If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog you’ll have heard me mention Alex Jeffreys.

He was my first real mentor and very good he was too.

Anyway, I have a sort of love/hate relationship with him because as much as I like and respect him, things always seem to go wrong for me whenever he’s involved.

It’s not his fault of course, it’s clearly me, but it does seem strange.

He’s currently on his fourth MarketingWithAlex coaching course,  and I was on the first one.

Undoubtedly he’s got it nailed now because the webinars don’t last anywhere near as long as they did when I was propping my eyelids open and  trying to keep awake for the end of the weekly training calls.  I think the record was about six hours, and I remember my son used to be getting up just as I was going to bed.

Alex certainly was enthusiastic, so during that time I felt  very, very tired.

Last year I went to his second workshop over in Las Vegas and had a great time, met a lot of nice people and learned a lot, BUT on the way home, tired and exhausted, I did a backward somersault down the “up” escalator  at King’s Cross railway station and ended up in hospital.  I cut my leg, knocked myself out and my head has never been the same since!

Anyway, at that workshop, I decided I’d trymy hand at interviewing people in the hope of inspiring others to try to create a different life for themselves if they wanted to, and about a year ago Alex kindly agreed to be one of my interviewees. 

My “interviews” are more like friendly chats.  I start them off with an introduction, ask a few relevant questions and we see where the conversation takes us.

It’s all very comfortable and fun.

I interview people over Skype using Pamela and they usually come out okay, providing the recording system works… okay – as long as I press the red button!

The first time I interviewed Alex, I didn’t.  We had a test call, which was great, began our real call and that was great, BUT I then realised it wasn’t being recorded so we had to stop.

Pamela does this funny thing  on my machine where you can’t record straight away after you’ve stopped recording.  You have to wait until the previous recording has landed in the call log and then press the record button again.
 
Clearly I was too fast off the mark and it didn’t work, but fortunately, we were able to do it again.  It  wasn’t the same though.
 
It was good and you can listen to that one here, but the one that got away had been phenomenal.

Anyway,yesterday, I thought I’d catch up with Alex again and see what he’d been up to over the past year and see  if he had any more nuggets of marketing wisdom to offer.

I set up Skype, did a test call with Pamela and the Skype testing call service, and it was fine.  Then about 10 minutes before I was due to actually start recording I got a message saying there was an update to download for Skype so I did it and LOST Pamela.   Not  only did she disappear from my tools option in Skype but she left my computer altogether.

Even bringing up a list of all my programs and stuff didn’t produce her and you can’t miss the icon because it’s bright pink.

Anyway, I knew Alex was pushed for time so I explained I’d record using Audacity, but Alex said the sound wasn’t very good and spent some time setting me up on one of the GoTo sites so we could record that way.
 
It took quite a bit of his precious time, but eventually we got it sorted.  I pressed record and we began what was by then going to be a much shorter than planned interview because of the time already wasted.

It went well, really well , and at the end of the call I asked Alex how to get the recording.  He explained and then rushed off to his meeting – (very late and for that I apologise to whoever it was he was scheduled to be with).

Sure enough, the recording rendered and eventually ended up just where it was supposed to.

“Great” I thought, but then I listened to it and realised with horror, it was only 10 minutes in length.  We’d chatted for well over an hour!

Yikes!

So, what had happened?

 I hadn’t touched anything during our conversation..

except…

you know how your screen can go black sometimes if you don’t press any keys for a while?  Well that had happened during our call, so I’d just touched  the mouse so I could see the screen again.

I suspect, (although I can’t say for certain), as the last thing I’d done before the screen went black was press Record on the GoTo screen, my pointer was still on the Record button, and when I pressed the mouse to see the screen again, it stopped the recording.

I’ll never know, but something happened, and that sounds logical.

Fortunately, I’d kept Audacity running the whole time so I did manage to capture our chat,  but the moral of this story is …

… when you’re sitting at your computer, be careful where you point your mouse!

Jean

Incase you’re interested I will be releasing this latest interview and several of my others  together  with their transcriptions fairly soon.