed things up.

On another side, I gather that other people haven’t been paid by him either which is a bit worrying. Anyway, hopefully this will serve as a lesson to anyone who reads it to make sure that you’re incredibly official with any business you do with “friends of friends”.  Otherwise you might end up in a sticky situation like where I am at the moment.

Weddings are not simple things to organise.  Right now mine is sucking up all my free time. (And I’m not even that involved in the organisation)  For the next few weeks my saturdays are pretty much fully booked, and I need to be looking for a place to stay.  Hence the need for a “gopher”, who could run around looking for places for Christie and me.

In the same vein, I could really use a good “thug” to go get some money I’m owed from a guy I did some after hours work for a while ago.  I’m seriously wanting to find out exactly what I’m legally required to do to ensure that he has “read and accepted” the invoice.  Unfortunately as he’s a friend of a friend I didn’t get him to sign the quotes I gave him.  In any case, he’d often call me at odd times to ask me to fix something on one of his websites (e.g. he’d call at 6pm and ask if I could fix a site that evening), so I’d quote him verbally over the phone he’d accept it, I’d do the work and send him a bill over e-mail.  I was waiting for one final job to be complete before I started to ask him to start paying for the previous jobs. 

That job was cancelled in Sept/Nov last year, so I started asking him what he required before he would pay me.  All I had to do was send him an invoice.  So I did (via e-mail).  Then that invoice was not in a format he wanted, so I split it into an invoice per client of his that I’d worked on. (previously I gave him one invoice with all the client’s details together)  That was probably around the begining of November. 

In December he stopped returning my calls, e-mails and SMS’s (in fact his Company’s phone number was redirected to a switched off cellphone number (I got the “The subscriber you have dialed is not available at present.  Please try again later” message that Vodacom/MTN use when a subscriber doesn’t have voicemail setup and their phone is out of reach)).  In January I finally got hold of him and he said that he’d had some “personal problems” and couldn’t handle talking to clients, but he’d pay me at the end of the week.  That didn’t happen.  Then he started ignoring my calls again.  I’m calling him on average about 3 times a day, and calling his office to leave messages about 3 times a day (hoping that the sheer annoyance factor will get him to respond to me).

But today I can tell that he’s now annoyed his staff, in their tone they gave away that they weren’t very happy with him (and in what they said, didn’t say, and asked me not to repeat).  So I’m guessing things are going downhill with his company.  Currently he owes me R4000, which I’m not very keen to lose.  Hence my desire for a thug who could go over there and intimidate him into paying.  Not that I’d want to cause him any harm, but I’d just like him to have some pressure put on him in some way. 

But since I’m not that kind of person, I think I’d rather see what I can do legally.  Anyone got any suggestions?