Lessons from Jeff Bezos
The McSweeney’s blog recently posted a “short imagined monologue” from the mind of Jeff Bezos (as imagined by contributor Evan Johnston). We meet Bezos in the waiting room at his doctor’s office, where he’s waiting to have a massive paper cut on his hand stitched up. Bezos is catching up on his summer reading with his Kindle – and he wants to tell us a little about himself “and the common reading experience we all share.”
Now, like you, I get a lot of my reading done in the least hospitable of places. There’s the airport, the ensuing plane flight, and the subsequent crash in the middle of an ocean, followed by being marooned on a deserted oil rig.
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Assuming it doesn’t get wet, the Kindle could become your best friend on that oil rig – unless there are other survivors. In the likely event that those survivors turned against you – let’s say they know that you caused the accident by demanding that the pilot look at your Kindle – you would be forced to deal with them. Harshly.
The Kindle can’t help you with that particularly gruesome task – but it can help you recover from the pyschological trauma of successfully sending your accusers to a watery grave. Reading, or course, is the best therapy a marooned murderer can buy.
As Bezos says, the Kindle can’t catch fish, but fish can’t buy a book in the middle of the ocean.
