Joe and Victoria crested the hill with the sun warm on their backs.
'Wow, what an altavista!',
cried Victoria.
'Yes,' Joe agreed, 'on a clear day a man can seek forever.'
They sat on a patch of grass and admired the wonderful scenery, but
mainly drinking in the peace and quite one can only experience when you
leave the fortunecity behind.
'Yahoo!' Joe shouted with joy. 'Is
this the best or what?'
Later that afternoon, feeling considerably more relaxed, they decided
to head off home. Arriving there, they unpacked the car together, with
the unpacking rapidly evolving into something much more serious. Joe,
flung aside the bag as soon as the door closed behind him and they
rushed to undress each other. Joe's momentum, however, was broken when
Victoria suddenly burst into tears.
Joe's voice was full of concern. 'What's wrong my dear?'
She looked at him through tear blurred eyes. 'Am I not attractive to
you anymore?'.
Joe was puzzled. 'What do you mean love?'
Victoria pointedly looked down. 'You are - um - micro-um-soft.'
It hit Joe like a shockwave.
In a flash he
understood why Victoria had been so withdrawn lately.
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her closer. 'No Victoria, you don't
understand, it is not you.'
She pulled free from his grip and ran, sobbing, from the room.
Joe knew he needed to do something and he needed to do it quickly. Life
without Victoria simply was not life anymore. He stopped his car and
confirmed that the address was the same as the hideously scrawled note
Frank had penned for him. What was wrong with the man, couldn't he
type?
The previous evening Joe had poured out all his troubles to his closest
friend. It was at this point that Frank simply intoned 'You need to see
the Oracle .'
'The oracle?'.
'No dummy, the Oracle. This man is unbelievable. He managed to get me
out of my slump last year. He put me back on track man. Look at where I
am today.'
Joe dutifully looked around to see where Frank was today and grudgingly
admitted that the absolute chaos that surrounded them was at least expensive
chaos. Which, by Frank's standards, meant that he had "made it".
So, now, here he was about to see the Oracle. He rang the doorbell and
almost left when the person answered the door. Hiking boots were topped
by bright green pants, a yellow shirt, a round - albeit friendly - face
and finally a totally ridiculous red
hat. The man stood sideways and waved his arm inside.
'You must be Joe. Frank told me you would swing by today. It was good
to hear from him again. He is one of my real success stories.'
Joe nodded numbly and followed him in while googling at all the utter nonsense
that cluttered the man's house. They seated themselves in a couple of
old garden chairs near the pool in the back garden. After a while Joe
realised that the chap was not going to say anything, so he decided to
get cracking. After all at 90 bucks an hour he could think of better
things to do with his time.
'So, we were not properly introduced. My name is Joe Inktomi.'
The chap nodded pleasantly while offering him an apple from a bowl on the table between them.
'I am the Oracle.'
'The oracle?' Joe questioned.
'No, the Oracle.' The Oracle appeared to be a bit annoyed, so
Joe decided to drop it and plunged straight into his problems.
'It all started about a year ago. I had launched my own startup company
which allowed people to stay in touch by adding GPS facilities to their
mobile phones. The idea was that you could go to our website and log on
with your phone number. It would then produce an immensely detailed
satellite photograph of your current position. You could then email
this to your friends as a sort of ultimate wish-you-were-here.'
Joe glanced at the Oracle to see if he was impressed by this. The
silence finally seemed to get through to him and he glanced up from the
funny webcrawler that he had
been studying under a potplant nearby.
'Yes, so you started this net-thingy and then?'
Joe was a bit miffed at his brilliant idea being waved aside as a net-thingy,
but continued his story anyway. 'Well, next thing we attracted enough
attention and got huge wads of venture capital and went IPO. From there
on things were just on the up-and-up. I am now driving my dream car, living in my dream house
and I have my dream bank-balance.'
Finally the Oracle seemed to shrug himself out of his torpor. 'But
somehow it feels as if something is missing in your life?'
Joe was somewhat taken aback. 'Yes, that is exactly how I feel!
How did you know that?'.
The Oracle gave him a knowing look. 'I am the Oracle.'
He settled back in his chair after giving Joe a suitably withering
look. 'I deal with you types all the time. Luckily it is quite simple
to solve and I also accept visa.'
Joe looked blankly at the Oracle's gleaming teeth until he suddenly
realised and pulled out his credit card. He placed it in the speedpoint
which magically appeared from beneath the table and managed to avoid
choking when he saw the figure. The speedpoint disappeared again just
as magically and the Oracle leant back in his chair with a contented
sigh.
