paul smith's Snaps & Bytes e-home
January 2000
There's a TV show called Room 101, which I love because I believe it's what we hate which truly defines us. To know a celebrity detests line dancing and poor lane discipline too makes me feel closer to them in some slightly sad way. Although I've watched religiously, I've yet to see a famous person smile at Paul Merton and say, "Bozo Customers". This is because very few have customers. Perhaps Anita Roddick gets dumb people asking her if it's ok to use lipstick on their pet rabbit, given that it's not been properly tested on animals. If so, get her on Room 101 so I can bounce up and down on my sofa shouting, "Me too!" You may assume from the above that someone has upset me this month, and you'd be right. But because it doesn't make great business sense to slag-off ones customers, no matter how inept or rude, all I'll say is 'you know who you are' and in 20 years from now I will loom out of the shadows and garrotte you with a printer cable.
Instead here's something to try at home. I'm trying to sell my dads old PC at the moment (486Dx2-50, 12Mb ram/540Mb HDD, 14"SVGA, £Offers!) which means temporarily I live in a two PC household. And to me 'one house, two PC's', means only one thing; DEATHMATCH-A-RAMA! A serial cable wasn't hard to come by and in no time at all I was hunting my old mucker Gavin around a Doom2 (ah, remember?) level of my own devising. A few years back, linked or network play was hailed as the Next Big Thing, but on-line gaming seems to have surpassed it. Perhaps I'm a little twisted but I much prefer to verbally abuse and goad an adversary in the same room and not pay a 'phone bill for the privilege. All the fun is in their reaction as I strafe their lifeless corpse sliding towards me on its belly… I digress. (A word only ever used by cardigan wearers.) Now early P1's have become as worthless as my dads 486, the future of thousands of dual computer households grows ever closer. Although I'm not quite sure where this may ultimately take us, there's got to be a moneymaking angle. I'm not suggesting you dust off your copies of Doom or stock up on x-over cables, but someone with a sharp idea will do something with this burgeoning market sector.
A wonderful idea currently going to waste, in my eyes at least, is e-mail. Here we have a flexible and powerful business tool and yet every morning when I check our mail all I get is three Spam's, a mixed quality selection of funnies and some porn [thanks Chris :o) ]. I'm begging you now, somebody, anybody, please 'mail me for a price list! Lets all work together to make this communications revolution (or be the first to use the word 'communolution') a rewarding experience rather than just another distraction. Because if there's one thing I really hate it's having my time wasted. Pointed look.
Dale, this hurt like buggery to cut to 513 words. It started at nearly 800 so please be kind to it. Paul.