Although the Swedes aren’t known as a warlike people, the marketing department had launched their latest campaign with military precision. They softened the beachhead—in a manner of speaking—by deliberately leaking all kinds of rumours that exploded like mortar shells in the trenches of America. The result was buzz. The air crackled with anticipation. The world was about to witness the latest in Swedish innovation from Yeskia.
The minute Sven Svensen stepped from the company jet at La Guardia, he could feel the electricity. He was on a tight schedule, so the limo drove him straight to the convention center. The driver was a dark-haired man who looked a bit rough around the edges. The man gripped the steering wheel with tobacco-stained fingers and when he spoke to Sven, his words were gruff and slurred.
Sven was there to deliver the keynote address at an industry convention. He was even going to upstage Steve Jobs, though out of deference to Apple’s marketing savvy, Sven had carefully studied each of Apple’s product launches and had paid careful attention to Mr. Jobs’ personal style. The lesson was obvious: stay positive; don’t open by trashing the competition; let your superior product do that for you.
“Hello, New York!” Hands up, waving to the crowds, smiling in the glare of the lights.
People were chanting: “Yes, Yes, Yes.” Or was it “Sven, Sven, Sven?” It was hard to tell in such a cavernous room.
“I’m Sven Svensen, CEO of Yeskia.” Cheers rose from the back of the room and cascaded down to the front. It was like an ABBA concert.
“We have something exciting for you today!” Sven wouldn’t have to do anything to win this crowd; they were already his. “Today I want you to walk away from this convention with one word on your lips. Just one word. Convergence!”
Sven scanned the room and tried to make eye contact with as many people as possible. He estimated that there were somewhere between two and three thousand people present for the keynote address.
“Convergence! Y’ know—” and he hitched his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans in a kind of homespun folksiness that appealed to the Americans “—y’ know, for years now, there’s been a lot of talk about convergence. You have your cell phone. Then you add a camera. And a camcorder. And an mp3 player. And a browser with wi-fi connection. And then, pretty soon, do you know what convergence starts to mean? Convergence starts to mean compromise. To make it affordable, you skimp on the camera lens and so your images are blurry. You skimp on memory and so you can take only twenty seconds of video. You skimp on your audio technology and then your music sounds like its coming from a tin can. You can get yourself a connection, but your browser looks like a postage stamp—ya, what the hell is a postage stamp?—and you have to visit your ophthalmologist every month for eyestrain.
“Well, not anymore. At Yeskia, we’re committed to real convergence. Not convergence of compromise. Convergence of excellence.”
“Y’ know, folks, ever since the earliest days of Yeskia, our company’s tagline has been: “Think dufferent.” It could have been “Think different” but then we’d be just like everybody else. Our new product line all began one afternoon when we applied the company tagline to a problem. We asked ourselves: “How can we think dufferent?” And from that simple question, an answer emerged. You see, we’d been trying to use our conventional cell phones to carry on a conference call, but we needed media applications too, and – well – between poor image quality and poorer sound quality and dropped connections—well—we all agreed that we needed something better than this. So we began to think dufferent and pretty soon the answer came to us.
“It was something really simple. And isn’t that the way it always is with really good ideas? It was something really simple. What we realized – the sudden insight, the amazing epiphany, the bolt of lightening to the head—was that we were thinking like Swedes. Silly us! We assume that because the cell phone has 99% saturation in the Swedish market, that we should use the cell phone as the platform for our converging technologies. But that’s not the situation in other markets. What about—well—what about America? The fact is: the cell phone isn’t so popular in America. I know. I know. It’s difficult to believe. But in America there are still people who don’t have cell phones: the homeless, for instance, and the more than two million people in American prisons, and some members of Congress.
“So we asked ourselves a question. If we think dufferent about the matter, is there anything in America more popular than the cell phone that we could use as a platform for converging technologies? The answer was obvious. We all know that every American loves his handgun. Market saturation is more than 99%. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Yeskia 9mm.”
Sven pulled a shiny object from a holster and held it high overhead. There was a crash of cymbals and the lights dimmed; orchestral music swelled like a sea-tide of epic change; fog machines filled the stage; spotlights picked out the upheld hand and mixed with the fog to produce an other-worldly effect; giant images appeared behind Sven showing a Clint Eastwood look-alike in poncho, dressed as a tough-jawed corporate executive and speaking in menacing tones on his Yeskia 9mm: “But being as this is a 9mm Yeskia, the most powerful cell phone in the world, and would blow your stock sky high with a single call, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ”Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”
A crowd can be a fickle beast. Sven knew from the moment he began that the crowd was with him. But if he couldn’t deliver on his promises, the crowd could turn—a complete reversal in the course of a half-hour presentation. What he needed now was that elusive “Wow!” factor. Time for a demonstration. The lights rose and Sven gave a quick run-down of the specs:
“The Yeskia 9mm has everything! We’ve thought of absolutely everything. Hell, you can even use it as a pregnancy test kit. It’s modeled on the Glock handgun with ceramic body and rubber grip. The major modification is a small scope which improves accuracy and doubles as the viewfinder for digicam and video. Camera has 10X optical zoom and shoots at 8 megapixels. Camcorder shoots Hi-Def RAW video and writes to a one terabyte removable memory device. Yes. You heard what I said. A one terabyte memory card. Awesome! The scope also detects infrared, so you can see live bodies through walls and it comes with night vision too.”
