by Peter Bennett

G21 AUSTRALIA Correspondent

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Peter Bennett

HOBART, TASMANIA, AUSTRALIA - As a Have Word Processor Will Haggle kind of a writer I've spent years on the margins of earning a living but have never really made enough to make my bank manager want to look up in a hurry when I enter his office.

The past 2 years though, have seen my earnings increase slightly. I was approached by an Internet guru called Dan Garlick who asked me to write a few reviews of the web sites he designs and hosts. I didn't know a lot about it but it seemed easy at first glance. All I had to do was to write 600 words or so describing each of the web sites in question and he'd pay me some money.

What I didn't realise though, when I agreed to become a web site reviewer, was that I'd also have to become one of a select little clique of twenty first century wordsmiths. The 600 word reviews I'm required to write are not about advertising ­ the client's web site does that. I have to write a description of the web site using the key words in the text so as to trick the search engines into putting Dan Garlick's client's site ahead of the opposition sites.

At first it was all too complex for my tiny brain to absorb but after writing a few reviews I got the hang of it and now find it fascinating. I've been involved in battles with rival wordsmiths in far-off lands whose names I'll never know but for whom I have the greatest respect. We know each other as two men would if tied around their necks by the same piece of rope stretched taut between two different rooms. When one moves the other shouts "ouch."

Last year I battled with Rommel. Well, that's my name for some far-off desert fox somewhere who was at exactly my level of wordsmithery. Our client's site had been in position ten on page two of Google for months. Then, one day, another site from way down on page three somewhere knocked our client's site into position eleven which was on the page that he used to be on before he knocked me off. Now, clients with something to sell all strive to position their web sites in the first two pages of the search engine rankings because the members of the general searching public often don't bother looking any further.

Rommel and I fought this rankings battle over something like nine months before I got the edge on him - or was it a her?

Rommel would tweak his client's site with a couple of well-placed words, re-submit it and wait to see if it moved up or down a slot. I'd try to get the edge on him by reading his site for changes every day and counter him with words of my own before the search engines re-ranked him.

It was around the eighth month of this unuttered war of words that I finally realised that, fascinating as the game was, I was loosing sleep over it. It came to be like some John le Carré spy novel. Sleuth Rommel was stalking me, anticipating my every move. I was slowly but surely being out-generalled.

He was drawing away from me. He was up to position number seven by the time I was back up to position ten again. He was obviously making this battle his mission. I woke up one night for a pee and couldn't get back to sleep again. Wendy sensed it and asked me what was wrong. I confessed that I was being stalked by Rommel.

"Rommel, you call him Rommel? Perhaps it's time you got away from that computer for a spell, Pete. It's a tiny, unreal little world you live in when you're on the Net. You can lose sight of the real world outside the window if you're not careful."

This led to a conversation I didn't want to have at three in the morning. It was all centered around the war in the Western Desert where Rommel was finally out-generalled by Montgomery but not until he'd already seen off two British commanders in the form of General Auchinleck and Field Marshall Wavell. Wendy majored in history and she knew all about it.

"And do you know how Montgomery beat Rommel?" she asked me.

"Um"

"Well I'll tell you. The first thing he did was to get all his troops to exercise."

"Oh ... well then, I'll head off down to the gym at first light"

"You should Pete, you really should. All you do is sit in that study of yours all day and write. It's not healthy. If you exercise your body you'll get some oxygen coursing around your brain and you'll be able to think better. Then have a go at your Rommel."

Now, I don't dislike exercise. I saw the Jane Fonda aerobics video tape twice and would have watched it a third time if it hadn't been for the one Raquel Welch brought out shortly afterwards. It's just ... well ... .I went for a jog around the block a couple of years back and came back feeling worse than when I left the house.

So there I was in the study writing another web site review. It was a corporate elite health service site where the company goes into offices and gives all the employees a fitness test and then works out some kind of on-site training program for them. I quickly read through the site to get the gist of what this client was about until my eyes fell upon the bit about healthy bodies supplying oxygen to unhealthy brains and making people "think more efficiently." Yes, I thought, I'll bear that in mind - no need to mention it over dinner though.

Not long afterwards I was reviewing another site, this time about a thing called a Zen Chi Relaxerciser. If anybody had asked me the meaning of Zen Chi before that I would have said it was either about kick-boxing or meditating or both, but this thing was a machine for moving people's legs around.

