Despite a power outage that affected some 200,000 Melbourne (and some other areas of Victoria) homes and businesses, our power supply here at home was unaffected.

Mel and I were out at our nearby 7-Eleven getting a cold slurpee (to beat the 40-degree heat) when the power went off in the store — about 600 metres from home.

I managed to get the very last slurpee of the afternoon — the next guy in the queue unfortunately missed out because of the lack of power.

But thankfully our street’s power supply must be separated from our neighbouring Brunswick West area by the freeway/Citylink, as power was still on at our home office just a couple of minutes away. Houses 150m away to our east had no power. But also, in other directions, power was out in neighbouring Essendon, and Glenroy to the north.

Our upstairs office would be most unbearable without cooling on a 40-degree day: and with stage 3 water restrictions, we can’t just turn on the hose and create our own splash-cooling fun out on the lawn.

And there’s four more hot days on the way. Boy do I look forward to the cooler weather arriving!

On a recent flight I saved the courtesy sickness bag (vomit bag?) from the seat pocket to take advantage of the film offer printed on it (undoubtedly supplied by the film processing company gratis).

At home, I gathered together all of my old rolls of unprocessed film (I managed to find 18 of them!), wrote up the order on the bag, popped them in and sent them off for development and processing — prints and CDs (at a great price).

All went fine — I received an email from the company giving me a weblink to my shots, so I’d browsed through all 18 albums online before the parcel even arrived. Some old pics, some going back about 7 or 8 years! About time they were all processed — ah, the days of non-digital cameras.

As an added “benefit” of course, I became part of that compay’s mailing list. Nothing wrong with that of course, good marketing in action. However, the person entering my data into the system has reversed my first and last names, so that I get everything from them addressed “Mr Kennedy Dean” instead of “Mr Dean Kennedy.”

And I received some direct mail today from Time magazine also addressed to “Mr Kennedy Dean” — “Dear Mr Dean” as the salutation — at least I know what mailing list they purchased!

The impact though may affect the response to the mailing. Whilst I may think most people don’t care all that much, it definitely has a feeling of being less personal than normal, as I know it is wrong — like $99 vs $100 — the psychological impact is far greater than the physical one. Who’s Mr Dean? It’s certainly not me. That kind of influence spoils the point of the offer.

Recently we did a mailout for a client with some 1,600 addressees — from a database they’d acquired during the purchase of an existing competing business. However, that database had quite a few dozen basic errors — suburb names wrong, postcodes wrong for the suburb (which we found and fixed) — but again, it could easily be interpreted as a lack of professionalism, and thus affect the response?

Well, that’s my take on data accuracy — it may not fit everyone’s personality type, but it certainly fits mine — which might be 25 percent or more of your database. Something to watch out for in direct mail, especially your own list!