False Bravado

One of the songs I used to own on 45 rpm record was Baby Come Back by the late 1970s soft pop group Player. Part of the lyrics:

All day long, wearing a mask of false bravado
Trying to keep up a smile that hides a tear

It was only later that I learned about the true nature of false bravado — defined by the dictionary as “defiant or swaggering behavior” but meaning ever so much more.

Which is where my thoughts turned when I came across the front page of Tumbleweed Communications which says:

Within 5 years all Internet communications will be secure and Tumbleweed® Secure Guardian™ will be the industry standard for securing every channel of Internet communication, for every enterprise, everywhere.

By combining industry-leading expertise from across the group of companies, Aliant utilizes the Aliant Premium^TM Model to deliver unique, end-to-end solutions to customers.

I think my New Year’s Resolution for 2002 is to avoid doing business with companies that don’t know how to accurately and honestly describe what they do. Avoid false bravdo, in other words. Here’s my suggestion for Aliant in this regard:

Aliant is a bunch of old telephone companies, plus a bunch of other companies we bought to go with them, all joined together so we can save money and try to appear more powerful. We pretend we’re fuzzy and eastern, but we’re really just a branch plant of BCE, which also owns the Globe and Mail and CTV. We’re trying to get all these companies to work together, but it’s really hard and so far we’ve had a few successes but otherwise generally mediocre results. It seems it’s harder than we thought to move beyond thinking like a monopoly: it’s buried really, really deep in our DNA.