The next sponsor I need to talk about is Motorola, the electronics manufacturer. Incidentally, this blog post ties in with the China Mobile cell phone bill blog post. In order to be granted the status of sponsor and all of the benefits that accompany it, Motorola gave the USA Pavilion several cell phones to use in our day to day and work tasks; this is a huge relief to many of the employees who must use their personal cell phones to entertain delegations from various sponsors, deliveries from suppliers, solve logistics problems, communicate with coworkers, etc. Not only can this lead to very expensive China Mobile bills, but it can also be very taxing on your cell phone battery and loss of privacy on your personal phone. The solution for this is to assign Motorola-donated cell phones to various staff members and allow them to use company-funded cell phone numbers from China Mobile. The spreadsheets with lists of phones received, their serial numbers, and partial lists of those they were assigned to were given to me by Jake; from that point, I researched the market value of each of the donated phones on various web sites such as Motorola.com. Some of them were so obsolete that the Motorola site no longer sold them, so I had to explore other sites like Amazon.com and Google.com; I also did not know whether I was supposed to find the highest or lowest prices, but therein lies the conflict of interest: Motorola wants to donate a large dollar amount, but we have to keep them honest by looking around.
The next problem I encountered was that some of the phones were not being used for various reasons: some were never functional, some had batteries that were faulty, some were just too large and obsolete to be practical, and others were just unused because people don't want to have multiple phones in their pockets. I had to track down all of these phones to discover who was using them, if they had been transferred to other people, lost, returned for whatever reason, or still working well. I am the manager of the Motorola phone inventory spreadsheet, as well as the one person who has complete knowledge now of which phones are actually in my possession. It will be this way until my contact at Motorola sends me the complete list of what they have donated to us thus far; this calls into question the issue of business ethics! What happens when a person who is leaving your business in less than 2 weeks has the most complete knowledge of your inventory? A less ethical person might take advantage of that situation, but everyone who knows me knows that I care about acquiring things in a legal and honest way.
Next in VIK series: Walmart. It's a doozy.
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