Secession storage meltdown
Late January I drove out to where our all our stuff has been stored to grab what's left of our stock. The storage facility is a good hours drive from the east side of Melbourne which makes it quite cheap. Around AUD$110/month.
Having found the place I was surprised to find that everything was stored in a shipping container. It was jam packed with studio equipment, master tapes and videos, office materials, furniture, a refrigerator and the best wok this side of Kuching... The container idea was just fine, the fact that it was out in the car park under the blazing sun wasn't! They'd run out of room inside the warehouse!
As I was coming to terms with the horror of heat and magnetic tape our storage provider discovered the key to the container didn't work. It had my name on it, but it was the wrong key. The only way in? Guess... an oxyacetylene torch! And this was going to take another day or so to organise!
I was stunned! Not only couldn't I get in, the heat would've destroyed all our DAT masters, or damaged them at best! And my precious old synthesizers will have fried their circuit boards... and on top of that, I was leaving the country the following evening!
I left quite debilitated, some what depressed and anxious... worse still I had no stock to take with me nor any to fill outstanding orders!
On top of all that I'd planned to leave with fresh copies of our latest release, but we had some last minute changes to make to the artwork to meet our printers specifications. So no new stock for stores in South Africa and festival organisers, no old stock for our customers and a blight on the start of Secession's 10 year!
So now I'm sitting in an office I'm sharing in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, knowing that it won't be till mid-late March before any of this will be sorted. In the meantime, I'm told the Melbourne summer has sustained the ferocity in which it had commenced in.
