I See… a Very Bad Psychic in Your Future
I don’t know the standards for accreditation in the psychic profession, or in fortunetelling, or in soothsaying, but they can’t be low enough. There is room here at the low end for an enterprising individual to enter the field and start a small practice, providing that the cost of entry is not too high.
Examples from other sectors of the economy are instructive.
There are many providers of car repair, haircuts, grilled foods, spirits, clothing, live music, and a thousand others, that fall into the lower quartile of quality in anyone’s estimation, including their mothers.
These self-starters don’t quite seem to know what they are doing and they do it no better than a random person plucked off the street might, but the fact doesn’t weigh on them and they don’t see why it should weigh on you.
They do not seek to deceive; nowhere do you find a promise from them that they offer up the best meal you ever had, or the finest clothing you ever donned, or the most sublime music that ever lighted upon your ears, or that in the first case mentioned, that they even know very much about car engines at all.
That is not the nature of the transaction.
Instead the implied promise is that they will satisfy this craving you have to do something about this thing that has been getting on your nerves – your windblown hair, your knocking engine, your worn pants –that will last at least as long as it takes for you to find someone who really knows what they’re doing.
They are available, and they are cheap.
While someone at the office says in passing, “that’s not what I would call much of a haircut, it looks more like you stuck your head in a large blender which included a fair number of blunt razor edges among its ingredients,” you do not hang your head in shame.
You instead say, “could be, but it only cost me $4.49 with the coupon from the local flyer. Beat that.”
Well, and the fellow can’t come close to beating that, and who’s looking pretty silly now?
Well, you still are, don’t get me wrong, you still have that haircut after all, but this other fellow I speak of has been taken down a notch or two.
And so it goes with the warm sarsaparilla you are served, the soggy sandwiches, the pair of pants sporting a color most ordinarily seen in paints reserved for painting sea buoys, and the music from the bandstand which comes across best right before and right after it is actually played.
There is no sense of betrayal however, or of being ‘taken.’
You, the consumer, have made you choice and gone with a substandard provider in the name of convenience, cost, or a simple liking for the cut-rate experience.
You. to take it further, have at times yourself provided such bottom-of-the-barrel services in whatever it is you do for a living, in the output of your kitchen or tap, in your own music-making abilities, perhaps in your own conversation.
Sometimes the low end is good enough across a wide range of activities, and the entrepreneur hopes to find the same is true — as we first discussed — in the fields of fortunetelling, psychic predictions, and the entire array of activities which might cluster in a room containing a crystal ball.
This is especially to be hoped by those who have exhibited no talent in this regard to date, even you might say, have exhibited a dis-talent or an anti-talent if those phrases haven’t yet been claimed.
There are those of us of whom it is said that they don’t exactly seem to know what is going on around them at the time it is going on around them.
How is it, they ask, these naysayers, that anyone can be expected to believe that such a person can tell the future when they can’t even tell the present?
This is a legitimate complaint but all I can say is that these people haven’t spent any time taking a thorough look at the business proposal.
What you might call the theme of the plan is that there is this unaddressed market for bad psychics.
By this theory, people have a natural aversion to actually knowing the future which, let us admit it, may be great but then again may simply stretch to the horizon like a boring landscape you trek across until you fall off a cliff.
But they also don’t wish to leave their options unexplored.
The program under discussion will allow them to take a run at understanding the future, fail at the attempt entirely, and then walk away knowing they have given it the old college try.
There is room at the very bottom of this industry, I will tell the banker that I plan to ask to fund this venture, room so near the bottom that it might as well be underground, for someone truly and naturally bad at this.
This operation will be the pawn shop in contrast to the fancy jewelry store, the check cashing outfit in contrast to the high powered Wall Street bank, the last location of a failed fast food franchise in contrast to the elegant steakhouse.
The venture will own the low end, and leave the high end to the others.
Let them slug it out between them! “Knock yourselves out, boys,” we will chortle as they go about comparing whose predictions are right more often.
In the meantime we will corner the non-prediction market.
It will be part of the messaging to the client base that the proprietor is really no good at this.
Your Guess is as Good as Mine could be the tag line, or Just Couldn’t Say.
The image of a man shrugging his shoulders with a bunch of questions marks gathered around his head will be the logo. This lets them know what they are getting into, and generally adjust their expectations.
Let us observe me at my table, draped with an ornate covering, the table that is, not me, with a crystal ball on a perch of marble in the middle of the table. Now, study my methods.
Me: (rubbing my hands over the glass globe): As I thought.
The Client: Tell me!
Me: Nada. Zilch. Can’t see a thing. That’ll be fifteen bucks.
This is no different that our usual run of luck playing the lottery or competing at those games along the midway at the carnival. We step away losers from those contests reasonably satisfied. We didn’t really expect to win in the first place, but somehow we felt compelled to try.
So it is in this case.
The thinking will be, or at least the thinking that I will try to foster, will be one of ‘look, you and I sat down at the table knowing it was a long shot. All I can do is frame the situation up so that if good things are going to happen, they have a place to happen in. If the Fates had something to say to you, I think they would have found a way to say it, don’t you? We gave them every chance.”
This will be greeted with a measure of relief.
‘At least the news wasn’t horrible,’ someone might say to himself as he puts his jacket on and walks out the door.
Again, observe my methods.
Me: (rubbing my hands over the glass globe). Hmm.
The Client: Oh, what do you see? What is in my future?
Me: Same old, same old. Different day, same baloney. That’ll be $20.
(The price has gone up from the last transaction because of inflation.)
If they have specific questions I can be even more direct.
Me: (rubbing my hands over the glass globe.) Hmmm.
The Client: What do you see? I’ve had the strangest feeling that I’m going to meet a mysterious woman. Are you picking that up?
Me: Nope. That’ll be twenty-five dollars.
The Client: No mysterious woman named Fiona or Esmeralda or Vanessa?
Me: Nope. And anyone that goes by one of those three names sounds like trouble to me right out of the gate. Doesn’t it to you?
The Client (who has never looked at it this way before, purses his lips and nods to himself): Well, you may have something there. You just may have something there.
I might have a little give, a little flexibility for my favorite clients, and go so far as to predict what I see for them in the next five minutes – “I see you sitting here still,” or “the image is strong within me of you putting your coat on,“ or “I see you writing a check. That’ll be $30.”
I really think that I will be doing my clients a favor since taken as a whole the future is all too terrifying. Let us tear off one small piece at a time. That seems to be enough for human endurance, and satisfies the daily minimum requirements set by the FDA.
We all have enough news in our lives, have suffered enough blows, have undergone enough excitement.
What I am selling is pure unadulterated boredom and the sense that though things might be unexciting enough right now to bore the spit out of your mouth…. that is unlikely to change. And that, brother and sister, I put before your consideration, is a good thing.
My clients will walk away from these appointments in a soothing state of pure lack of expectations, a nirvana of boredom, and a sublime sense of having dodged some bullets, whether they be named Fiona, Esmeralda, or Vanessa.
In fact, it’s what I see for you, my friend, an unending stretch of non-events stretching to the horizon, no great mountains to scale, but no great crevasses to fall into either.
The temperature is more or less moderate, neither freezing nor blazing, the people around you will be more or less nice but no better or worse than that, and all in all you won’t need more than a teaspoon to measure out the thrills and despairs of the next twenty years.
There, doesn’t that feel better? That’ll be $35.
