Error Incorporated

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PHONE RINGS. LINE ONE:

-Hello, Error Incorporated. "We make your mistakes for you." This is Error Associate Peter speaking. How may I be of assistance?

-Good afternoon, Peter. This is Paul. I was given your number by a new business associate of mine. He wrote it hurriedly on the back of his card and handed it to me at the end of a long discussion about boosting profits in our respective industries. You offer an invaluable service, he told me, or is it product? Excuse me, did you say, "Terror? Terror Incorporated"?

-No, no. Error. Error Incorporated. "The most promising, fastest growing Fortune 500 company on the scene," according to a recent Forbes survey. Surely you've heard of us: "Make no mistake, Error Incorporated embodies some of the most time-tested and integral principles of corporate America," according to a Business Week report. And the Wall Street Journal writes glowingly that "Error Incorporated boasts a quintessential corporate culture, a potent mix of the shrewd and the professional that can enhance any corporate endeavor." Here's The Financial Times: "Error Incorporated relies heavily on time-tested market savvy and cutting edge innovative strategies to achieve tremendous profits. A solid company with a bright future."

-I could've sworn you said "terror."

-Paul, you misheard. We buy, sell, and trade errors for many companies worldwide. We make individualized need assessments for each business and come up with the most profit-enhancing errors possible. We also sell general errors that can be adapted to suit any company at any stage of its development.

-Okay, Peter, I'm trying to understand. How can an error-

-"You've got problems. We've got errors." The ones that will benefit your company most. Let me tell you the unspoken secret of the business world, Paul-error. Error pays.

-Well, the way our revenues have gone lately, my company can't exactly afford any more mistakes. We're so deep in the red this past year-

-That's your first mistake. We'll give it to you free, this first error.

-Excuse me? I didn't intend-

-There's no charge. The first error is free.

-What error?

-Failure to believe in mistakes, Paul. As a businessman, you have absolutely got to believe in the power of mistakes. This is ancient knowledge. To err is human. And, of course, to profit is divine. The two are not unconnected. You must believe in the power of error.

-You're selling a belief?

-An erroneous belief. To be precise.

-I see. I think.

-It's not so complicated. Errors are quite profitable. Your company is probably selling fewer mistakes than it is aware of, I'm afraid, and certainly fewer mistakes than it otherwise could benefit by. This is sometimes the case. We find that businesses make an incredible number of profits from errors, in one form or another. In fact some companies and even entire industries are actually 100 percent error based. It's a fascinating science. Here at Error Incorporated, we're the experts in errorology.

-Go on.

-Planned obsolescence, surely you've heard of it?

-Purposefully designing products to wear out sooner than they need too-but I haven't heard it articulated that way in years, it's so cynical and misleading, unlike, say, "product optimization." Far more accurate.

-Call it what you will, by all means. The optimization of error. Nice ring that.

-But look, I'm in foods with the GleamRight Foods Corporation. Unfortunately food is not something that wears out like doorknobs and car parts, so it's difficult to optimize in the same way. You eat our product once and it's gone. I don't see how we can do any more along these lines. Believe me, we've tried. Once we even brought in a world-class philosopher to help us with this optimization puzzle. At first we thought he was coming up with some interesting ideas, like selling what he called "imaginary food". Then we pressed him on who would buy such a product, and he replied, "Imaginary people, I suppose." Using imaginary dollars, you see? We got rid of him quick after that. He didn't seem to mind. Maybe he only imagined that we hired him. That's what we decided, anyway, that the guy believed he was a figment of his own imagination. A real figment, this philosopher. A real fig.

-He works for us now, Paul. Not in house, we're too efficient for that. On contract. He's an inspiration really.

-You don't say.

-Think, now. Error Incorporated has performed wonders for your competition. Profits are sky high with them, and you know it. Maybe that's what your new-found associate was trying to tell you on the plane. Error Incorporated, for such a young company, is generating enormous respect in the business press. Why do you think GleamRight Foods has tanked in recent quarters? You're not one of our clients, are you, Paul?

SILENCE ON THE LINE. THEN PETER CONTINUES SPEAKING:

-So would you like to go ahead with that purchase?

-I'd like to inspect the product first.

-Paul, you have to trust us on this. Look, that philosopher really got one over on you, way more than you understand. I'll bet he was chuckling when he walked out the door because it was killing him how many real dollars you were saying goodbye to. With all due respect, Paul, better to err than to not try at all. Blank checks are what we sell here at Error Incorporated.

