G'day all
Each year we are on the road for 6 to 8 months travelling inland NSW & QLD offering several modified college photography courses to towns with no TAFE or Adult-Ed colleges, & villages & cattle stations etc. Over this period we'll offer about 2-dozen photo workshops of one sort or another.
During these months we need resupplying for many consumables [funnily enough]. We buy as much as we can along the way as we pass thru larger towns, but often it needs to come from 'the big smoke'. Last week I had an interesting phone call from a Sydney place with whom we had placed an internet order
The delivery address we supplied was "for over-the-counter collection, Post Office Springsure, Qld 4722"
This is fairly common when we're on-the-road ... we look to where we'll be in 2-3 weeks time & ask for the stuff to be delivered ahead of our arrival
The conversation went ...
shop - Mr Jones, we cannot deliver to a post office - our courier needs a street address
phil -- Oh- that's going to be a problem - why can't you deliver to a post office ... other shops do?
shop - it's shop policy ... the courier we use only delivers to an address
phil -- Oh- that's still a problem. Okay then let me give you the address we'll be at next week
phil -- "ALBENI cattle station, Salvatore Rosa Road, 175km west of Springsure QLD"
phil -- will that do? Please ask your supervisor if s/he will authorise the courier to do a 350km round journey to deliver this item
shop- I'm not sure - I'll ask the supervisor
shop- the supervisor says that we'll deliver to the post office for you to collect
phil-- good, thankyou [etc etc]
The message I want to pass here is that -if- you are working in a city business and supplying country people with goods, please remember that this is a big country with long distances and NO PHONE COVERAGE for huge areas of countryside
Services & deliveries out here are very, very different from the city
If you look at a map of Qld, Springsure is inland of Brisbane - it's about 800km westwards ~ nowhere really "outback" as we're still under 1000km from Brisbane
The 275km between Springsure & Tambo has Telstra coverage for 15km west of Springsure and 10km east of Tambo and nothing in between. Albeni cattle station where I am at now has satellite internet coverage - slow as slow as slow
A forum post including a photo takes 90 seconds to display the photo
Apart from the above - travelling the 'outback' is great and we get to go to some great places and meet lots of lovely people on their farms and stuff like that
See you later ...
Regards, Phil