Things you thought you’d never see

Aren’t most of the people you know pretty reasonable? They go to work, have dinner, buy Christmas or Hanukkah presents, enjoy their books or golf game or the Patriots and a cup of coffee. It always a surprise then to find some of our more prominent fellow citizens a bit out of control.

Take Mark Hurd, for example. He used to be the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, the old-fashioned, dependable computer maker started by the smart but stodgy Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Hewlett-Packard has been known more recently by a friskier name, H-P.

Anyway, Hurd had a relationship—use your imagination—with Jodie Fisher, a porn actress whom he hired as a “consultant” and to whom he complained about his wife. That’s not surprising.         Eventually he was fired by the H-P board, who heard that Hurd had told Fisher company secrets. They decided they couldn’t trust him to level with them. That’s not surprising either.

What is surprising, according to a delicious November 6-7 Wall Street Journal article that chronicled Hurd’s love life in some detail, is H-P’s method under Hurd of drumming up customers.

I quote: “The CEO’s unofficial chief of staff, Caprice McIlvaine, helped devise a marketing plan in which customers’ executives were invited to spend time with Mr. Hurd at hotel receptions. Ms. McIlvaine hired contractors to staff the events. One was Ms. Fisher . . . [Her] job was to rank H-P customers . . . by importance and introduce the executives to Mr. Hurd.”

Folks, do you know any executives who’d run a marketing program like this? If you were Mr. Hurd, wouldn’t you want to pretend all your customers were important? Wouldn’t you want to greet each of them personally in turn? If you needed a go-between, wouldn’t it be a member of your sales force who might actually have a clue as to who were the important customers? If you had women executives as customers, wouldn’t you risk a raised eyebrow when they noticed the “staff members” were bimbos?

In any case, Hurd, who prior to this mess had a good reputation as a corporate leader, is now a co-president at Oracle. The story isn’t over, so you might want to follow that company’s new marketing practices, not to mention Hurd’s love life.

The second recent development you probably could never have imagined is the return of the gladiators. Ultimate fighting, a form of hand-to-hand combat, appeared in Boston this past summer at the TD Garden to the joy of those who like to see one man beating up another. It’s a combination of wrestling, boxing, martial arts and a bloody mess, all for no other purpose than to enjoy the violence. They call it mixed martial arts so they don’t have to call it cockfighting, a term John McCain used when he saw it. (Finally, something John McCain and I can agree on.)

This is good old American know-how at work. It started in the 1990s. Viewers pay to see the guys go at it, and a lively betting industry has developed around the bouts. Mike Ross and others city leaders have supported it as a boon to the economy. It probably does help our unemployment situation, but wouldn’t most men prefer to earn a living as a UPS driver or a McDonald’s franchisee or a teacher rather than participating in an activity popularized by owners of Roman slaves?

You probably don’t know anyone who would submit to this kind of “sport?” I bet you don’t even know anyone who would want to see this kind of slaughter.

As you might expect the human combat has attracted sports celebrities as defenders. Shaq apparently enjoys it. Strange to think that quarterback Michael Vick served a prison sentence for operating a dog-fighting ring, which doesn’t seem too different. Maybe it’s that the dogs didn’t have a choice in the matter, but human males do.

Harking back to the violence of earlier times may be making a comeback in some quarters. I’m just hoping that we won’t be presented with public hangings next.