Do you reckon Sir Richard Branson has decent internet? I bet he does. I bet he’s constantly streaming and downloading and uploading at a gazillion bits per second from his Caribbean island. I bet he’s got his own satellite in some sort of geosynchronous orbit above him, launched during one of his Virgin Galactic test runs. I bet it relays all his data so smoothly, so perfectly, so well, that he never sees so much as a Netflix glitch or an iPlayer spinning wheel.
“Excuse me sir,” says an assistant approaching him on the verandah. The billionaire looks up from his lounger and rests an elbow on a tanned knee. The assistant continues.
“We’ve got this er, email to send out to all our U.K. Virgin Media customers, and marketing wondered if you’d take a look at it.”
“Tell me, is it written in an overly friendly and informal style that skirts on the borders of patronising and sarcastic?”
“Yes Mr Branson. It follows the guidelines.”
“And is it promising something vaguely beneficial that isn’t quite specific enough to be promising or beneficial?”
“We followed the guidelines, sir. It’s the one about us upgrading the WiFi ‘in your area’ at no extra cost, etc.”
“Ah yes,” Branson slips back into his sunglasses and relaxes onto the sun lounger. There’s a moment for the ocean to breathe: in the distance below, it crashes into the white sand and seeps back to the dark blue-green of the wide Atlantic. Palm trees whisper on the gentle evening breeze, and above them the pink clouds hang like drapes beneath the purple night. A few stars even begin to twinkle.
“And is the WiFi upgraded in their area? Really?” He asks. The assistant flashes back a confident smile.
“I’ve no idea, sir.”
Branson smiles too, as though sharing some sort of in-joke. Far above him, there’s a single star, a tiny dot of white, motionless in the night sky. If he looks carefully, he knows it won’t be long before it would look like that one man-made glint of sun-kissed space-aluminium was actually winking at him.
I bet he does have good internet. He’d be really annoyed, wouldn’t he, if say, most evenings the signal cut out six feet away from the router at fifteen minute intervals and he had to dance around like a gazelle in pyjamas, with his smartphone, looking for a signal. Imagine if he suddenly couldn’t look up how to fly a balloon over the Himalayas or lay a hyper-loop across America! No building a spaceship today, Richard, the internet’s broken; you’ll have to look at other ways to buy off bits of the NHS now, won’t you?
I guess I might read a book; that might help. I’d phone for support but as VM also have my landline contract, I have a feeling I’d be paying the gamekeepers to hire the poachers. Plus it never seems to go well that, and they always want me to use the chat bot. And the chat bot makes me feel uncomfortable, in a sort of ‘other end of the Turing Test’ way.
What I really need to do is ask to speak to Sir Richard. They’d patch me through, wouldn’t they? I mean, if I’ve interpreted the chummy communication properly, his door ought to be so wide open, it’s off its Caribbean hinges! He’s bound to want to talk to someone with about as much money as he makes in ten minutes of high-performance interest, isn’t he? I mean who’s not for the little guy?
Well. So long as he can still sip a stockpiled can of Virgin Cola, tune in to Cash in the Attic and check up on Elon’s Twitter, I guess he’s happy.
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