Survival

My office e-mail has a neat new spam detection system, which every 24 hours sends us a list of all the files quarantined as "suspicious", rather than hi-jacking them willy-nilly. This means that you can scan down a list once a day and, uysually, get rid of all of them with a single button-push.

Yesterday, amidst the normal plethora of remortgage offers, penis enlargements and drugs of dubious origin (although not so many dodgy watches recently), I saw the subject line "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOR EVER?"

Well, I thought, it's alright blocking out spam, but here was an e-mail offering me eternal life. In terms of EV, one would have thought that this one might be worth reading, particularly if the names Miros and Lord appear in your title.

Then again, I doubt that, if a company had discovered eternal life, it would be selling it for $5.99. Admittedly, it's a tough one to price. One could imagine the board meeting at GlaxoSmithkline.

"So, what does this pill do?"
"It makes you live for ever, without ageing, sir"
"Hmm. Impressive. So, umm, how should we price this one?"
"I recommend $5.99 for a lifetime supply sir."
"I see, and lifetime in this sense means ...?"
"For ever, sir."
"Yessss. I'm not sure that we have a top-class pricing model here. You're in R&D, aren't you?"
"Yes sir. How did you guess?"
"Well, you don't get to the top of a drugs company business without having a nose for these things."