Monday, July 21, 2003

2 Books

This past weekend I finished 2 books: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and Raving Fans by Kenneth Blanchard. Pattern Recognition was an odd book that mostly revolved around the world of advertising and commercialization of images. No nearly as techno-centric as Gibson's previous books and I have a feeling that if he hadn't have been the author it would be classified as regular fiction. It did make me think about the source of the images used to sell products and why the ones that work on me are successful. The book failed to engage me on either the topics of 9/11 or the plight of lives in post-Soviet Russia, two things it weaves into its plot almost unnecessarily.
Raving Fans was a book I read for work and was probably the most inane thing I have chanced across since college. The idea that Americans have low expectations when it comes to service strikes a chord with me. If I went to a store and they hit me with a baseball bat while making my purchase, I would be glad they didn't kill me, but not surprised. At the same time, I will never expect the level of service suggested in this book. In my opinion, most of the population are dumb as rocks and deserve to be treated as such. I love to purchase things on-line so as not to be exposed to people, whether or not they are bending over backwards to provide service to me. I also don't plan on changing my behavior to match the ideas presented. I work in an environment where my "customers" are fellow employees of the same company, and expect to receive the same level of forgiveness when it comes to interactions as I give. This will never work because it makes sense and requires most people to not be dumb as rocks and I already said they were. Never the less, I am sticking to my principals.

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