- just like the "Improve your IQ" tapes of the 1970s, when self help was catching on.
"So what is Zero Time?" I asked him. "The time it takes some dodgy specimen like yourself to crash and burn?" I had left the door of the studio open, and the High Street would be just an awkward dash away if my rudeness proved erotic for this slicked-back, eager young man.
"Zero Time is all the time we have, these days," he said gently. "Remember the olden days, when you would sit about chatting with friends ..." I sensed an advertising pitch but nodded obligingly ... "and laugh the evenings away? When did you last do that?"
Not last week, because I had cancelled Andy at the last minute. Char would have come round on Saturday, only I was having a quiet one. Mit had been on at me to meet up after work, but she had stopped calling recently. When was that big party before I got my new job?
"And that's Zero Time," he said, disturbing my reverie. "Not having the time to see your friends, even when they're steaming mad that you haven't answered their calls in weeks; convinced you've found some new lover who has poisoned you against them; terrified that they are boring and you don't care about them - even if your only crime is to work your tits off every hour of the day. You could call it No Time, but the branding is less effective."
He had caught me out. "So maybe I do fit into your target market - well spotted," although all he had seen me do was drop my address book in a puddle, and start to giggle at all those fantastic excuses to come. "But now you've brought me here, I hope you're going to tell me the solution. Do I get to do yoga at dawn? Regular trips to the country? Take up vocational work instead of all this bloody office crap?"
"It is a lot easier than that," he said. And showed me his services.
That's all I tell my friends when we meet in the pub these days. The possibilities send them into laughing fits as it is, and giving them the details would hardly be in my interests. If they want to imagine mutual ejaculation with personal secretarial services thrown in, then let them.
You, however, are virtual, dear reader. So you get to know more than real people - in accordance with Angel Face's system, which has its commercial origin in supermarket loyalty cards. Those fancy credit cards with computer chips already reward people who build up an identifiable spending pattern. The marketers trade your profile, and you get incentives to buy certain products that they know you like.
If it works for loyalty to commercial brands, why not try it on the good old-fashioned forms of loyalty - friendship and trust?
Why not, indeed...
I initially chose Service level one, which was a simple CGI script that you could install onto your PC. Any of your office-bound friends who sent you jokes or games by email automatically got a "thanks, very funny"-type response, and were added to a mailing list that sent them every joke or executable file you received, except those they had sent you themselves. Dead easy. I could have - should have - written it myself.
Service level two was tempting and I signed up three days later.
It took a couple of hours to get the computer familiar with my handwriting, but once it had created a FlissFont, there was no stopping me. My friends got happy postcards from Italy and Morocco, via an online agency that employed 'postcard posters' all around the globe. All I had to do was type in my holiday dates and the type of relationship I had with the recipient - and then sit back and relax! No more black clouds glaring 'you really should phone him' at me each evening. I am sure London is so stressful because you are unable to lose touch with old friends politely. It takes years to build a social network, and then you find that all your friends know each other and the whole thing becomes utterly inorganic, like it was a trap that had caught you in its spirals.
Once I'd linked the level two software to my appointments diary, things got even easier. Friends or lovers who I did spend time with received little handwritten cards the next day, saying how pleasant the evening had been, and how I was looking forward to seeing them again. I must have been the best friend any of them had ever had - although all I did was tick the level of fondness in my customised database. At last, the reproachful edge went out of those voices on the answerphone.
Not that I heard them. I was aiming for Zero Time - when I would cease all manual configuration of my social life.
The level three loyalty card keeps a tally of how many answer phone messages I receive - and who sent them. I needn't bother to tune in any more. Anyone who calls me more than once gets an automatic message, giving details of when and where we can meet, and how much fun it will be. The personalised message sounds like my voice and arrives while they are out. But the day before the date, my happy friend gets automatic message two, which cancels on grounds of unforeseen events. It works like a dream.
LONDON CALLING!: FLISS USSHER visits the home of Automatic Loyalty.
G21 DAY ONE: TODAY: ROD on being an itinerant Web writer.
RADIO ACTIVE: RADIO RAHEEM says "Well, it's Headline News..."
FAX NIKITA: More of the Strange, but True.
POWERSBOOKS: To enhance your summer reading regimen(hurry!) BOB POWERS reviews new thrillers by RIDLEY PEARSON AND MICHAEL D.McCLELLAN, and recommends a Thoreauean meditation by JOHN HANSON MITCHELL.
K.O.'s CALLS: KRIS "KO" OLSON talks more Baseball.
TABLOID HART: THOMAS HART on the resignation letter that rocked Colorado: JONBENET DETECTIVE CRIES FOUL.
G21 ASIA: ROD AMIS provides a follow-up to his series on the Cambodia election: Mirage on the Mekong.
IRISH EYES: Guest Contributor DAN VANDEMORTEL returns to Rate Congress on Human Rights for Northern Island.
POWERSSOUND: BOB POWERS on Jazz cornetist RUBY BRAFF, singer FREDDY COLE, and the WOODY HERMAN BAND.
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