Then I go, Look, Randall, you’re how old — about 50? He says he’s 49. I go, Okay, so you were born in 1960, so maybe you don’t remember Meet the Beatles. Or do you? Do you remember that album? Did they have record players out there in Arkansas?
Well worth the read. Fake Steve is genius.
This was very good. My favorite part was the end:
“…I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.
Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.
“Okay,†I said. “Nice talking to you.†Then I hung up.”
How many organizations do this exact same thing? Too many.