Mr. Vincent Jennings:

We were in constant contact with the national lottery in the run-up to the changeover. A date had been picked for the launch and the national lottery were trying to make certain, as far as it was concerned, that everything was right. There had been a delay and it was going down to the wire. Obviously we needed to know so that our staff would know the style of play tickets and which terminal to use, as we had both terminals side by side. Literally three or four days beforehand, we knew it was all go. It was not that we had highlighted a difficulty but the lottery when it was doing its systems processes, needed to be absolutely certain.

In hindsight it may have been better from a sales point of view for the changeover not to have taken place in December because we lost a number of sales opportunities that traditionally would happen throughout the Christmas period but as one knows, from having a family business, when one loses on one thing one pulls up some bit on another.

I will allude to the issue of compensation. If my newspaper distributor chooses not to deliver papers to me today because it is snowing I cannot get compensation. There are many unfair practices levelled against retailers and small businesses. Compensation did not form part of our thought process. In a 20 year time span with thousands of sales, all we wanted to do was to ensure that we had the system we were hoping to have. We are not jumping up and down looking for compensation. All we want is to be able to sell the product, sell as much of it as possible quickly and efficiently. As it so happened the day following the outage, our sales were more or less at the same level if not better than they would have been. We did not lose out. We are not crying for compensation. That is not our mentality. The Senator knows the breed.