“Brought to you by NTES”
You can hear it, can’t you? For the last five, the Blood & Thunder Podcast and the TRK teamsheets (the ones without the mistakes) have been brought to you by NTES.
You hear it so often that it can sort of blend into the background noise a bit, but it shouldn’t. NTES have helped me keep the show on the road with their sponsorship, and they are a core part of what I do on Three Red Kings for the last half a decade.
Look at their site. The very first thing you see is “Rely on us to solve IT”, and there’s nothing so accurate. I’ve been in their office in Castletroy to pick up some bottle openers (more on those later), and when I tell you that it was like walking into a beehive, it’s true. I’ve been in a lot of offices. I’ve been in a lot of places that claim to be busy. As I went up the lift — excellent lighting in there, by the way — I was wondering what it would be like inside. I’d been sponsored by NTES for four years at that point, and I knew what they did based on their website, but not how they did it.
You expect a bit of dossing in every office, I’ve been in enough and been that dosser myself, but when I got into the foyer, and then into their main hub, all I could see was people dug into their work. Three or four people were on the phone with a customer, sorting issues remotely. Two guys were talking openly about a system they had to optimise that day, and it sounded so technical to me, a local dumbass, that they might as well have been Data from Star Trek talking about changing the resonance of a deflector shield to repel tachyon particles. The meeting rooms were full of people looking at whiteboards and animatedly discussing one thing or another.
It was a Thursday afternoon. The perfect time to be sitting around and taking it handy, but every single person I saw was locked in. I got my box of bottle openers and left pretty quickly because they were busy. No scope for chit-chat about the weather (pretty good that day) or Munster (pretty ok at that point) or anything else, because I was very aware that everyone there was foot to the floor, jobs to do, issues to fix, jobs to do.
I sat in my car afterwards, about to record an Instagram reel about fellas running into each other with a ball, and laughed to myself. Compared to the people in that building — I was recording it in the car park — I was barely working at all.
***
Flashforward to eight weeks ago, and I discovered that my system here had been compromised. There were random articles on my site advertising Russian gambling sites. Core files from my server had been deleted. It was a nightmare. I tried contacting support with my host, and kept hitting a brick wall. Someone would be with me shortly, I kept being told, but they weren’t.
I thought back to that day in the NTES office. If I had a problem with my server or IT and I called NTES, I know for a fact it would be on the way to being sorted after two rings — because I only ever heard two rings when I was in the office — and mostly sorted by the time I got off the phone. That’s the thing. They know what they’re doing. They are obsessed with their clients and their work. And they are the best at what they do.
I sat at the same kitchen table I’m sitting at now, and wished that the place I called earlier that morning had been NTES, because now I was on my own with this incomprehensible technical problem. Nobody was answering my call. There weren’t lads hothousing how to fix it. There was nobody in a meeting fixing a problem before it ever started.
If you use NTES, you need never worry about an IT problem ever again because they fix problems before they happen, and annihilate any problems that show up on those magical boxes full of crushed rock and lightning as they’re in action.
I’ve seen them do it.
When you need them, before you need them, after you need them; you can rely on NTES.
This year, they’ll be sponsoring the Blood & Thunder Podcast, the teamsheets and the Red Eye.
