|
Home
Up
| |
Calling Jack@Kerouac.com
By Peter Bohush
I have been a rover
I have walked alone
Hiked a hundred highways
Never found a home.
-- Rod McKuen
A drifter's life, though it sounds romantic, is really quite dull.
Endless days on the highway, a little grub at some greasy spoon, then long, lonely
nights in seedy hotels where countless drifters before have also stared at the ceiling,
wondering what it all means.
Info-drifters face much the same routine as they travel the winding, endless threads of
the Information Superhighway. They stare at directory listings instead of water-stained
ceilings. There isn't as much dust in their shoes. And the food is better, especially if
they still live with their parents.
But the search for meaning is the same. It's the need to know that drives the drifter
ever onward. Their searches will only end when they pause one day in front of a television
set, perhaps in the waiting room of the Montgomery Ward auto department while mechanics
put new snow tires on the Sable.
"I seek not to know all the answers," David Carradine will whisper in a
re-run of Kung Fu. "But to understand the questions."
Whoa! Time out! Was Peggy Lee right? Is that all there is?
'Fraid so. After a few months or years surfing the Internet, the truth suddenly springs
out like a Palmetto bug from your sock drawer.
You were perfectly happy without all that information at your fingertips. Now that it's
there, what do you do with it?
Use it, my friends. But don't abuse it. Or you'll lose it.
- National Internet access provider Performance Systems International Inc. (PSI), once
provided Internet access for an Arizona law firm called Canter & Siegel. But these
desert barristers caused a major uproar among the first-wave of netheads when the lawyers
posted advertisements for their firm in Usenet newsgroups. PSI told them to stop, kicked
them off the system and was loudly cheered as they stood behind the cyber lynch mob. Then
they said to themselves, "Whoa! There's money to be made in them thar hills!"
Good for them.
It seems Canter & Siegel's advertising has raked in about $100,000 in
business for the firm. But the husband-and-wife principals have also been deluged with
obscene phone calls, e-mail "flames," and carloads of magazines to which they
never subscribed.
Ms. Siegel called the anti-ad 'netters "a down and dirty bunch of irresponsible
miscreants."
Then she thanked them for the Cosmo subscription. (PSI went public, made tons of money,
and now is desperately trying to get some big company to buy them before they go broke.)
How times change. Especially when you get to add thousands of players to your team.
Where only two years ago it was sacriledge to advertise on the net, today it's Job 1.
- The $100 million in-flight communications market is predicted to skyrocket to $1 billion
in the U.S. and $2 billion worldwide by the year 2000, according to Investor's Business
Daily.
Soon to come are jet-to-jet telephone conversations, the ability to receive calls
from the ground and even seat-to-seat calling (when you'd just die if anyone saw you
chit-chatting with someone in economy class).
The bathroom may soon be the only place where the boss can't call you. Hold on a
minute, is that the t.p. ringing?
- U.S. Microtel Inc. of Richardson, Texas, introduced a rugged laptop computer designed to
withstand shock, vibration, humidity, salt, fog, dust, rain, atmospheric pressure and
temperature. Basically, you could use it for word processing or for step aerobics.
Perfect for the 21st-century drifter who wants to surf the 'net and surf the waves on
Maui at the same time.
|