'Ok, you must listen carefully and follow my instructions to the
letter.'
Victoria pushed open the door to her favourite salon. In her mind there was nothing
quite as relaxing as doing some shopping and then stopping off to talk
to some mothers who think
at the salon. Betty, her closest friend for the past eleven years, was
there. She immediately realised that something was amiss in Victoria's
life.
'What is wrong dear? Are you and Joe still having problems?'
Victoria started crying all over again. 'Yes, I think he is seeing
someone else. He is so distant lately. I cannot seem to get him to open
up to me like the old days. He really seems to be a different man now.'
Betty hugged her friend closer. 'I think what you need is a bit of
serious pampering. Nobody can discuss problems like these when they are
so stressed.'
At Betty's home, both women relaxed on the comfortable sofas in her
lounge. Betty sipped her drink and looked at her friend who still
appeared to be miserable. 'Have you tried putting up a banner at the front of your
house, just to doubleclick
him back to reality?'
Victoria looked totally puzzled, so Betty continued. 'Last year Matthew
was going through a similar phase, so the one day I made this huge
banner which read "Welcome to Betty's homepage. The best bookmark in
the world!". I then hung it over the front of the house so that he
couldn't miss it when he got home.'
'Did it work?'
'Yes, he finally realised that I needed a bit more attention and now he
positively dotes on me. You know what these men are like. They
get all wrapped up in their work and forget that us women need a bit
more personal communication other than a spammy sort of email from the
office to tell us that they are going to be late. They just need a
touch of reality from time to time.'
Victoria looked considerably more perky now. 'Yes, I think I might try
something like that and see if it does the trick.'
Joe nodded and waited excitedly
but with baited breath. This was great. The Oracle was going to
solve all his problems!
'At the moment you are finding yourself in a real amazon jungle filled with
conflicting emotions brought about due to your success. You feel that
you owe the fools in the street
something because you managed to pull yourself above him so
effortlessly.'
The Oracle glanced at Joe to make sure he was following this.
Satisfied, he continued. 'At the same time you want to kick them all in
the teeth because somehow you think they are all a bunch of pathetic
wimps for not making it as big as you did. If you could leverage
yourself out of the primordial ooze, then so can they huh? You are
tired of trying to pull them up when they should be doing it on their
own?'
Joe nodded in agreement.
'This inner conflict is causing you to keep your ID at ebay. This is extremely dangerous.
Your ID must be brought to the fore for your success to continue.' The
Oracle motioned with his hands to indicate the seriousness of the
action.
'If you don't do this then you are sure to slide backwards.'
'OK, but how do I do that?'
The Oracle silenced him with a menacing look. 'I am not finished with
the problem yet, how can we start with the solution? The major part of
your problem lies in the nature of your business. For your business to
be successful, your website needs a large number of "hits" each month,
am I correct?'
Joe nodded, happier now that they were on more familiar ground.
The Oracle in turn nodded sagely. 'Therein lies the biggest problem of
all. Your inner man is interpreting these "hits" as attacks on you, so
your subconscious is trying to minimise the "hits" to protect you.'
Joe's jaw hung slack. 'You mean sub-consciously I am trying to destroy
my own business to protect myself?'
The Oracle smiled happily. 'Exactly!'
Joe was thunderstruck. How was he going to solve this problem?
'What must I do about that?'
'Ok, the second part of the problem, which is the most serious part, is
luckily the easiest to solve. You must immediately stop referring to
these actions as "hits". Instead refer to them as "e-handshakes". You
will have to convince your advertisers and independent page counters to
adopt this policy as well for the success to be truly felt.'
'Is that it? I just call start calling "hits" "e-handshakes" and all is
hunky-dory?' Joe looked and sounded extremely sceptical.
'My dear boy, do you question my wisdom in this matter? It is not just
a question of calling something by another name, it is the entire
subconscious perception of the action that is at the core of the
matter. Now on to the other part of your treatment. You can choose to
lower yourself down to man-on-the-street level again or you can simply
decide that they are there for a reason and you are here for a reason
and get on with life. This, however, is not so simple to achieve as
their is a lot of guilt we are going to have to work through here. I
would suggest a series of sessions over the next couple of months.'
The Oracle pulled a palm-sized computer from his pocket. 'If you will
give me your calendering ID, then I will slot you in for the remaining
sessions automatically. You can amend the appointments at my website if
you cannot make it later on.'
