18 January 2011
I heard today from Proctor and Gamble, the first of the three firms to whom I submitted my ‘Mitt Wipe. I must say the gentleman concerned, David Hull, has been very generous in the amount of time that he has dedicated to considering this product.
In the event he had to decline to proceed with the idea and in doing so pointed out that P & G had tried to develop something similar in the past but ‘concluded that no business opportunity sufficient to meet our criteria was forthcoming.’ However, David did not leave the matter there, but introduced me to a company in Cincinnati to whom they have referred similar ideas in the past who might possibly be interested in pursuing the idea. I think that was very generous of him and will certainly follow it up.
Talking of follow-ups I spoke this morning to the lady to whom I was referred concerning the WendyLett sliding sheets. She, in turn, put me in touch with the distributors, Nordic Care Services in Canterbury. I spoke to a very nice gentleman called Mahesh and explained my problem and also referred him to my blog and the comments I’ve been making about these products over the last day or two. As a result, he sent me a fantastic presentation of the use of these sliding sheet, both manual and video, which I found extremely helpful. I believe they may be prepared to let me try out these products and then report on the results in my blog. However, the boss who can make this decision is away until the weekend and in the meantime I shall invite, Lynn, my OT to kindly drop in and discuss with me which specific products we should ask for.
It was one of those busy days with people coming and going. First of all Peter, our gardener came to see me early this morning. I hadn’t seen him since I stopped going across the lawn to my office, and I think he was rather concerned to see that I was okay. Peter is like one of the family having worked for us for over 30 years and is genuinely interested in our well-being. Then Jane and Richard, vet and farrier, came to attend to the donkey, Mouse, who either has laminitis or touch of rheumatism, or possibly both. I don’t think there’s much to choose between the two of us in the way we shuffle along! They certainly gave her a good going over having sedated her to do her feet, they then filed her teeth and, in doing so, concluded that she is probably over 40 years. They also tried to administer some anti-inflammatory medicine which Mouse was not interested in taking.
Then came Chris Wix, our electrician, to try to sort out why almost every time we switch on the office equipment in the morning our trip switch is thrown, something to do with surge I think. As a result, I think we are going to change our Belcon  eight-way adapters to ones without surge control. It was these adapters which saved our equipment, a year or so ago, when the mains electricity surged and blew  a lot of equipment in the area. I remember we were off for 28 hours and many of our neighbours had to have new televisions, washing machines etc. All paid for by the electricity board as it was clearly their error. We were lucky the only thing that went with us was my office fax/telephone. We were also expecting a further visit from the telephone people, who came yesterday to try to sort out why both our main telephones were out of order. The engineer managed to partially resolve the problem and promised to return either today or tomorrow. What an exciting life we lead! Never a dull moment.