Sven pointed the scope around the room while the image was thrown to the big screens behind him. He zoomed in on a man picking his nose and he gave everybody a good view of a woman’s tonsils when she yawned.
“Now listen to this.” Sven pressed the play button and Ace of Base blasted through the hall. “It has the speed to pump out uncompressed audio and the audio processor has a dynamic range that rivals the best names in the industry—Bose, Blaupunkt, Bang & Olufsen, Yeskia. We’re in good company.”
By now, people were out of their chairs and swaying to the music. There were cheers and even a few lighters flickering on and off. Sven could feel Yeskia’s share prices rising and it made his heart warm. “Now let me tell about the Yeskia 9mm’s cellular telephony capabilities. The big story here is coverage. Our phone will be supported by unprecedented global coverage. If you subscribe to our plan, there will no longer be such a thing as roaming charges. Doesn’t matter where you call from or where you call to, it will be treated and billed as a local call. In fact, we’re so confident about our coverage, that we’ve given every member of the McMurdo Scott Base in the Antarctic their own cell phone and free service for a year.”
The lights dimmed again and the music grew ominous. “And now for the final demonstration.” Manikins dressed as street punks moved into view. Sven pointed at the first. A laser sighting placed a red dot on the manikin’s forehead. Sven squeezed the trigger and the manikin’s head exploded. “It has everything, my friends, absolutely everything!” The crowd went wild. People stood on their chairs and whistled. Buyers were already on their phones to head office asking for bigger budgets. Industry analysts were posting stories to their corporate blogs. Media pundits were dispatching stories to the national dailies. Sven smiled at the mild riot he’d unleashed and quietly slipped off the stage.
The driver was waiting for him at the rear door. “Get me outta here, Olaf.”
The man held open the door. As Sven brushed past, he caught a whiff of Olaf’s breath. The driver reeked of alcohol.
“Olaf? Have you been drinking?”
Olaf fumbled with the keys then dropped them on the ground. As he bent down to pick them up: “No, sir.”
“Olaf?”
“Yes?”
“Give me the keys.”
Olaf looked up with a sheepish grin and handed the keys to Sven.
“We can bring cell coverage to an entire planet but we can’t find a decent driver. Get in. We’re going to La Guardia, but it looks like I’m driving.”
Sven punched in the address and studied the directions while Olaf sat in the passenger seat singing an old song and staring out the window. The driving was more hectic than Sven had anticipated. It wasn’t like Stockholm. Here, cars came at you from every direction, and people honked their horns and stuck up their middle finger and rolled down their windows and swore at one another. Sven had to swerve to avoid a man pushing a grocery cart full of old clothes and when he righted the car, Olaf gripped his stomach and vomited all over the dash. The beautiful LCD display was covered in chunks of chili dog that oozed down the screen and made it impossible to read the map. Sven pulled a silk hanky from his jacket and held it out for Olaf to wipe down the screen, but Olaf was leaning way back in his seat with eyes closed and groaning. “Olaf!” Sven was angry. But Olaf batted away the hanky. Sven wasn’t about to wipe away his driver’s puke, so at the next stoplight, he rolled down his window and asked directions to the airport. It was a woman dressed smartly in a taupe suite, but when she caught a whiff of Olaf’s mess, she held her nose and pointed vaguely to the northeast and made a veering motion to the right.
Sven continued driving in the direction the woman had pointed. On the way in from the airport, Sven hadn’t paid attention. He’d been busy reading the latest financials and making notes for next week’s annual general meeting. He hadn’t noticed all the bridges and concrete and tall buildings and billboards and taxicabs and people swarming across the streets even when the stoplights said stop. But now, trying to navigate through the streets of Manhattan, the shock of it all was overwhelming. The worst part was that it was evening now and it was getting difficult to read the street signs. Sven noticed one big green sign pointing the way to the airport, but by the time he saw it, he had missed the cutoff and went speeding in the wrong direction. He kept looking for a place to turn around, but his nerves had gotten the best of him. After all the pressure of the presentation, his adrenalin was low, and with jet lag from the trip here, he was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to settle into the cushy chair of the Yeskia jet and nod off.
