Darn you, Keefie!

Glutton for punishment, aren't you, Keefie? So you tagged me. Huh! You tagged me with "The Damned Book Tag" and blogger honour dictates that I follow the requirements of the tag.

So here goes:

1. Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages

The nearest book happens to be "Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across The Firm". Hey! Don't shoot me, you said, "the nearest book" not "the nearest interesting book. " The book is a humongous 668 pages excluding the fluff about authors and publishers so I think it qualifies.

2. Open the book to Page 123 and quote the 5th sentence

One, two, three, four five. Okay, that's, "A full 60 percent of the graduates and 59 percent of the corporate recruiters responded to the survey - a very high rate of return by corporate standards."

I have no idea what the authors are talking about. Nor do you, so we're on even ground. It looks like someone conducted a survey and the authors think 60 percent (American spelling; we Indians would write per cent. Oh, who am I fooling. We'd write "per cent", "percent", "persent", "present" and anything else that sounds like what it sounds like to us, which may not be what it sounds like to you) of the graduates responding is a fulsome figure. By "corporate standards" too, so it might be rather important.

How this impacts you, dear casual reader, I have no idea.

3. Post the next 3 sentences

Okay, here they are:
Sentence 1: "Here's how the survey worked."
Sentence 2: "Questionnaires were mailed to a random sample of MBA candidates from 82 business schools."
Sentence 3: "The recipients answered 37 questions about the school's performance, which were substantially weighted to reflect how closely they related to overall satisfaction."

Coupled with the title of my last post, "Entry from backside only", Sentence 3 seems to be edging towards adult content. Of course, only an adult would do stuff as boring as conduct a survey and report how many questions were there and talk about "substantially weighted" stuff.

4. Tag 5 people

Okay, here's where the engine splutters and dies. I know five people, of course. In fact, I know substantially more than five people. However, they don't blog fluff like this (I mean, if I tag Seth Godin he won't forgive me in a hurry. I really know him! I mean, I know his email address and all! Nor would Hank Mishkoff, who met me via a typo in another of my blogs. Nor would Tom Peters, who knows me through his employees because I posted a rather pungent thing about Dubai as a comment to one of his posts. Hmmm... what I'd said was, "Dubai shines, but with whose sweat?" [or something like that]. Nor would Cindy Oriente of The World Healing Network, who does such good work gathering prayers for those who need them. Nor would Bob Baker, who shares his expertise with every writer seeking publication) . What can I say? I know celebrities.

Since most, if not all, track their names via Google Alerts, I suspect they'll see this post. What they do with it is another matter. Thanks, Keefie.

Oh, almost forgot: Since I don't know five bloggers, you're TAGGED! Yup, if you're reading this, YOU'RE TAGGED. Do the thing and post a link in a comment.

Deepak