-Excuse me? Blank checks?

-Our mistake, you say? Certainly. One of our first and by far our mightiest. We've been banking the profits ever since. Sounds like a terrible foul-up, doesn't it?

-A profitable foul-up, apparently.

-Exactly.

-But how does it work? You don't cover those checks yourself.

-Guess who does.

-The customers?

-Who else? By way of mistake, that's how they pay. By their natural proclivity to err. The manner of error scarcely matters. As a way of streamlining our business, we sell all errors for the same price: a million dollars or 10 percent of your company's profit that is attributable to the error in the first five years after the error is fully implemented. The purchase price includes semi-annual consultation services throughout the five year window. It's absolutely risk-free. You pay no money down, and subsequently only 10 percent of the error-driven profit, or a million dollars, whichever is less.

-Error pays so well?

-Here at Error Incorporated we make mistakes with the best of them-our bottom line can assure you of that.

-Then can you explain why I'm still having trouble grappling with this idea of buying and selling mistakes-

-I'll tell you straight out, Paul-though I won't name names-some people, even the those who seem to be the best of businessmen, don't have the stomach to take an honest look at the real nature of their business. It's disgraceful, really, the way these incredibly high-paid executives are able to shield the truth from themselves, or pretend to. For some reason, the higher up the ladder you go the more the executives wish to remain oblivious to the error behind their profit. We understand this impulse, though we don't have the luxury of similarly indulging, since we are in the business of fully and directly knowing the error of our ways. Here at Error Incorporated we cannot afford and in fact do not much appreciate this sort of executive irresponsibility. Just let us know if you can't handle it, Paul. Fortunately, we've found that to compete with the best, most businessmen are perfectly willing to acknowledge the inherent beauty of their past, present, and future profits from error, in error, by error, of error. In error we trust, you know.

-Why do I keep hearing you say the word "terror"?

-You have ear problems, Paul. Ear problems. Maybe wax. I suggest you get it out. I know a good doctor or two. You do want to play with the big girls and boys, don't you Paul?

-If only I could make it make sense.

-Look, Paul. Error is wrong, obviously. We make no bones about-if you must. But it's the nature of the system. What is, is. And what is, must be. And what must be, must be good. And so, clearly now, what is wrong is a delight. It must be, because what is wrong is what works. What is wrong is what sells. You have to be willing to be wrong in this real world we call business. I'm sure you are familiar with all those traditional, supposedly astute, business aphorisms: "Innovate or Die" and "Lead or Bleed"? I'm not saying you can get no utility from these ideas. But for the biggest bang for the buck, you need to think more dramatically and mistakenly, Paul. Thus, "Death is Innovation." By thinking erroneously, you see that there are huge profits to be made in death, and not only for morticians. Someone has to clean up every catastrophe. It takes money. Catastrophe is dollars. Likewise: "Blood leads," not "Lead or Bleed." The "blood error" as we call it is often crucial and not only in the international operations of transnational corporations, but there especially. These corporations understand the often remarkable inverse correlation between the quality of humans rights in a country and the quality of its investment climate. You have a sense of what I mean, no doubt. The wrong is the real. It's a fact of nature.

-Peter, when you say "wrong," do you by any chance mean "efficient"?

-Sure, sure. "Efficient," fortuitous, beneficially, to us and our clients, that is. That's another way of saying the same thing, I suppose, in a useful, mistaken sort of way.

-Error is legal?

-Is gold precious? We're Fortune 500, Paul. For the most part, what we say goes-as you well know.

-And your track record?

-That record is older than we are, by far. This goes way back to when corporations were first chartered. In 1601 Queen Elizabeth chartered the East India Trading Company and by 1700 the British had gained "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" especially from the rich Indian province of Bengal-once incredibly prosperous and advanced, before the British arrived, but today home to two of the leading symbols of poverty, unfortunately, home to the cities of Bangladesh and Calcutta. So you see, mistakes of a sort were made. Very profitable mistakes. Powerful errors rooted in the laws of nature. It may be tragic, but it's true. In fact we realized that tragedy was profitable so early that, believe it or not, our business originally incorporated as Hamartia Inc. But it was too Greek to too many people. It turned out to be Greek to us as well. We thought hamartia meant tragic flaw, you know, like our teachers told us, a moral thing, but it goes deeper than that. Precisely speaking, hamartia derives from the Greek hamartanein, "to miss the mark, err." So it's a rational issue. Irrational, that is. Error, the stuff of life. Now here we are, Error Incorporated.

