Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald not only ended the life of President John F. Kennedy, he also effectively ended the career of a promising comedian named Vaughan Meader.
Meader had perfected a clever JFK routine in which he so closely mirrored the Bostonian voice that his career was skyrocketing. Blam! End of routine. Effective end of a burgeoning career.
As talented as he was, Meader had no fallback position. His was a one-string fiddle. He paralleled the buggy-whip manufacturers who refused to believe the automobile was here to stay; the crystal radio manufacturers who felt that vacuum tubes were decades away; the makers of tooth powder who sneered, “Paste? Nobody will ever use paste.”
OK, kids, advance your sundials to two months from now. We’re in the year 2000. Those who have cashed in on the millennium had better have some new grist in their speech and column mills, or they’ll represent the latest casualties that invariably attend fads – hitching your wagon to a rocket whose destiny is burnout.
Well, there go the speeches. There go the workshops. There go all the programs tied to an apocalypse. Now these opportunists will have to find another quickie to use as a coat hook.
(How about the year 2001, which actually is the millennium? Nah – it’ll be warmed-over gruel.)
By now most of those “The end is near” signs have disappeared under the straw beds of their carriers. Times Square will be jumpin’, planes won’t fall out of the sky, and if the clock on your PC won’t cross the border, so what? Your art department uses Macs, which don’t have a clock problem…and we all know that the art department is the key to successful marketing, especially now that the new Macs come in such delightful colors…and we all know that the color of the computer is the key to successful marketing, don’t we?
What I don’t get is the number of people in our business who happily and naively accept the notion that because it’s the year 2000, gigantic changes and upheavals are in store. Oh, I admit I’ve convinced one of my publishers to delay publication of a book so it will have a year 2000 copyright; but that’s ego food, not faux fact.
One of the curios of these curious times is that a bunch of consultants have changed their titles. They aren’t consultants. They’re “futurists.”
You and I have been there when a somewhat nonplused event chairperson introduces somebody as a “futurist.” What the hell, the futurist can’t even levitate or read minds.
Oh, he or she predicts the future? Yeah, sure. How about some stock market tips? How about the litmus test of having the futurist bet his or her entire bankroll on a spin of the roulette wheel? The only genuine futurist I know of is Nostradamus, and we have to create tortuous interpretations of his predictions to make them fit.
I’ve seen lists of recommendations for the “New Century” – what to do and what to don’t. One recommendation, in Mother Earth News, is “Start the new year with a full tank of gas.” For futurists, that’s no problem at all.
Another suggestion is to avoid scheduling surgery in the weeks before and after the new year. OK, I promise. But cooperate, please, by not hitting me with a truck.
A third suggestion, about money: “Leave it where it is.” What else can I do? My wife has it.
A computer expert named Geoffrey James has put the proper spin on the non-event. It will be, he says, a bonanza for lawyers: “The projected value of Y2K lawsuits is expected to reach $1 trillion!” (Exclamation point is his, not mine, because today’s dedication to litigation no longer has any shock value for me.)
One delightful sidebar is that some consultants and “systems integration” specialists whose raison d’etre has been to “prepare” clients for the coming apocalypse are undergoing an apocalypse of their own. They’re scrambling around, looking for a new product to pitch, because their Chicken Little cry turned out to be a croak. The sky isn’t falling – except on them.
The Gartner Group is much quoted in publications ranging from the newsweeklies to The Wall Street Journal. Predictors and, I guess, futurists, Gartner said the cost of fixing the Y2K bug would be as much as $600 billion. Ah, the cloudy crystal ball! A fellow named Howard Adams laughs at that number, saying at most it will be less than half. (Admittedly, Adams is an executive with a Gartner competitor; and less than half is still heavy cigar money.) Gartner no longer is making predictions.
Here’s the cream of the jest and how we come full circle: The Washington Speakers Bureau says a speaker on the Y2K issue can ask and get $7,500 to $40,000 for a single speech. That’s more obscene than paying Oliver North.
So what’s to be? I’m not worried, because the January issue of this publication will be on and off the press before that tempestuous midnight. And by February, with luck, the whole phylum “futurist” will have flown to that great septic tank in the sky – unless, doggone it, they’re right and the sky has fallen.
A Frustrating Update
In the August issue, I took WordPerfect and its owner Corel to task for issuing an imperfect WordPerfect 2000 and having no effective technical support. About six weeks later I had a call from Janet Chen, communications manager of WordPerfect Suites, who had been exposed to my vitriol. In a conference call Ms. Chen and a Mr. Bennett, director of premium services, soothed me and said they would send a patch correcting the lack of thesaurus and macros. The patch – a CD-ROM – arrived the next day. I installed it. The thesaurus is superb. The macro was a joke. It listed just one macro – reverse type – and that one didn’t work. I e-mailed an objection to a Web address they gave me, and quickly a knowledgeable techie called. By gum, he fixed it.
Now, here are my problems: 1) Yes, I’m using Microsoft Word, but even with its deficiencies WordPerfect is a better, more user-friendly program. 2) What if I hadn’t had an editorial outlet to broadcast my complaint?
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