All The Good Names Were Taken

Still trying to figure out how to make my business blog relevant or at least entertaining. That said, one amusing thing happened to me today. Or at least I'm trying to be amused by it. I was supposed to interview someone at 1 p.m., a business owner, and I was on the conference call, right on time. At 1:03, though, the media relations person came onto the call, and she informed me that the CEO had been called away on an "emergency," and that he wouldn't be able to do the interview for another week or two.

This was rather troubling, since I had told my editor I'd be interviewing him today, and turning in the story a few hours later.

I figured we could probably wait a couple days, though, and I asked if I could email him a few questions, and get his thoughts for the article that way.

She hedged, saying she wasn't sure if he'd be able to email me this week, and so suddenly I'm thinking that this emergency must be pretty bad. Perhaps he's broken up over the death in a family, and he just can't focus on emailing anybody. Maybe he's been told he has three months to live, and he doesn't want to waste any of his time doing a phone or email interview (hey, I wouldn't either). But, no, I eventually get the media relations person to admit that the emergency has to do with a business merger, and apparently, since this is a good merger, it doesn't sound like much of an emergency either.

"So what about the email?" I ask again. "Could I email him a few questions, and get him in the article that way."

"Well, he really won't have access to email until July 24th."

"Is he stranded on a deserted island?" I want to ask that, but I don't. In fact, I know someone who is traveling to Antarctica in December, and even he will be able to email people from there. Instead, I gamely accept her answer, which would have worked on me in 1995, when email was still somewhat a novelty.

I suddenly feel sorry for the public relations person. "I don't want to burn any bridges," she says, maybe realizing how lame her client's dodge sounds.

"You haven't," I say, and she hasn't, though I feel a little burned. It's not that he bailed on the interview and made me wind up disappointing my editor, who expected five profiles for this article, instead of four. It was the lingering smell of that reason for a CEO of a multimillion dollar company not being able to reply to a few of my questions.

No email? I haven't heard such an improbable excuse since my junior year in high school, when I asked a girl to the prom, and she told me she was going to be busy watering the lawn. What really hurt was that she lived in a high-rise apartment. But I think I'm getting off my point... Did I have a point? Will I ever have one? Stay tuned...