Ireland had a nice Summer. All things considered we were blessed by long hours of sunshine. But this is not the reason why I neglected the blog, it was because we moved once again.
The last time we had to move was in the first week of December and for over two weeks we had no telephone connection which means that we could not process credit card payments. But worse, it was in DECEMBER which for a wine merchant, is the best trading month. Needless to say that our December was somehow below par and it did not need an in depth analysis to find the reason why. The new premises were somewhat of a shock too as the insulation proved to be nonexistent and the Winter cold. In January we had a burst water pipe and temperatures as low as 2 C in the office. Now, I know that this is not great to store wine but it is even worse to sit at a computer and try to work. The only way out was to warm up in the steam room of the local hotel and then transfer the office to my private home. All this was not great for business either and I immediately started looking for an alternative. It was July when we finally found a place almost in the centre of Kilkenny.
I will not go through the whole move step by step suffice to say that this time the transfer of the phone line with broadband took two and a half months. 2 1/2 months. I am glad we have mobile phones and wireless broad bands these days for otherwise I would have been cut off from the rest of the world. But of course we could not process any credit card payments and were told that we could not keep our phone number even though we only moved a few roads closer to town. This is a country in a deep recession and it is still not possible to process moving requests faster. The only consolation is that finally things are in place and it looks like we will be ready for this Christmas season.
