*By “Special Offer,” we mean “Obsequious Solicitation.”
It’s not like we haven’t tried.
In our tireless efforts to increase our gross receipts, we’ve resorted to double-billing, even triple-billing, but our over-educated readership must employ a small army of highly trained accountants to heartlessly snuff out this nearly legal initiative. (If you would like to avoid the menace of multiple billing and its associated surcharges, we have an insurance plan just for this almost certain eventuality. For details, see below, in the space provided after the last paragraph.)
To bolster our resume, we’ve declared ourselves the uncontested winner of prestigious awards (the Stump-Bertoni Award for Excellence comes to mind) that turn out, upon more scrupulous inspection, to have been fraudulently concocted by a dummy organization. (That we also created. But with only with the purest of intentions!) Despite the laurels we’ve accrued in this totally transparent process, our membership rolls have gone down. (Italics supplied to make our plight seem appropriately poignant.)
Because we are constantly being pestered to provide our visitation numbers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we engaged the services of trained professionals to address our deficiencies in this department. (I am not making this up.) Despite months of effort by social media savants, we didn’t gain a single subscriber. Whatever activity this initiative engendered remained within the confines of the site whose membership we were attempting to woo into our orbit. In short, we went fishing in an ocean teeming with fish and didn’t get a bite.
Just when we feared all avenues to enhancing our income stream were blockaded, we received several urgent messages from one “George Dawson” promising that “Experian Confirms $307,600 Credit Line for Realskiers!” No personal guarantees required! And here I thought I was up to my knees in skullduggery. I’m a piker compared to the likes of Mr. Dawson (and dozens of others of his ilk who have reached out to us with similar appeals). While the offer is indeed tempting, some tingling in my lizard brain warns me that Experian’s keepers may one day want their money back.
We know what you’re thinking.
“How much should I donate? What’s considered appropriate?”
Logic can only take you so far down this road. Science, trying to be helpful, informs us that there is no single answer, due to the quantum nature of, well, everything.
Such foggy thinking may appease the curiosity of the feeble-minded masses, but those of us who dare to think the improbable know that when words fail us, we turn to math for solutions. To find how much it’s widely considered to be appropriate to give, abide by this simple, 100% recycled, organic, numerology-inspired formula:
- Add up the numerals in your date of birth.
Example: June 6, 1956 = 6 + 6 + 21 = 33. - Multiply by your age. 33 x 68 = 2244
Revel in the eerie mysticism of the total, which won’t tell you how to live, but will suggest an amount to consider donating, depending on where one puts the decimal point. - You’ll be tempted to divide this generous sum until it is much, much smaller, a syndrome known as “Musk’s Fallacy.” Don’t fall for it.
Keep in mind this is the most money you or your heirs will ever pay. (This time.)
How to Raise the Dough You’ll Be Sending Us
Now that we’ve established the scientific foundations for sending us a fat slice or your net worth, permit me to suggest a few ways to raise said funds. (Cue the Christmas music to imbue these suggestions with the Spirit of Irrational Spending.)
- Charge your offspring for financial advice. You know how much financial advisors make? I don’t either, but I’ll bet it’s a pantload. Your kids likewise won’t have any idea, so you can charge the seed of your loins anything you like. Best of all, just like astrologers, you don’t have to ever be right!
- Create a home maintenance account to which you contribute every time you mow your lawn or shovel your driveway. Refer to these activities as “landscaping” and you can charge a pretty penny for it. When the accumulated funds start to become an accounting headache, forward the lot of it to me. (I mean, “us.”)
- You could make boundless fortunes in crypto. What could possibly go wrong?
- There’s always another “George Dawson.” His current offer is $260,000, no strings attached…
The mechanics of giving are simple. Right there on the Realskiers.com home page is a lavishly illustrated Tip Jar. Go tap-tap on the Tip Jar icon and you’ll go directly to the head of the line.
Now all you have to do is not yield to panic nor surrender to attention-sapping distractions. If you live long enough, your mind will eventually wander about on its own. This is not the time to indulge it.
Stay focused.
Find the Tip Jar icon.
Be absurdly generous.
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Is 3D Imaging a Fad or the Future?
Any serious attempt at bootfitting begins with an assessment of the customer’s feet and lower legs. This appraisal can be as superficial as measuring each foot for length or as detailed as a complete skier profile accompanied by a few basic biomechanical evaluations.
Better bootfitters gather further information from a litany of details that lie outside the scope of the usual foot-measuring device, such as a Brannock. The veteran bootfitter watches how the customer walks, sits and assumes a skiing position, for starters. The savvy fitter can even spot limb-length differences and redistribute pressure around the foot in places no measuring stick can quantify.
If this sounds like a pretty sophisticated skill set, well, it is. Yet many, if not most, prospective boot buyers approach the bootfitting exercise with the same enthusiasm they usually reserve for a root canal. Suspicions are often confirmed when the first boot proffered seems crazily short. Even the most knowledgeable fitter is obliged to re-establish his/her credibility just to move the bootfit process pass square one.
Of Podcasts, Archives & Revelations
According to my tight-knit circle of advisors, idolaters, sycophants and astrologers, I was made for this medium.
Of course, any garden-variety sycophant will whisper words of inspirational twaddle, but the faint note of sincerity I detect in the smarm-storm of platitudes meant to buck me up has proven sufficient to spur me to action. I quickly acquired a very professional looking microphone and a pop filter to knock down my fierce sibilants. To preserve my objectivity, I opted not to take any lessons, follow any tutorials or otherwise prepare myself for this venture. By the powers vested in me as the Pontiff of Powder, I declare myself to be, now and forever after, a podcaster.
I’ll give you a moment to recover.
The Making of a Skier, Chapter XI: Desperate Measures
When Head humanely, if rather brusquely, terminated my tenure in 2001, the ski business in the U.S. was already facing stiff headwinds, a brewing storm that would turn into a full-on debacle when 9/11 disrupted all commerce. I became unemployed just in time for the job market to implode.
I don’t handle inactivity well. I started writing a very long, very dreadful novel, composed a handful of scripts for Warren Miller – and later, Jeremy Bloom – to recite and scribbled batches of brochure copy and white papers for industries as diverse as accounting software, instrumented football helmets that registered concussions and risk assessment based on location.
The pickings were slim, but they wouldn’t have amounted to anything at all were it not for a little help from my friends. Andy Bigford, who I’d worked with at Snow Country, hired me for the Warren Miller gig. A college chum kindly engaged me to write white papers on accounting fraud. But it was Dave Bertoni, an erstwhile colleague from Salomon days, who joined me in creating Desperate Measures: A Training Method for Selling Technical Products at Retail.
