When you're reading about a new cabling product just introduced by Company X and you're left with only a city location to hold onto, what good is that?
When you're based in New England, as our magazine is, you learn to live with what outsiders say and think about you.
OK, so we natives sometimes talk funny. Hey wait a minute-I don't! But if you insist on an authentic Yankee twang, let me introduce you to my dad. ("Yessah. Great day out they-ah.")
We also have a fatalist love affair-every single year, doggone-it-with the Red Sox. Eternally hopeful, forgiving to the nth degree, yet paralyzed by prospects of inevitable doom or letdown. It's a vicious circle, but we can't get enough of it. (Unfortunately, we have enough New York fans in our midst who will be glad to remind us how futile our hopes are.)
New Englanders also have a peculiar knack for sense of direction in a region known for roads that seem to go nowhere and where direct-route and Boston are never said in the same mouthful. This is a plus. It's a great place for men who don't like to ask for directions. Because there are none.
The roads and former cow paths are ancient. It's the way it's always been, and to undo it all would mean uprooting entire neighborhoods and even cities. The "Big Dig" highway modernization project through downtown Boston is proof that maybe it would have been a good idea to just leave things alone.
But that doesn't cut it in the information-providing business, and it certainly doesn't cut it for you when you're reading about a new cabling product just introduced by Company X and you're left hanging for directions, with only a city location to hold onto. What good is that? It may make the company happy to get a free plug for its headquarters, but how does that help you?
It doesn't. And it's time we put an end to it. Right now. You see, before the Web was the common man's happenin' place, a typical way for magazines to provide further info was to list the company location within the text so that if you wanted to badly enough, you could call directory assistance, ask for the number for Company X, and then hope and pray you got something other than Bridgit Digit on the other end.
What a pain.
You guys and ladies are too busy for all that stuff. Most of you, even if you're a computer-nerd like me, have access to the Web on your home or business computer, and you not only know how to use it, you like it.
Never mind the rather overwhelming fact that part of this magazine's mission includes an understanding that "keeping pace with...changes requires access to current information..." Since we're here to help you design and install the very infrastructures that make www.com a reality, it only makes sense that we begin pointing you in the same direction for additional "current information"-to the company's Web address and not its hometown.
So, beginning with this issue of Cabling Installation & Maintenance, and forthcoming in our sibling publications Cabling Installation & Maintenance Europe and Cabling Product News, we'll direct you to a company's main Web page whenever we reference a particular product within an article. We can't help but believe that helping you point-and-click for more info will be more useful than dial-and-pray.
Long overdue, you say? Hey, we're New Englanders. The Red Sox have gotten off to an awesome start, our hearts are racing again, we're not talking as weird as we usually do, and in all the excitement-well, we realize that just because we know how to "get they-ah from he-ah" doesn't mean that everyone else does, too.
Steve Smith
Executive Editor
[email protected]