Joe was still feeling a bit dazed by all this information and slowly
got out of the chair. 'What? Oh, I will have to send you a mail with
the info, I have forgotten my calender ID.'
The Oracle looked deeply troubled by this. 'You have forgotten your
calender ID? My boy you are repressing yourself even more than I
initially thought. We will have to get together again very soon.'
Joe called Larry, his CWO (Chief Web Officer), into his
office first thing.
'Yeah Joe, what can I do for you?'
'I would like you to remove all references to "hits" on our site and
replace it with the term "e-handshake".'
'May I ask why? It seems a bit pointless wasting manpower on something
like that when we are desperately trying to break into the B2BNBCTOARB (Business
2 Be Noticed By Changing Terminology On A Regular Basis) market?'
'Yes, you may ask, but the answer is "Just
do it". It is crucial to the survival of our business. We will be
seen as market leaders in a few weeks and everybody will be following
us.'
'OK, you are the boss, but it still feels like an awful waste of
manpower.'
Joe struggled to contain his frustration. 'Yes, so please get on with
it right away.'
It seemed to him, since he had started adopting the Oracle's IBM(Integrated Business Model)
approach, things had been getting worse, not better. If anything he was
more frustrated at work and he was now visiting the Oracle on an almost
daily basis.
He decided it was time for his twice daily prowl through the cubicles
to see what his employees were up to there. It was not that he really
wanted to check up on them on such a regular basis, but he just felt
really good wandering around out there where he was much closer to the
code.
At Wally's cubicle, he stopped
to chat about some of the technical problems they were trying to
overcome.
'At the moment the main problem we have is improving the resolution of
the photos quick enough that we can send them through to the users. If
we do it on the fly then it takes forever, and if we do it beforehand
then we eat up a huge amount of storage space and processing time for
nothing.'
They sat and batted the problem back and forth until they arrived at a
compromise which seemed to work for most of the aspects.
It was only when he got back to the office that he realised most of the
day had been wasted in Wally's cubicle. However, when he sat down and
thought about it he realised that he did not feel the morning had been
wasted. In fact he had not felt that good for a long time.
Victoria raised her end of the banner while Betty was laughing so much,
she could barely hold her end up.
'If this does not work, then I don't know what will.'
Victoria nodded in agreement while trying to hook the corner of the
banner on a tree branch. 'This thing keeps slipping. I think it is too
heavy to stay up.'
Betty looked at it and agreed. 'Yes, I think we need a couple of jpegs to hold it up.'
After firmly securing the banner they stood back to admire their
handiwork. Both of them were still laughing when they returned to the
house.
When Joe arrived home that night, he found a large crowd of people
gathered around his house. What has happened here? When the
crowd realised that he was trying to park in the driveway they rapidly
made way for him amid much cheering and clapping. More puzzled by the
minute, he got out of the car and found everybody slapping him on the
back and trying to shake his hand. When he reached the front door he
realised what the commotion was all about. On the large oak tree to the
right of the door was a large banner proclaiming; "Victoria's Secret to be revealed
here tonight!". Positively dying of embarrassment, he fumbled with the
front door key and finally escaped into the house with a weak wave to
the cheering crowd.
Inside he immediately realised why all the curtains were drawn. He
dropped his briefcase on the spot. 'Oh boy, I think there has been some
conniving going on here!'
Victoria smiled wickedly. 'Indeed, there has. You have been a bit of napster lately haven't you? I
thought it might be a good time to give you a bit of a wake up shot.'
The next morning Joe called Larry into his office again.
'First off Larry, I want to apologise for yesterday. I was out of line.
Secondly if you have not started converting our pages as I asked you to
yesterday, then forget about. It doesn't matter what we call them, we
could call them "direct body punches" and it would not change their
function.'
Larry nodded quietly, but remained openly suspicious. Joe, not to be
put off his stride, continued.
'Finally I am selling you the controlling share of the company. I have
decided to live my dreams instead of other people's
dreams. I will immediately return to the trenches to face the attack of
the code in the front lines.'
Joe handed a sheet of paper to Larry. 'Here is the address and phone
number of the Oracle.'
'The oracle?'
'Nooo. The Oracle! You will need his services if you continue in this
position.'
With that Joe handed his office key to a completely dumbfounded Larry
and made his way to the single, unoccupied cubicle in the building and
settled down to some real work.
