A venerable former employer is taking its stubborn, sweet time letting the WWW flush it down the toilet.
The dismantling of printed text matter from necessity to luxury product is nearly complete in the United States. Access to as much information as most humans need costs only the expense of Internet access, computing devices, and blind surrender to advertising profiles and opaque gathering of data about your clickstorms. Individuals who consume content for free are not customers. They are the product being sold. (Quoting a meme.)
I used to hold court in this room, and in corporate meeting rooms similar to this:
I did not always lead these meetings but often in rooms like this people looked at me for direction, waited for my next utterance, scribbled notes, looked out the window, housed free sandwiches, then “shifted gears” before putting projects and products “out the door”.
I felt like a buffoon sitting at the heads of these tables. I never wanted to Direct. I wanted to Do. I failed up, to use self-serving parlance of corporata.
I hope the company’s pension plan survives its apparently inevitable evaporation. That pension plan is my beer money should I make it to retirement age.
My most memorable encounter in one of these august meeting rooms was my first. I showed up to a needless meeting wearing torn-up pants and a filthy t-shirt. The meeting (which was needless, I should repeat) was filled with suits and ties, those suits and ties stuffed with bodies of seasoned corporate citizens whose future demanded printed matter and editorial control.
At this irrelevant meeting corporates demanded experts who knew this stuff, experts who understood “interactive” and “WWW” and “HTML”. “We need experts!” I remember one old man saying.
My presence felt unentitled. I knew HTML and server push, and I could summon a directory listing from a command prompt. But sartorial concerns held me back. I couldn’t stand my torn-pants self up in this room of dozens of suits and ties and expect credible reception.
The meeting needlessly endured for its appointed 2 hours. Old men and no women droned on, usefully exposing their ignorance of digital publishing.
As the meeting neared its end I saw someone staring at me from across the room. He might have been my age but in his corporate attire he seemed older, wiser, more confident. He looked at me with a strange grin, a twinkle in his eye.
I looked away, thinking he might be gay or preparing to call me out for my slovenly attire.
I wanted to exit this useless exhaust of corporate meetingness without a dress-code confrontation.
As the dozens of attendees exited the meeting room I was, inevitably, caught in the path of this staring stranger. His grin grew more wry, more cheshire-cat/shit-eating, as I passed him in the hall.
Putting his hand on my shoulder he asked “Are you Sorabji?”
Surprised but not horrified I responded in the affirmative (“I guess so.”), getting few words in as he expressed knowledge of and interest in my web site activities of the 1993-1995 epoch. The conversation, perfectly amiable and courteous, relieved anxieties that took over my mind during the closing minutes of that eternal and useless meeting.
I returned to my office, where I mentioned to my boss that I had just met ____, my new friend who turned out to be righteously well-networked in the corporate world of this company. My boss seemed surprised but happy to hear I had made this connection. I was but a cub production assistant with barely 3 months at the company, but my reputation evidently preceded me in the halls of corporate.
Near the end of the day I was sitting in the boss’s office, filling the day’s end with virtuosic corporate cud chewing, when ___ called. The boss perked up, pointing out to me that the mucky-muck I had met earlier that day was calling.
The boss answered the phone. He and ___ spoke for a few minutes, talking about what I do not recall.
As the conversation seemed to be ending the boss said to ___: “I hear you met Mark Thomas today.”
From across the room I heard ___ scream “OH MY GOD THAT GUY IS SCARY! FUCKIN’ SCAAAAAAARY!” I couldn’t distinguish the next few moments of what he said but the boss was visibly alarmed, muttering the word “Sorabji” in response to this crazed litany of scary fear.
I do not know what else ___ said that afternoon but it clearly made an impact on the boss, who simply reported to me that “___ thinks you’re a pretty scary guy, Sorabji.”
The initial meeting with ___ seemed sanguine and saccharine. What to make of it except that meetings are useless charades.
