Prophecies of the day

I once wrote a blog on how people are dead keen on horoscopes. A former editor of mine would grab the afternoon tabloid from my hands if I had bought one on my lunch break and then flip fast forward to the forecasts for the day. Once she was done with that, my paper was mine again; the rest of it was not relevant.

Then I worked with Internet sites on astrology. Which meant that I had to do a lot of research to find out just what people wanted from them, what kind of stuff they wanted to read and how deep they were willing to go online. It was amazing that so many would even plunk down money to learn that they would be married in such-and-such year and find a new job say when and have to deal with a personal/professional crisis then and not now. But I was and still am a bit of a cynic. It doesn’t really make sense to me to consult anyone who does not know me about what will happen to me.

And as for horoscopes – well, I have to confess this one: when I was just starting out as a journalist, I have on occasion had to juggle around predictions for the week if the astrologer who normally sent them had been derelict in his duty and we were horoscope-less for at least that day that I was making the relevant pages of the newspaper. Which meant that even if I just moved the forecasts around, changing them slightly, it really made little difference. It worked – the astrologer never objected and the reading audience lapped it all up.

A few years after that, I was in charge of an online astrology portal (almost) that had a number of astrologers on board to answer queries for a fee. Since it was essentially e-commerce, and I was rather averse to dealing with people who had some kind of beef about the money they spent that was not being realised in the way they would prefer, I stayed out of it. But then I was asked to filter the experts and retain only those who were really worth having, contracts renegotiated and re-signed to the company’s satisfaction rather than that of the astrologer. I was only the editor, I protested fairly violently, but no one would listen. So I girded my loins, swallowed my qualms and got down to the job.

It was an interesting but exhausting business. Each of them was so eager to please, so keen to stay in the loop we had created for them that they bent over practically backwards to make sure they were pleasing me and the chappie who was in charge of the money part of the deal. Each insisted on charting my astrological profile and telling me what my fate was all about, past and present. None of which made me happy, since all I wanted to do was get out of there and either get back to work or go home, depending on what time it was that day. The experts worked very hard to do their jobs, my colleague worked even harder to get me to stop being my usual nasty self and just hear them out, even if I had to be in a semi-asleep daze to do it. The net result of the exercise was entirely predictable – the astrologers were disgruntled because so many of them were thrown out of the portal citing contractual non-extension, and I was disgruntled because I was bored, not-pleased and completely out of the depth I normally cruised at.

But somewhere along the line I was amazed at the similarities in the various predictions. Most of the experts said the same thing, about my past, my present and, more or less, my future. That I would never have paid any of them to predict my life for me on the Internet was a different issue all together. It was just not my style to do that, even if I had believed in the whole shebang. And it all made me rather sick with the unctuousness of the people involved and the oiliness with which we had to eliminate them without causing rancour. All a hoot. And we should have known better - and we would have, if only we had consulted our horoscopes!