The Straight DOPE

The Straight DOPE

The story you’re about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. In my entire working life, only one attempt has been made to stiff me for an invoice. It was the mid-1990s. Having been cut loose from The Travelers Managed Care and...
Too Big to Scale

Too Big to Scale

A gentleman who refers to Australia quite a bit — and spells as if he’s from there (behaviour) — has jumped on the bandwagon, the players aboard which are playing a dirge for advertising. He wrote a piece called, “Don’t Be Advertising!” And he...
The Hum of Technology

The Hum of Technology

I read a post the other day by a British chap who wrote that, when he arrived at his office at 7:30 one morning, the only sound he could hear was the background hum of technology. I immediately wondered: How did he know it wasn’t tinnitus? If you clicked on the...
The Rhetorical Rumble

The Rhetorical Rumble

Naïveté comes in all shapes and sizes. So does academic detachment. And so it is that we have a match-up of lightweights, who’ve now squared off three times in what’s come to be dubbed, The Rhetorical Rumble. For each bout, they enter the ring with...
Get Your DUCKs in a Row

Get Your DUCKs in a Row

I’m noticing what seems to be a proliferation of a phenomenon called use cases. These seem to constitute vignettes or scenarios in which sellers of products or services illustrate various applications of said products or services — having already elucidated the...