His Element

May 16th, 2009 § 1

Some really lovely writing by Chris Locke.

So OK, I have this big meeting with a large and very well heeled corporation. I am thinking they can feed me for a long time. They, in turn, are thinking I plan to cheat them out of a large sum of money. In other words, your usual prospect meeting.

As it turns out, the CEO is a woman. She is trying to pretend that this is, you know, normal, and I am trying to pretend I’m not scared shitless of her. Just two consenting business pukes doing our jobs. Meanwhile, there are about a dozen underlings scattered around a conference table you could play football on, all of them doing a fair job of convincing me they’re really quite important in their own unique way. Probably true. I’m not here to judge.

Anyway, the CEO wastes no time getting down to brass tacks. “So what do consumers really want?” she asks.

Shit, I dunno. I got nothin here. I panic. Am I really supposed to know the answer to this? How come nobody told me? Oh wait, I know! But seeing as how she’s a woman and all, I figure I better just give her the second half.

“Faster horses,” I say with Total Confidence.

Across the room, someone drops a pin. Everybody hears it. They are all staring at me, dumbfounded.

“You can’t be serious,” she finally says. I’m thinking: how did she know?

“No, really. Faster horses.” I’m sticking to my guns on this one.

“Do you have any notion of our market?” she asks, I figure rhetorically. She isn’t really looking what you’d call “swayed” by my argument. “Most of our customers have never even seen a horse! For this you want us to pay you ten thousand dollars?”

Right about then I’m thinking you can keep your money, where’s the fucking exit? But then I remember that I am, after all, a Professional.

“It’s a metaphor,” I say. That always gets em. And indeed, everyone sorta sits up a little and a few tentatively pick up pens, as if to give the impression that, if they were to hear anything potentially profound at this juncture, they might just be inclined to make a note or two.

I’m racking my brain. Jesus, how did I manage to get myself into this? Horses, horses, let’s see… But nothing’s coming to me.

“Are you implying,” ventures one particularly unctuous minion, “that the speed of online transactions gates our ability to deliver total customer satisfaction?”

Say what? Bad as the horses were, this is worse. I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about.

“…well sure, that, but also the whole Portal thing…” I say, as if, yes, yes, it’s coming to me now… Pens are poised.

“You see, what consumers really want is a place in the universe. A home. A feeling that they belong somewhere. They long to come in out of the cold — from the harsh realities of nomadic late-20th-century anti-intellectualism to the warm embrace of prefabricated purport.”

Oooh. This could be working. I see puzzlement, but it’s tinged with willing suspension of disbelief. A little anyway. OK, here’s where all those wasted years of writing EGR could come in handy.

“Consumers are like newborn infants,” I say, warming to it. “They wake up in mediaspace one day and don’t know how they got there, where they came from.” People are writing now. Hot damn!

“What do you mean exactly by ‘mediaspace’?” one fetching young thing wants to know. She is so fresh and enthusiastic and her blouse is so demure. I nearly get sidetracked into unfathomable lust. But no, I must keep my mind on The Client here…

“Mediaspace is that concatenation of Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist and communication bandwidth that provides new opportunities for wealth creation at any given historical juncture,” I orate. “It is the constellation of unbridled desire conjunct with the potential for ultimate fulfillment.”

Heads nod knowingly around the table. Finally I am in my element: total bullshit.