From the Archive - The Chinese Embassy
‘From the Archive’ is a series of real-life anecdotes from my career. Because some stories just need telling!
I lived in Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea) for 5 years working as the Technology MD for the countries largest IT provider. One of the businesses under management was an ISP based on a Canadian Microwave infrastructure delivering high speeds. The business needed a lot of work, especially to get the books back into the black. On reviewing the outstanding invoices I discovered that the largest amount owing was from the Chinese Embassy, a whopping 4 years of overdue invoices. I promptly sent them an Invoice for the total amount with a polite letter.
A few days later I received an invitation from the Chinese Ambassadors Attache to come to the Embassy to discuss the matter. Naturally I accepted. The Chinese Embassy in Port Moresby, like most buildings, is surrounded by high brick walls with razor wire on top. The building itself was nothing short of magnificent, it looked like the Ming Dynasty had moved in, it had an equally palatial interior.
The discussion soon turned in to a potential negotiation with the Attache stating that they should not have to pay any outstandings, and if they did, they should be heavily discounted. He said he was happy to negotiate this with me. I then asked if the accounts had not been paid because the Embassy was short of funds? He took offence at that and assured me, that was not the case. “So you can pay them” I replied. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we parted with nothing settled.
I asked my techos what kind of service they were receiving. It was top notch, highest bandwidth, priority one setting. Fine, I said, “turn it off”. If you don’t pay your bills, you don’t get any service. So we turned it off. A day later a Minister calls complaining about the treatment of the the Chinese Embassy and insisted that we restore their service immediately. So of course, we did. I was really pissed off by now, no payments and they are still receiving the highest internet speeds we could deliver (100 mbs). One of the techos solved the problem, “lets throttle down their priority setting to the lowest level” (5 mbs). So we tested and set that and the internet response just crawled. You know, 5 or more seconds for a full screen to appear. Next day, the Minister calls again, I gave him the full picture of the situation and our problem, explained that the Embassy still had Internet, it was just a little slow. He seemed quite satisfied, had nothing else to say and we didn’t hear from him again.
Each time the Embassy called to complain, we simply said “we have a technical problem, we don’t have sufficient funds to fix it.”
