'Solar activity' interrupts John Pluthero's flow

Water, water eveywhere...

By Tim Richardson • Get more from this author

Posted in Bootnotes, 28th February 2006 16:23 GMT

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Hats off to John Pluthero. The man in charge of "an underperforming business in a crappy industry" stood in front of analysts today for 15 minutes short of three hours outlining Cable & Wireless's (C&W) plans to turn around the business.

Throughout his presentation he sipped water from at least two bottles and not once left the room for a break. Talking of breaks, even when we lost the webcast for a few minutes Pluthero was still ploughing on.

In fact, the downtime was one of the few blips in the presentation. One insider for CTN, which produced the webcast, blamed the flutter on "solar activity" which interfered with the satellite connection.

Still, not to worry. The connection was up and running again very quickly and hardly anyone noticed the message on a C&W slide that accompanied the downtime.

"We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with the live broadcast of the Vodafone group plc interim results webcast." Vodafone? Solar activity indeed. ®

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