Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Waiting for Google no more

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Google PR people never got back to me on my hysterical Monday request to talk to a human being about whether all my videos are about to be deleted from the universe.

As hard as it is to imagine, maybe they had bigger fish to fry.

But I'm not some dumb jamoke either, so I reached out on Wednesday to Laura Hunter Thomas, an old speechwriting acquaintance from Chicago who recently went to work for Google, in internal executive comms.

Or, "Saint Laura" as I've come to call her.

"I'm still a newbie at Google," Saint Laura wrote, "but I will do my best to figure out what the heck is happening."

Her own requests for help weren't returned by a PR department that apparently does indeed have bigger fish to fry. But Saint Laura, herself no expert in the vagaries of YouTube accounts—she's a nitwit writer too, remember!—did some digging on her own and we set up a time to talk.

Ahead of our call, she sent me a thread she found, of Google/YouTube victims trying to solve similar problems to mine. I wrote her back:

Laura, this might as well be written in Polish and then converted into a Chinese font.

Here was the most helpful suggestion I found: 汉字  /漢字 汉字  /漢字 .

I know. What a fucking baby I am, right?

So Saint Laura calls me at the appointed hour, and we have an odd conversation that involves the necessary and increasingly hilarious repeating of the stupid name of the account in question, slimmyfucker.

And it was so strange, what happened. I don't think Saint Laura told me anything I didn't already know. Maybe she made me understand once and for all that accounts and channels are separate and that an account can be conceivably closed without the channel disappearing.

But mainly, she just talked to me. She asked me if I have my videos backed up on my computers. It occurred to me for the very first time that—why yes, for Chrissakes, I guess I do! My shoulders dropped nearly to my ass with relief.

We then typed in a password or two. We discovered together—we came up with a shared strong hunch, is more like it—that probably what would happen to my channels if they canceled the slimmyfucker account as they threatened to do next Saturday—was nothing. Which is fine with me, because I have access to both my channels through other e-mail accounts.

"I'm starting to get that warm and happy feeling coming over me," I told her, and Saint Laura laughed. (Saint Laura has a great sense of humor!) She added that Google realizes it has customer service issues, and is working to improve them. She was sure to point out that this was just a friend helping a friend and that this was no kind of technical support. But now I have someone to call if it all goes wrong and one of my channels does go missing.

It's Friday afternoon. It's been a wild week. I'm ready for a cocktail. But everything already has a gauzy glow.

I told you all I needed was to talk to a human being.

And oh, what a human being I talked to.

Laura, you're a saint.

Now google forth and multiply.

Guessers gather at Davos to guess together

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Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay not long before he died in which he called the world's leaders what they are: the "guessers," on whose grand public hunches rest the fate of us all. Aristotle, Ivan the Terrible and Hitler were three of the variously successful guessers from history that Vonnegut named.

But the guessing goes on, wrote Vonnegut, even after the information revolution:

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long—for all of human experience so far—that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

I thought of that essay as I read a Huffington Post piece called "Davos Confidential," written by Eric Schmidt, simultaneously a direct supervisor of the information revolution and the guesser-in-chief at Google.

He's at Davos right now.

He starts out on a somewhat defensive note:

It's easy to sneer at Davos as a place where the rich, powerful and famous come to talk to each other and arrogantly put the world to rights. But there has been little sign of arrogance at recent gatherings. Nor any settled view of how to overcome the challenges our world faces. If there is a global conspiracy underway at Davos, no one has yet let me in on the secret.

Instead Davos mirrors the uncertainty in the world in general. The real story this year was not arrogance but anxiety over how we could channel turbulent global forces in a more positive direction so that everyone gains.

Oh, no. So these days our guess is as good as the guessers'?

Back to Vonnegut, who listed some of the influential guesses we've been laboring under in recent years.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences. 

That's correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

And back to Schmidt, who concludes his essay by talking about the "principles central to Davos," which sound familiar:

Principles such as the benefits of free trade, free societies and free speech and, above all, open collaboration between business people and politicians who recognize that with freedom should come responsibility. Yes, the world has critical challenges, especially in 2010, but I believe that in these Davos values lie our solutions. It's this hope and optimism that will ensure I keep coming back as long as I am invited.

Davos values? Hope? Optimism?

You know what it sounds like?

It sounds like he's guessing.