Let’s Play Buzzword Bingo!

# 47

   Users of The Bus Lane are enduring a surfeit of televised sport. Although viewing is not yet compulsory countless hours are devoted to the Euro 2012 Championships. Coming shortly will be the tennis from Wimbledon (zonk-gasp-tonk-ponk-groan-bonk-donk-scream-tink…new balls please) and after that the dreaded Olympiad looms.

   As a timely distraction from the stress of all these synthetic dramas, The Bus Lane this week offers the harsh unreality of Buzzword Bingo. A game at once ephemeral and totally trivial yet providing unlimited cheap shots at management via a competition which is both pointless and deeply unfair. We trust that our habitually sedentary passengers will find all these qualities to their liking.

To download your game cards simply Google “Buzzword Bingo Cards” and take your pick.

PLEASE NOTE: All entries must be FIFA-compliant and submitted before the end of Pentecost (Gregorian calendar) to Lickspittle@leveragedcrapisstillcrap.com

So, when you’re ready, my dears…

On your marks, get set, GO!

Looking into transparency

   This past week, thanks to social looping, we’ve had Brand Reputation Optimisation guru Dingle O’Pringle right inside the wheelhouse on a mission to ‘look into our transparency.’ Talk about drilling down! For starters, this guy comes on board with sufficient bandwidth to drink from the fire-hose. In a matter of nanoseconds it became clear that a paradigm shift is going viral out there and The Bro commanded we skate to where the puck wants to be. Streetwise, this gambit may, or may not, turnout to be sustainable at the end of the day, but the synergies all point to the rinse-cycle hitting retail curation. This is a fast-moving environment where rampant gamification will cascade down to every water-cooler and beyond. Network virtualization could become yesterday’s chip-wrapper overnight if we don’t step up to the plate PDQ and stop trying to re-invent the wheel.

   Our front-line geek-team are incentivized to the hilt and, to be honest, they’ve been going like the clappers, twenty-four seven. Despite a couple of off the ball incidents involving Marmite parameters, we’ve kept clear blue water between our ballpark scenario and the event-horizon. Whether this turns out to be mission-critical in real-time remains to be seen but our core-competency immediately empowered us to pick the low-hanging fruit and leave the old-school crowdfund holed below the waterline. Slam dunk, back of the net!

   Having experienced sufficient face-time with Dingle’s dongle, we clicked through off shoring and found ourselves directly in a win-win situation way outside the box. Modularity provided all the leverage required to downsize the trans-media portal and thus bring Dave’s Big Society concept to the table. Drinking the Kool-Aid is, was and can only ever be step-one towards being proactive any time soon. Herding fat cats is never going to be seamless at this time but, given sufficient stakeholder inputs on-tap, downloading the dot-bomb can go super-critical instantaneously. When digital nomads per se absorb blue-sky thinking into the DNA of their mindset, the netiquette reverts to default settings and thereafter the Wikiality paradigm is guaranteed to hit the ground running.

   Dingle O’Pringle advised The Bus Lane to hold back on time shifting this quarter. The game-plan is all about playing hardball with passion-based learning. Whistle-up the hat-check girl and the ‘B’ team will have just enough fuzzy logic to run the folksonomy show from soup-to-nuts. Forget about going for broke; fire the retros and ten to one on, its fast track and fairy-cakes all the way to cross-platform osmosis. Who’s the Daddy?

   Benchmarking this modality ticks all the boxes and whiteboards the mission statement on our radar. The next Tiptronic upshift revisits the bottom-line and stretches the envelope to confirm the strategic fit. It’s a piece of piss to take that off-line, then pencil yourself in to get best of breed in the dog-and-pony show. That way you come at the value-added scoreboard on the top floor like a Navy SEAL and miss the buttock-clenching drama involved in a penalty shoot-out. The performance-challenge is to go the extra mile and shift the goal posts before close of play. Tee yourself up a double-whammy before the boots on the ground go AWOL with truthiness and sync-up convergence on a mash-up enabler for the posh boys’ exit-strategy.

Any questions?

Yes. Why do I hate myself?

