After listening to the Telstra That Business Show on the Nights with Steve Price show on Radio 2GB (and on over 50 stations across Australia), I wanted to nominate a business, but couldn't.
Ok, so if you want to nominate a business for Telstra's annual Business Awards, here's a tip – never leave it to the last minute.
The awards nomination process opened towards the end of January 2018, as covered by iTWire here.
As a happy listener of Price on most evenings, and enjoying the vast majority of the segments and shows within the show, I often listen to the Telstra That Business Show which airs on Wednesday nights.
{loadposition alex08}I even rang the show once when Steve and the presenters were wondering if anyone had delivered a pizza by drone yet, and I was able to call and relate the story about Domino's Pizza claiming to be first in the world to deliver a pizza in 2016, a claim that Russian pizza company Dodo Pizza contested, as it had made a delivery of pizza by drone in 2014.
I don't want to drone on about it, but you can read the series of articles on the topic here.
So, as I was listening tonight, Steve and the Telstra hosts were reminding the nearly nationwide audience that tonight was the last chance to nominate any business, including your own, for the Telstra Small Business Awards, and that you had until up to midnight to do it.
I was driving from Sydney to Canberra at the time, and only arrived about 90 minutes before the midnight deadline – indeed, it is now 11.03pm on Wednesday 28, March, with 57 minutes to go.
I decided I would nominate a friend's business, and discovered that upon going to the Telstra Business Awards website, I was greeted by the messages "Cannot contact reCAPTCHA. Check your connections and try again."
You can see screenshots of the reCAPTCHA problem below.
I tried different browsers, I tried connecting via my wired connection, I tried wirelessly, I tried on my phone on 4G, but the same message appeared.
So, I cannot nominate the business in question at the last minute, because at the last minute, Telstra's access to the reCAPTCHA system has crashed.
I tried calling the 1800 AWARDS number, but the Telstra message said the service was closed, which is a shame. It might have been a good idea for Telstra to have people in a call centre somewhere on the planet able to help people with last minute entries.
However, as previously noted, don't leave entering to the last minute!
It's just a shame that the Telstra That Business Show promoted the competition tonight and urged people to enter before the midnight deadline, which leads me to wonder how many businesses weren't able to enter.
Enter early! A great and simple lesson for us all.
