I was cruising the Hewlett-Packard website looking for pictures of hot babes with printers, when I came across this executive profiles page. A couple of things struck me about this page:
1. Does anybody else think it's a bad idea that the Chief Technology Officer is also responsible for Mergers and Acquisitions? Seriously, i'm not kidding, Shane Robison, him of the nehru collar halfway down the page, is listed as Chief Strategy AND Technology Officer AND responsible for M&A, partnerships, corporate development, and divestitures. Hmmm. I'm not sure i'm putting my CTO in charge of M&A even at an 11 person company. Anyway, you'd think that with this kind of streamlined organization that Carly would only have 2 direct reports, but no, she has 13. Sumpm' ain't right there.
2. Who, on the planet, anywhere, has an easier job than Debra Dunn, SVP of Global Citizenship. You must be kidding me. Did I read that right? Yep, Debra is responsible for HP's social and philanthropic and environmental responsbility. Debra? you should be smiling a lot more broadly in your picture. When I go to bed at night, I DREAM about your job. To head to the office thinking "to whom should we grant wishes today?!" or "It's time we paid a visit to the President of Fiji", man, I'm doing something wrong. Shoulda studied global citizenship in school. (you know what just struck me? I bet debra thinks she has a hard job. I bet she works late and says things to herself like "those ungrateful bastards at the special olympics!". Debra has no perspective on her awesome awesome job. Poor Debra).
HOWEVER, the thing that really caught my eye on this page was that, there, under carly's picture, it says I can email Carly. Wow. how cool, i DEFINITELY have some ideas for her. First of all, have you ever seen her speak? She does something very strange that I need to ask her about. When she is speaking and enumerating a list of points (eg, "there are four reasons this will happen: 1, blah blah blah, 2, blah blah blah", you get the picture), she uses her fingers to count out the points; HOWEVER, and pay careful attention here, she ALWAYS uses her fingers in the wrong order! That is, when she says "the FIRST thing is XYZ", instead of pointing out her index finger in sync with saying "first", she points out her PINKY FINGER! This is outrageous and unnatural, but i've always suspected it's how she got to be CEO ("dear God, johnson, look at that, she's starting with the wrong finger! Good lord, man, it's GENIUS!"). So, I wanted to email her and ask "what special powers accrue to you from going in the wrong direction on your fingers when you're enumerating points, and do you have to think real hard not to start with your index finger, like human beings do?"
So, i read the email carly page. It's nice, she wrote us a personal note that talks about emailing her. She says things like ...due to the volume of messages I receive, I often pass along suggestions" and please email ME your suggestions, etc. So, cool, the email is a direct email to her. Neat. But then I saw it. An amazing and probably unintentional bullet point that alerted me to the compelling and awesome technology that HP has developed. Here's the line: " Messages that are not in English will take longer to reach Carly". WOW. Do you understand the implication here? While carly has already told us that we can email her directly using this form, we now learn that if you do not type your message in english, that the bits will actually take longer to get to her inbox! HOLY CRAP! HP has somehow invented a technology that can slow down electrons that are encoded into foriegn languages! No WONDER Al-Queda is having such a hard time regrouping - The HP electronic language decelerator has been unleashed on the internet. I wonder if you use poor grammar if that slows things down as well.....like if you use a comma where you should have used a semi-colon, or you don't capitalize "god".
Anyway, ok, so i'm going to send her this email now about her counting backward thing. I wonder why i have to give her my phone number. Hmmm, maybe she's looking for a date. I better tell her in my email i'm married. ok, here's what i wrote and sent:
"Carly, Hi. I'm married, so if you want to hang out, you should email me back your hotmail or yahoo address and i'll send you mine. listen, i was wondering where you learned to count backwards starting with your pinky, and if you've ever used that power to hypnotize other Fortune 500 executives. thanks. oh, also, can you tell your CTO/M&A/Strategy/Investments officer that the 1980's called and they want their nehru collar back? HAHAHA! Don't you love David Spade? ok, don't forget to send your private email address, kewl? Dick."
Posted by Dick at January 23, 2004 12:38 PM | TrackBack