TIME’S UP!

Remember, the maximum score at Buzzword Bingo permitted under Article XIV of the Geneva Convention is 91.358025%

In the event of a dead heat, dead-leg or deadhead, the decision of the judge [Lord Tescoe of Barking] will be terminal.

Good luck!

In another’s lifetime. . .

# 46

   Another season, another month, another change in the weather… another day, another hour… and then, a week ago, another funeral. Sadly, my brother-in-law, Stephen Goldberg, has died. Another lifetime is at an end, another’s life is over. Stephen was my age, we were both born in 1947 and he was the elder by only a month. His passing is another reminder, which I didn’t need, of my own mortality.

   We were born into another time, another place, another world. It was a monochrome world where men wore hats, women shopped with ration books in their hands. Most people took a bath only once a week and for every household Monday was wash-day. As I remember it, the streets were largely without cars, the houses without warmth and there was no television. We seem to have spent our lifetimes getting away from that world. And now it is long gone, but so too is Stephen.

   Over the years, he became a genuine life force - which makes it all the more difficult to believe we will never see him again. Until his last handful of days, he was very energetic, very determined, impossible to ignore. At times he could simply be impossible but, looking back, we wouldn’t have wanted him any other way. He was a great original. An iconoclast, an innovator and an inventor, he never took ‘no’ for an answer. He never marched in step with the rest of the world but maybe, like McMurphy[1], he simply heard a different drum. When he invested in property it now seems unsurprising that his portfolio should at one time have included a haunted hotel. When he bought a villa in Portugal he soon also acquired a very dodgy Jeep, which – even more strangely – now survives him. In another time this vehicle might have become the conveyance for his equivalent of a Viking’s funeral. Imagine a Willys Jeep going over the cliff…

   In time, most of those who knew him developed the habit of saying “Think Stephen Goldberg…” Confronted by a problem, someone might ask – ‘What would Stephen Goldberg do in this situation?’  We knew, of course, that imagining Stephen’s advice was not necessarily going to produce the best or wisest solution, but it would certainly get you thinking – and thinking differently…

    Martin Amis has been out and about very much this week, eager to press the case for his new book. I caught him three times; Tuesday morning on Radio 4’s Today, Wednesday afternoon on Radio 5 Live and then interviewed by Sarfraz Manzoor on The Guardian’s website[2]. On each occasion he mentioned mourning the death of his friend Christopher Hitchens and described how that loss has affected his own engagement with life and awareness of his own mortality. Amis suggests that Hitchens’ own love of life has now passed to him and resulted in a compulsion to embrace every moment with renewed vigour. I wish that I had thought to say the same about Stephen when I spoke at his funeral.

   When you get past sixty years of age you realise, as Amis puts it, “Now this can’t turn out well…” Life looks precious again, as it did when we were children. And now, at the age of sixty-five, cancer has ended the life and times of Stephen Harold Goldberg. Living is what we do. Living is what Stephen did as well and for as long as he could. Life is all we’ve got. It’s what we cling to, night and day. We speak, casually, of a lifetime as if it were continuous, endless even. But it isn’t. Death makes every lifetime finite; and without life there is no time.

   Death is not ‘time out’, death is the end of time, and the end of life as even Spock knew it[3]. Life is what we know and we know nothing without it. Without it there is not even any tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow[4] in which to catalogue our regrets. And yet we comfort ourselves by saying, “Life goes on.” As indeed it does until the day when our past, our present and our future all stop. Then, for each of us, there will be no more present and therefore also no more time. Goodbye, Stephen. If only you could know now how much, and by how many, you are missed.

  

---

[1] Alvin, one of the junior medical staff in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest suggests to Nurse Ratched that McMurphy may not be truly mentally ill, only that he “hears another drum.” Kesey is quoting from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

[2] www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/12

[3] “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it…” Words misattributed to Spock in the 1987 song Star Trekkin’.

[4]  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

   Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

   To the last syllable of recorded time;

   And all our yesterdays etc etc

                                                                                Macbeth. (Act V, Scene V).

                                                                                 Look it up, why don’t you?