Fun distractions
My friend David made mention of a game called Waving Hands, which is a reproduction (with permission) of the rules from Richard A. Bartle's Spellbinder game; a game that is almost as old as I am.

Upon David's recommendation, I looked up the rules and played a few face-to-face games last weekend with David, Dan, Tomoko, Jacinta and myself. The game is incredibly fun, and that it's possible to play with only pen, paper, and rules makes it even moreso.

One of the most appealing features of the game is that it's primarily a battle of wits. You usually have complete information as to what your opponent is doing (as you would in chess or diplomacy), so a lot of time is spent trying to determine their intentions, and trying to mask your own. Some of the bluffing elements are superb.

I've been taking part on one of the online servers, where I have the imaginative name of pjf. Some of the rules are slightly different, but the gameplay is essentially the same.

Work - The last busy week
This week is busy. Public holiday on Monday, working with a client on Tuesday, catch-up today, and teaching interstate on Thursday and Friday. Luckily, things look much quieter after this week. Sure, there's a couple of trips to Sydney, the whole end of financial year paperwork, and a big project deadline. But that's nothing compared to have things have been recently. I'm looking forward to relaxing a little.

Customer Service Strangeness
Our regular printers, who have up until now been lovely people with excellent customer management skills, have gone all weird. They have an odd pricing scheme for printing, $0.08 per page for amounts 500-1000, and $0.06 per page for 1000+. It doesn't take much arithmatic to figure out that if you're printing more than 750 pages, then it's cheaper to be printing exactly 1000. In fact, printing 1000 pages is almost $20 cheaper than printing 999. Obviously hell-levels exist in the real world of business as well as in games.

Anyway, up until now we had a good working relationship. If I submitted a job that was between 750-1000 sheets, I informed them that I was expecting to pay a flat $60 for the printing. If it made them feel better, they could print up to 250 blank sheets and give them to me at the end, but there was no requirement to do so. As far as I was concerned, I'm saving them time and money by not "filling out" the job with extra work that would cost them paper, toner and time. They never gave me the extra blank sheets, and I never complained. All was happy, and they'd give me pens and chocolates and stuff to keep me coming back.

Recently, their manager has started to raise objections to this practice, wanting to charge the full $0.08 per page for amounts 750-1000, since that's "playing by the rules". I'm at a complete loss as to how this actually benefits his business. It certainly doesn't make me feel like a valued customer, and at the best I'm going to pad jobs with books (I've got all of Project Gutenberg to get through), manuals, articles, and other useful reading material that will increase his cost per job, but bring me up to the 1000 page sweet-spot. At the worst I'm going to take my business elsewhere, as there are plenty of printers in the area, and they all have the same (or better) prices as where I'm going now.

Right now I'm giving the manager the benefit of the doubt. It is the end of financial year, everyone is busy, and everyone has bad days/weeks. I've got two weeks before I need another printing job done, and in that time I'll either have everything cleared up with these printers, or new ones found and tested.