ASX chairman Rick Holliday-Smith hardly bounded out of a Stanford computer science major in a didactic T-shirt last week (let's face it, the spaghetti western moustache is a dead giveaway). The bloke has been a company director since 1998 (a big year for Microsoft Windows), back when the height of Silicon Valley innovation was the HD-ROM. Or at least that's what Ask Jeeves told me when I loaded up Netscape …
But the former international banker ran flat out of patience with his fossilised shareholders (Computershare telegrammed them a notice of meeting via Western Union) at yesterday's Annual General Meeting of the local bourse.
One question from the floor sparked a 20-minute debate as to the wisdom of static electricity. "Disgraceful" is how one Grumpy Old Man, channelling the late, great Walter Matthau, described the compulsory delivery of shareholder information via the web. A Golden Girl worried that a telecommunications outage at her Estia facility would equate to a forced divestment of her shareholding. That was Blanche. Not to be outdone, Rose seized the mic: "Obama basically gave control of the internet to the UN, so how does the ASX prepare for when someone takes down the internet?"
Chairman Rick's response has him firmly in contention for Rear Window's 2016 Man of the Year (to be handed over by Merrill Lynch ECM banker Lamar Odom): "Did you have a lot of red meat for dinner last night?"
Who you calling dinosaur, dinosaur?! Anyone seen my Mylanta?
