Not so sure this morning actually.

I had to go into the office for a meeting with a techy. The office is miles over the Yorkshire moors from my house, and this photo was taken as I drove over at 9.30am.

Mist, a bit of snow (I apologise in advance to any Canadians reading this who know what REAL snow is) and fog made it very interesting, not to mention sheep with no road sense.

I actually had to use the four wheel drive option on the car for once.

I’d normally work from home on a manky day like this but as I said I had a pretty important meeting so I set off.

 And 5 minutes ago I got a call from said techy who informed me he’d been ‘out on the beer’ last night and wasn’t in any fit state to make our meeting. 

 At least he trusts me enough to tell me the truth, but I must have pink buttons up the back of my head in some people’s opinion.

So Mr Techy – if you’re reading this – you’re fired!

And sometimes it seems as though real, face to face business has let itself go a little.

As marketers are we spoilt by being able to interact with people at any hour and get pretty responsive replies?

When I outsource work it’ s rarely from someone I’ve actually met – purely because you can’t rely on the most skilled people living within a couple of hundred miles of where you’re based. So I outsource work to people in the US, India, Australia, the Far East and a dozen other places I have to look up on a map.

But I get great work done.

If I had to reply on people with a similar accent to mine I wouldn’t have anywhere near the skills available to me (actually in some parts of Yorkshire they have one brain cell per village that’s loaned out in turn) that I need to run an online business.

And while there is a certain downside to outsourcing using email communication it also means that outsource workers have to be reliable and competant, because if they’re not, It takes less than a day to find someone who is.

So think about that the next time you go into your local shop and get growled at by some grumpy sales assistant who’s only slightly more articulate than the contents of the deli counter.

Whatever part of the world you’re in, the gene pool is a lot shallower than the whole of the internet combined.

Use the resources on the net – and this is my public apology for not using a techy from elance or rentacoder. Next techy I work with, will have a strange accent, a funny sounding name and a different flag on his postage stamp.

And it’ll be bloody great! 🙂

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