As I was writing my 600 word review I had to keep referring to the web site and gradually I could see that what I was writing about was the very thing that would solve all my problems vis-a-vis lack of exercise. It said I could exercise lying down.

" ... Zen Chi is a unique non-impact exercise movement that stimulates venous and lymphatic return, as well as the digestive tract, all whilst lying down ... ."

That's what it said. And I was impressed. I didn't know what "venous and lymphatic return" was but I thought that I wouldn't have minded some.

I was even more impressed with a whole load more of words I didn't understand, too. And it didn't stop there. It could cure menstrual pains and promote the flow of blood to capillary banks in all the extremities of my body. It could cure things I'd never heard of; maladies with names reminiscent of well-known typing errors.

I read on ­ the relieving of nervous tension - stimulus to the digestive tract - the boosting of sluggish metabolisms - enhancement of digestion - increased circulation of oxygenated blood through the muscles. And all this could be achieved while lying on the floor of my choice. Wow! This was my kind of exerciser. I wondered if it could make the coffee or tell me what time the tide came in, in the Bay of Naples on St. Valentine's day. I read on until I came to the bit about insomnia.

"Hello Dan?"

"Yes?"

"You know that Zen Chi vibrating ankle thing I'm writing about?"

"Oh good, glad you rang. I need that article ASAP."

"Ah, yes ... I was actually wondering if you could prevail upon the Zen Chi people to let me have one for a few days. It's a bit difficult to review a thing like that when you haven't actually used one."

"Sorry Pete, too late for that. You can review mine if you like."

"What, have you got one?"

"Yep."

"Can I try it?"

"Yep. Bring around the article and you can pick it up at the same time."

I cursed myself for calling him. It had had the reverse effect. I had wanted to borrow this ankle shaking machine thing that was going to relax me and stimulate my lymphatic returns and now I'd succeeded in bringing forward a deadline on an article. More stress. That evening I came home with the Zen Chi and we all tried it.

Tim said it was like putting your feet up on a giant blancmange during an earthquake. Wendy said it made her feel like a Mermaid. I said it made me feel like a dolphin. Nikki said "Me too, can we have French fries with it?"

You know the way that Dolphins swim? The way they always look as though they've actually got two legs duct taped together inside a bin liner? That's how it made me feel and the dog, who's not used to seeing me lay on the floor, added a touch of realism to the whole watery experience.

When I'm writing web site reviews I spend a lot of non-productive time sitting around waiting for sites to download but the next day I plugged in the Zen Chi machine and used it whenever there was a break in the traffic. These things are time-guzzling machines. They can take fifteen minutes and make them seem like five. I don't know how they do it, they just do. But most of all, the Zen Chi machine worked on my brain, on my memory. While I was there lying on the study floor with my eyes shut, going through my new dolphin meets mermaid fantasy, l found I could think.

Perhaps it's just that I've never lain on the floor in between web sites before, I don't know, but it straightened out my thought processes and gave me another angle on the article I was writing.

The Zen Chi web site is replete with information about the thing being helpful in the relief of rheumatism and arthritis and oxygen absorption and a whole trailer load of other things I've never heard of but they've missed the point. It's a thinking machine.

But wait for the good bit. I'm sure it was this device that helped me finally overcome Rommel. With my new, clear weapon of a brain churning out carefully selected volleys of adjectives I Montgomery'd him off to page three. Thunk him right down I did. I hope he's not reading this because it could be classed as cheating but, at the end of the day, I guess all's fair in the western deserts of cyberspace.

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PETER BENNETT decribes himself as a gray-haired, baby boomer era, freelance journalist and article writer. He writes mainly about his own perceived social injustices, theatre and art. "Being freelance gives me the opportunity to write on issues that concern me, even if it doesn't always pay too well." Even so, he has managed to "earn a reasonable living" in this way for over twenty years.

Born in England he migrated to Australia in the early 'seventies and has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle East. Along the way he has written for various English language newspapers and periodicals in nine countries. He returned to Australia in 1999 after a ten-year absence. He is at present engaged in writing two humorous books about his sojourns in Turkey and Poland. This is his fourth article for The World's Magazine. His first was on the ownership of DNA.

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