"Enough is enough," Erickson growled around his cigar, "I have had it with these mystifying snarks in your mystifying Flames." He waved an issue of DDJ at me. "You're always digging up obscure song titles to title your columns and slipping in references to last season's trendy movies or old comic books—and great Caesar's ghost, whatever possessed you to try to use as many words as possible that end with the letter 'K' in your October column?
"No, don't tell me," he added, pushing back his green eyeshade to fix me with a steely glare. "Just get over to Foo Bar and pump your journalist friends for some hot trends. Go. Get out of here. Go!"
Which is how I found myself once again behind the bar in that secluded hangout for tech journalists on the edge of Silicon Valley where I occasionally moonlight as relief bartender to pick up tips of the journalistic variety. A tune by The Cure was playing on the jukebox as I placed a glass of Chardonnay in front of journalist Laurence Wilde.
"So what's the latest, Larry? What's consuming your bandwidth today? What's the main meme, the buzz in the blogosphere?"
Concern lines creased his British brow. "Well, our friend Mo's been let go."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said, and I was sorry, partly because this didn't sound like the kind of news item that would placate Erickson. "But that reminds me, what's your take on RFID blockers? Will we soon be carrying cards in our pockets to create a cone of RFID silence around us?"
Before he could respond, not that the faraway look in his eyes gave any reason to think that he was going to respond, Joe walked in and sat down. I poured him his usual cream soda. "Evening, Joe. You're always up on the latest gadgets. What do you know about HearHere, that new technology that lets you search podcasts?"
"Did you hear about Mo being laid off?" he answered, if you call that an answer.
"Apparently everyone has," said a familiar female voice, and Mo claimed her accustomed perch. "Scotch, stet. I have been outsourced, rightsized, reengineered, decruited, eighty-sixed, uninstalled. I am a woman of leisure, and I'll take that leisure on the rocks, barkeep."
"It's tough, I know, Mo," I sympathized as I poured and she drained and I poured again. "But you don't want to let your skills get rusty. Best thing for you would be to talk about the stories you were working on. Anything about Hewlett-Packard and their bugging scandal, by any chance?"
"Michael's right," Larry interposed. "You want to get right back on the proverbial horse, as it were. There are interesting jobs out there. Have you looked into what Jay Rosen is doing with collaborative journalism at NewAssignment.net? He's apparently got funding and intends to explore how amateur and professional journalists can work together, with the pros actually getting paid and everybody satisfied with the arrangement somehow. Awfully clever, if he can pull it off." He wiggled his glass at me and I did my duty.
I tried again to steer the conversation toward the kind of tech leads that I go to Foo Bar for. "So have any of you been following the latest announcements from Intel? Aren't four cores overkill for the average computer user?"
"Dunno, Larry," Mo said, "I'm not sure where journalism is headed today, with everybody and his dog pretty soon having something like that Qipit system that lets them scan, copy, e-mail, and fax documents with nothing but a camera phone, not to mention in-the-field podcasting and blogging capability. Citizen journalism is here. I'm sure there's still a place for the professional reporter, but the day of the print newspaper is over, and I haven't figured out yet what that means for yours truly."
Joe tugged her sleeve. "Maybe you could iReport for CNN." He looked at her face and added, "Uh, no, I guess not."
"Direct-to-printer e-mail connections," I blurted, "for people who are technologically illiterate but still want to get their email. Anybody tracking that technology? Or Void Communications' disappearing e-mail messages that can't be printed or saved and that vanish as soon as they are read. Comments? Opinions? Anyone?"
The jukebox finished the last strains of The Cure's "Never Enough" and moved on to "Grinding Halt." Larry and Joe kept offering Mo career advice that she kept rejecting, and I moved down to the end of the bar, where I sat on one stool and put my feet up on another and listened to the music. Clearly I was going to have to get creative to come up with a column this month.
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
