Warlach’s World

Wow.

Well, it’s now the Monday after I cast my plea for help to the social media winds. You can read all about it in the previous post, and I’m going to writing here with the assumption that you know what I asked for, and how people responded. What I want to cover here is a look back at what I consider the key points.

Firstly, thank you Telstra. A lot of people I’ve spoken to since the blog post went up and the storm of crazy happened haven’t realized that they responded in almost under an hour. The hardware was mailed that afternoon, arrived the next day and worked perfectly. They even included a reply paid envelope for ease of return. There were a number of people at Telstra who helped, not simply limited to Kristen Boschma and the @Telstra team, but to all of you: thank you.

However, there were some further developments: firstly the funeral was pushed forward from Saturday and is actually going ahead today; secondly, during this whole process we were obviously also talking to the hospital and in the end they came through, putting together a team, ambulance, donating oxygen and equipment needed for Doug to actually attend the funeral.

While this does negate the need for the tech, obviously I’m just happy for the best case scenario to be achieved. Regardless of if the NextG cards from Telstra are used, they still demonstrate a fantastic gesture. The goal was to get Doug as involved in the funeral as possible, so I think this is definitely a win.

Some other important notes:

• Telstra wasn’t of course the first person to say that they could help, nor were they even the first to get me on the phone. That award goes to Maralyn Kastel from The Detail Devils. Maralyn immediately contacted some of her clients in Orange and started trying to help co-ordinate if any of them could help out with equipement and support. Thank you Maralyn, you’re good people
• While some of you may have seen this story get a write up on Mumbrella and on Trib’s blog, it also permeated the mainstream press. This resulted in two interesting outcomes. One, a paper that wanted photos and approached the situation with the sensitivity of  a brick to the head. The other is a bit stranger: reportedly the ABC contacted the hospital directly to offer to help with the hook up, having “seen something on Twitter.” This is coming to me second hand, and to be honest the hospital staff were, naturally, just thoroughly confused. Certainly nobody from the ABC contacted me, but
• This brings me to my next point, how to handle this: I think Telstra, and specifically their social media crew, have demonstrated an extremely high level of competence for how to handle delicate situations like this. The paper mentioned above? Terrible. They swanned in, clearly ignored the reality of the story, and topped it all off by wanting to invade the privacy of the family during a horrible time for nothing but personal gain. Had the story been, like the Mumbrella article, about the response, fine, happy to talk – but as I actually mentioned in the first post, I’m not offering sponsorship or media rights to a funeral. The ABC I can’t really comment on other than to say: next time, contact the person, in this case me, who you heard from first, don’t complicate the issue.
• Some people have also raised the question of whether this would be as successful if I didn’t have a large number of people following me on Twitter. It’s the same question that was raised after @OtherAndrew’s story earlier this year regarding gaining a flight to New Zealand after missing his plane due to surgery. While I am stoked about the response, and don’t think it reflects on Telstra’s or anyone else participation, the possibility of a two tier system based on how loud your voice is, bothers me. That is a whole blog post in itself though, and I’ll be putting up my thoughts on this in the next week.

Once again, thank you to everyone who helped by blogging, tweeting, commenting and sharing the word. You guys were great, and it’s certainly been a wild ride. Feel free to leave a comment or your thoughts on how this all happened below. Did I do the right thing? Did Telstra? What are the ramifications of stories like this?

Hello all. Many of the readers of this blog would know I can be fairly irreverent when it comes to most things, but for once I’m being completely sincere.

The other night my partner’s grandmother passed away in country New South Wales, Australia. She had been sick for some time but was still a powerful force in the family, the very definition of a matriarch. While the news was expected, she had been fighting cancer for years, the loss of such a strong figure has rocked the family.

Her husband, Doug, has also been on oxygen for emphysema for years, and was actually admitted to hospital during her final stay, where he still remains. It is unlikely he will leave again other than to go to a palliative care facility. Patricia and Doug have been together since they were teenagers, with both now in their 80’s, and it was some comfort that they were at least together when Pat passed the other night, but this brings me to the point of this post.

The funeral will most likely be held this weekend, Saturday, February 20th, and with Doug confined to hospital he will be unable to attend. It saddens me greatly that this would be the end of their story together, but it dawned on me that through technology and harnessing my social networks it doesn’t have to be.
Essentially my goal is to have Doug at least be able to watch a live feed of the funeral, and preferably to even be able to speak should he wish to.

It isn’t that this is that much of task, technically. The funeral will be held in the town of Orange while the hospital is located in the nearby town of Blayney. By my count, and from suggestions already made to be via Twitter, what I need is two laptops with webcams, one at each end, two Telstra NextG USB modems to provide the connection, and a service to stream the content, with most people on Twitter suggesting uStream or Skype.

The real thing I need is this equipment though. I don’t need it permanently, just for the weekend, but I am essentially throwing myself on the kindness of strangers to:

a)    trouble shoot the technical side
b)    loan me the hardware, data packages etc need to pull it off.

Please leave any comments below this post and share this with anyone you know who would be willing to help. If any companies are keen to assist I will of course be happy to give you a shout out across my network for being awesome (but please remember I’m not selling branding rights to a funeral.)

Only thing to say is, go team!

EDIT: OK, some of you may have seen the original tweet from the @Telstra account but I just got off the phone with Scott from that team who said they’re in the process of sending me two NextG Cards for free to support the streaming side of the equation. There are details in the posts below but this is an amazing result and I want to thank Kristen Boschma, Telstra’s Head of Online Communications and Social Media, and the whole @Telstra team.

We’ve also managed to secure two MacBook laptops for either end. The one in the hospital will have a Input Mic and headphones, both of which I have, and we’re just in the process of looking into a better camera input for the funeral end, given the fact it wont be a close up but a wider shot. I’ll also run some tests tonight on Skype Vs uStream and see which works best for our purposes.

Finally, thank you to everyone who made calls, sent emails, retweeted this post, commented and generally lead to this result. It’s crazy to think this started just a few hours before, and while it’s incredibly soppy, you lovely Internet people never fail to amaze me.

Will update this post if any more information comes through. I’ve noticed a number of people talking about blogging about this and if you want to make sure you’ve got the whole story I can be contacted at Warlach [at] Gmail [dot] com, or hit me up on Twitter at @Warlach.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a big mouth, and that I’m likely to shoot it off at the worst possible times. Often however, what really gets me in trouble is not when I’m trying to be offensive but just don’t think before I speak.

Last night I said something incredibly silly about the lovely Internet maven, Mab397 (pictured to the right). Mandi is one of the nicest people in Sydney’s digital scene, and so obviously I feel a bit bad about this turn of events: so I’m asking the Internet to help make Mandi forgive me.

EDIT: People keep asking me what I did - I accidentally made a derogatory comment about her age, and that’s all I will say.

Basically the goal is to get the hashtag #ImSorryMandi trending on Twitter, as a sign of my regret. You can attach the tag to your favourite apology songs on Blip.fm, link to photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube that best sum up forgiveness, write your own blog post about how Mandi should forgive me, it doesn’t matter, just make sure you use the #ImSorryMandi hashtag. Linking to this post at the same time will probably help clear up any confusion too (you can use the short URL http://bit.ly/ImSorryMandi)

For the less creative, I’ve even written a basic tweet that you can just copy and paste:

Everyone knows that @Warlach can be an idiot, but he really is sorry @Mab397. #ImSorryMandi http://bit.ly/ImSorryMandi

Thanks in advance everybody! Encourage your friends to help spread the word and hopefully Mandi will forgive me for being a rude twat.