Marty and Graeme's Story

Marty first became a blood donor when the NZ Blood mobile unit visited the Ohakea Airbase in the early 80’s.
They regularly visited the Airbase as there was a captive audience of service personnel to collect from. After leaving the Air Force Marty joined an IT company, Datacom and continued his donations whenever he saw a mobile unit setup at locations around Wellington.

Both Marty and Graeme were General Managers at Datacom and had regular fortnightly business catch-up meetings. It also happens that Datacom provide an IT Service to NZ Blood. So for one of our meetings Marty came up with an idea to do a customer visit to NZ Blood.

Graeme had no idea that Marty was setting him up to do a donation at this meeting.
So we duly went down to visit our customer at the Newtown donation centre where Marty presented his donation card and suggested to Graeme he might like to donate a pint of his finest. Not being one to miss out he jumped at the chance. Only problem was he did not have any identification on him. So a quick call back to Datacom and a staff member dropped off his ID to us.

That customer visit meeting was on 5th July 2012. So after almost 8 years we reached the milestone of doing our 100th donation together at the same place it all started.

We have now done 125/130 donations each - Like all good things in life, it plays forward. Graeme’s daughter Marie, a university student, is also a regular donor now and has encouraged some friends to do the same.