-Strange how it rhymes with "terror."

-You have to get over that, Paul. You're a businessman, after all. Surely you are aware there was massive error in food long before genetically modifieds came along. In fact the food industry has a long and daunting record of profit by error that challenges the glorious histories of even the most error-advanced industries in the world.

-Peter, you're not one of those who believes there is something wrong with genetically modified foods are you? We prefer to think of them as "ingenuity enhanced."

-Sure, sure, of course, Paul. The point is, we all make mistakes. Some incomprehensibly huge, and profitable. Some less so, that's all. Error, it's an art.

-We goof, I guess.

-Go astray.

-Screw up, I'm afraid.

-Get it wrong.

-Blunder, unfortunately.

-And make the big bucks, Paul.

-Which we could use right about now at GleamRight Foods, Peter, I can tell you that. But with this idea of hamartia, I guess you started out thinking you could sell flaws-flaws and vice-but PR was an issue, I suppose. So you made a mistake there that didn't pay.

-Not at all. It was a very educational mistake. Knowledge was our reward. Some mistakes are like that-you get smart before you get rich. We learned. We switched to "Error." It polled well.

-Too bad it rhymes with "terror."

-Most people don't notice that.

-The inevitability of error.

-It keeps you up with the competition. Remember them, Paul?

-How much did you say it cost, a single error?

-Do we have a deal?

-You've got me thinking.

-I just don't give away our services for free, Paul. Remember, this conversation is recorded.

-When did you mention that?

-My mistake.

-I see.

SILENCE ON THE PHONE. THEN PAUL SPEAKS AGAIN:

-You got me there.

-We know our business. We've patented the rights to commodified error.

-I'm impressed.

-It was inspired, I'll admit. The courts came through for us.

-I'll say it again-

-No need. Innovation should be rewarded. It's well understood. The patent was key though-we got it on "error and error consultation," as we understand it.

-Okay, I'm just wondering: how exactly do you understand it?

-Our patented definition of error is spelled out in over 800,000 pages, Paul. You can look it up.

-You've covered it all then.

-And we've recently followed through with several related patents extending the definition to where we feared there might be certain loopholes.

-Can't be too careful.

-Do we have a deal?

-Seems like it would be an error not to go ahead and purchase a mistake.

-Something like that. And a damn shame.

-I see.

-It would be tragic to miss this opportunity to err. To properly err.

-Tragic for whom, I wonder.

-All around, Paul, all around.

-I have another question, Peter. This corporation of yours. Has it filed any other patents?

-Many.

-"Deceit"? Did you patent anything like that? Or "fraud"? "Lie"? "Forgery"?

-Certainly not. Not insofar as they may not be considered errors, that is.

-Well, then, have you got anything similar that I might rightfully purchase. You know, in case something-unbecoming-might come of say an error that blows back? An unfortunate blowback error.

SILENCE. THEN PETER SPEAKS:

-This is an issue that usually comes up later.

-I'm interested in it now, Peter.

SILENCE AGAIN. THEN PETER SPEAKS:

-"Judicious Equivocation." That's the name of the patent that I believe you are referring to. Not "lying," not "deceit," not "forgery." You understand. We have our principles, after all. We do sell several types of "Judicious Equivocation."

-It sounds rich.

-We expect approval of this patent in a few months. We have terribly high expectations for it.

-I can imagine.

-There is already tremendous demand.

-You don't say.

-I certainly do.

-Then you're on, Peter. I will buy one general error on behalf of GleamRight Foods Corporation.

-Excellent.

-And regarding myself personally, I would like to reserve one judicious equivocation in my own name, if I may at this time.

-As you wish.

-By the way, what's the going price for the J.E.?

-Half a million. Plenty of protection at a bargain price. Sold?

-Sold.

-Wonderful, Paul. You and your corporation won't regret it.

-I expect so, Peter. I hope you don't mind my telling you that it actually feels okay to fully embrace the terror- I mean the error of our ways. It truly does. I guess I only needed to have it explained, so that I could understand it in the proper way. I suppose most people in my line of work have a more intuitive grasp of this sort of thing. But for me, at least, it's comforting to hear it spelled out straight. And so I salute you and the products and the service you provide, you and everyone at Error Incorporated.

-Glad to hear it, Paul, glad to hear it. May you always err!

-Amen, Peter!

-That's the deal, Paul. That's the deal.