With another wrong turn, Sven found himself in an even stranger landscape: tenement buildings everywhere, and vacant lots and chain link fences and graffiti and old cars abandoned by the sides of the road. Sven slowed up and rolled down his window. There was a group of young men walking towards him on the road, which struck him as odd. He told them he was looking for La Guardia. The one standing closest reached behind him and pulled a 9mm beretta, a PX4 Storm, from out of his pants. He held a wide stance and pointed it at Sven’s forehead. “Get the fuck outta da car.”
Sven held his hands in the air, then cautiously lowered his left hand to unlatch the door. Raising his left hand again, he nudged open the door with his foot, then swung sideways and planted his feet on the pavement. Another of the men pulled Sven away from the car and gave him a hard shove to the sidewalk. The one with the gun leaned down and pointed it at Olaf: “You too. Hands up and get the fuck outta da car.”
“He’s sick,” Sven said.
“Did I ask your fuckin’ opinion?”
“But he’s sick.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Somebody whacked Sven across the jaw. He dropped to his knees and felt with his tongue where a molar had come loose.
The one with the gun motioned one of the others to get in the car and push Olaf out the passenger side. It was just a kid—a pimply teenager who kept schnooking back snot and wiping his nose on the sleeve of a dirty jean jacket. “But the guy puked,” he complained. “It smells like a cat’s been dead in here for a week.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Just get ‘im out an’ get the fuckin’ car to the chop shop. Puke don’t make no difference.”
“Now look here – ”
Another whack to the head and Sven was on his knees shaking gossamer cobwebs from his brain. There was a thud. Sven looked to one side and saw Olaf hit the pavement head first. His driver was unconscious. The car sped away with all the young men who’d been walking on the road. Now it was just Sven and the man with the beretta—“to finish the job” is what they’d all been saying.
“Look, I have money.” For the first time, it occurred to Sven that the man might kill him. “Let me show you something.” Sven reached into his pocket, but before he could withdraw it, the man had cocked the gun and was pressing it sharply into Sven’s temple. Sven gulped. He could feel the perspiration running down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. “Easy. It’s just a cell phone. You know Yeskia?”
The man gave no indication one way or the other.
“Yeskia? Cell phones? From Sweden?” Sven held up the cell phone. “This is what I do. I make cell phones. This is the latest. Not even on the market yet.”
“Know what I do?” The man spoke in a cold and even tone.
Sven shook his head.
“I steal cars.” The man smiled. “And yours is the latest. Not even on the market yet.” The man let fly with the back of his hand and sent the cell phone clattering down the sidewalk. “I couldn’t give a fuck about cell phones. I steal cars. Don’t need any fuckin’ phone to steal cars.”
“But you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand. You’ve got the latest in your pocket and it’s worth something. But like I said: I couldn’t give a fuck. I steal cars, not phones. I know cars, not phones. I see some rich fuck drivin’ in a limo and my fingers just itch to run the prick’s head under the wheels. Just the way I am I guess. Tell you what I’ll do.”
Sven looked up the barrel, imploring.
“I’ll let you live.” The man swung hard and struck Sven full in the face. Everything went black, then Sven hit the ground.
Sven couldn’t say how long he’d lain on the sidewalk, but it was dark when he came to. He tried to stand, but the ground whirled around and his legs buckled beneath him. He fell again, splayed across Olaf’s body. There was a buzzing in his head, but what hurt the most was a throbbing in his big toe. He wondered why a stubbed toe would scream for more attention than a powerful blow to the head. Sven rolled over and propped himself up against Olaf’s broad back. From this position, he could tilt back his head and feel the cool night air. He ran his tongue over parched lips. He was thirsty. Again he tried to stand, but fell against a low brick wall as the world spun away from him like a top on a warped table.
There was the sound of Ace of Base, clear, without distortion, breaking through the night air: “Happy Nation.” Sven had set it as his ringtone. Somebody was trying to call him. There, maybe ten meters away and gleaming in the moonlight, was Sven’s Yeskia 9mm cell phone. Sven crawled to the phone, tearing a hole in the left knee of his jeans, but by the time he’d pressed it to his ear, it had gone silent.
Sven dialed 911 instead. After two rings, a woman’s voice came on: “Hello, this is emergency services for New York City. What number are you calling from?”
Sven couldn’t remember. He owned the company. He had maybe a hundred different cell phone numbers. How the hell could he be expected to remember which he was using at any given moment.
“No need to get all snarky about it. Now what’s your situation?”
Sven explained that he’d been mugged and had his car stolen, that Olaf was unconscious, that he needed police and an ambulance.
“And what is your location?”
“I don’t know. I’m from Stockholm. I was on my way to La Guardia and got lost.”
The woman must have heard the anxiety in Sven’s voice because she spoke in reassuring tones. “No problem. No problem. We’ll find you. You say you’re talking on a cell phone, right?”
“Ya.”
“So we’ll find you with GPS.”
“GPS?”
Sven rolled back against the low brick wall. GPS. Shit! They’d forgotten to program the phones with GPS.