at last! a cure for importance!

I was recently going through this frazzled second hand women’s magazine Id bought from a pavement in Bamba, when I found this half page colour advert about a healthy though expensive new vitamin preparation containing some Chinese root or another which is supposed among other things to cure importance. Now that’s the actual spelling they had used, along with a photo of rather obscene looking tuber and a really happy looking couple... I did not have time nor inclination to read thought the whole half page but later on, after a lot of careful thought on the subject I figured it’s a very good idea and long overdue.

Have you noticed what a crippling affliction importance can be in some people? You see it in the way they sit, taking up as much room as they possibly can (ankle crossed on knee to make a little space for pricey Lamborgini Notebook which everyone should notice -), the way they talk (much deep clearing of throats and palpable care with their choice of exact wordings) the cultured accents (mock Oxford or Harvard elocution although they’ve been to third world banana republic schools*) and the generous servings of jargon they introduce into their day to day communications…You wonder if they talk to their dogs like this too? In the first place if a dog could survive around anything as important as this without rolling over and dying of acute inferiority?...words like zeitgeist , raison d’etre (I dont even know how its spelt and Im not apologising) and de facto need to be casually batted too and fro in any gathering of Importants for them to feel, well, important, which is (creek, creek –the echoing of crickets chirping in my comparatively empty head- ) alas actually lost on us lesser mortals and has us groping weakly for our thesauri.

At the Office, the Important cant just meet and talk like normal people, but must brainstorm, rationalise and strategise in hushed tones, then take elaborate minutes of the proceedings, and rework them to about 54 pages of research findings which they distribute to all on their spam lists and which no one spends more than 3 seconds on before junking.

Institutional importance clouds any reading material that originates from the average workplace and results in about 2.5 pages of possibly good ideas being hidden in at least 65 pages of a report in stodgy official jargon, which, lets be honest, no one WANTS to read , even if they had the time. This is not only really bad news for trees , but disturbing for Internet users since it probably grows at the mind boggling rate of billions of gigabytes per day what with people posting stuff on servers for further reference.

Medical and Scientific Importance I wont even go into here, because it would need a whole centre spread to begin on, and the same can be said for shh quietly now- state Importance. The best way to handle incurable individual Importance is to stand back, open your mouth in an awestricken gape and agree reverently with whatever the person says, while at the time coyly gushing “my, my, what a genius you are! Where do you get these ideas? What brilliance! What an amazing intellect!” at regular intervals( And sound as if you mean it!)

Readers or recipients of such Important -cattle waste are just as much to blame for the trend: they consistently continue to be obviously unimpress-able by anything less than a centimetre thick when it comes to documentation, or a speech which has any less than one hundred obscure words. This in spite of, or could it be because of , the fact that it just means they have less time to walk the dog, talk to their parents or spouses or practice Tai Chi, which although everyone agrees is good for you hardly anyone seems to actually provide for. Strange.

I personally envisage,I mean, foresee,(someone hit me with a brick- its rubbing off on me, help!!) a future where people will actually realise the value of keeping things simple(- stupid!) . They will speak and write down what they think in the most basic four or five letter words, accompanying anything written with cartoons and embedded audio clips which get the point across painlessly, with perhaps dormant links to the resource websites they poached it all from. This is so that if you have a lot of spare time and nothing planned for the weekend you can carry out further fact finding to whatever depth you feel you need for your development as a human being with only an average lifespan of 75 years to plan for.

In the meantime I want to find out what that root was and serve it secretly to some people I know- just to find out if it works and they become approachable normal people.

* No offence: They are probably as good as any other ,I’m only referring to the tedious accents.