The Dog Ate My Passport

For the last two days I’ve been pacing up and down my room trying to think up the mother of all excuses. I was going to have to explain to AffiliateFuture that I had to drop out at the last minute in going with them to the Caribbean on this year’s annual affiliate getaway they had kindly invited me to. The reason was because my new passport hadn’t arrived, but I thought they may not believe that, so I had settled upon telling J Lil that my chihuahua had chewed the passport while I was intensely focusing on adding deeplinks from an AffiliateFuture merchant to my website.

However, I am now sitting here eating a bounty and sipping Lilt (well, it’s really Diet Coke, but gimme some leeway). Why, I hear you ask? Because just a few hours ago a courier brought my passport and hence… I will be able to alight on flight VS037 at 10:00 on Sunday morning to Barbados!

I am not your average affiliate or Affiliate Manager who seem to spend as much time jetting between continents as in their offices. While I probably go more to the airport than anybody in the industry, because I have to have regular meetings with our email marketing and affiliate management client Purple Parking at Heathrow, I’ve been so busy building our and our clients’ businesses that I’ve not had the opportunity to go abroad for over five years (hence not having the passport).

And until a few hours ago it seemed like I was going to have to remain in sunny England for a while longer because, with only about 40 hours for the flight to take off, my passport still hadn’t arrived.

I’m not going to express my views about the British Passport Office, but I kept ringing and emailing them every two hours for days and days and they’d promise me delivery would be “today” but the passport would never arrive. Hence the reason for bringing my (non-existent) dog in to the fray to save my skin and explain to AF why I would not be on the flight!

But here is me now:

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The next 36 hours are going to be the busiest of my life, as I both pack my bags and complete an avalanche of work, but it’ll be worth it in the end. There are fifty smashing people going and I’m looking forward to snuggling on the beach with Marilyn and sipping a cool cranberry juice … it’s not only my first trip abroad in five years but my first holiday per se in that time, so it’ll be good to recharge the batteries.

I’d best dash as lots to do, but a heartfelt thank you to everybody who pressured persuaded me to go, including all my colleagues at Azam and the staff at AffiliateFuture; I had originally decided to turn down the ticket, as I had last year, because I had too much to do, but I eventually conceded to everyone’s relentless encouragement! Were it not for you wonderful folk it may have been another half a decade ’til I got to tear myself away from my work.

And a special thank you to my good friend, the inimitable Mark Smith for signing my passport application and photos half way through the A4U Awards ceremony a few weeks back!

After negotiations more arduous than those between the USSR and USA at the height of the cold war AffiliateFuture have agreed to allow me to work three hours a day in the internet cafe near the hotel, so if anybody does need to contact me I will be answering my emails.

Though, if you are contacting me about those 2010-2013 cashback revenue projections I promised you, my dog ate them.

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