CONFESSIONS OF AN UNPAID CONSULTANT Intense Competition in the microcomputer business has given consumers a confusing range of products to choose from. Guess who's just been drafted to sort them out. By Stephen Manes PC Week July 2986 You pick up the phone. The frazzled, deferential voice on the other end claims to be a friend, or a friend of a friend. Within the next 15 seconds, you hear the words "They say you know alot about computers." Your cornea clouds. Your cochlea crackles. You enter a trance-like state. You are participating in a transmorgrafication more mysterious and frustrating than lycanthropy, and you are powerless to resist. You are about to become the rarest, most necessary of beings -- the unpaid consultant. Flushed with confusion, the disembodied voice has received a bushel of contradictory advice from rapacious salesmen, evangelistic cohorts and enthusiastic relatives. You, LUCKY YOU, have been selected to sort out fact from fiction, truth from hype. There is no rational way out. You consider "accidently" disconnecting the phone and hooking up your modem for autoanswer, but your afraid one blast of carrier tone in the ear might permanently impair the hearing of your litigation-prone attorney. You resign yourself to the knowledge that the next hour of your life will be irretrievably lost in a sea of deja entendu: "Wait, I'm writing this down. Now what was it you said about this Monotone Spray Cod?" In theory, it's wonderful that intense competition in the microcomputer business has given consumers a truly gargantuan range of hardware and software options. In practice, not even dBase II can sort them all out, and the people who need help most desperatly are the least likely to get any. A corporation that's buying 100 PC's to link up with its mainframes can afford to keep somebody around who knows how to do it or contract the project out. The poor guy who wants a system to his garage golf-ball-retreading business or produce the Great American Video can't spring for expensive hours of a consultant's time. That's where you come in. Alas, things you take for granted are utterly befuddling to the abject novice. He's wondering if he should buy IBM or the Clamdip-98, the hotshot new Szechuanese wonder his boss Morty swears by. Or maybe he should cheap out and go the Commodore-64 route. His Aunt Louise insists here Commodore-64 can do anything any IBM can "AND" peel potatos. "Did Aunt Louise mention that her Commodore won't run the "TakeAGander" integrated database, which is the program you say you're interested in?" "No kidding! You're sure? All right, forget the C-64. What about the others?" "Well, no matter what you buy, if you've got your heart set on "TakeAGander", you'll need a memory upgrade." "Wait, I'm writing this down. Memory upgrade." You point out that the Clamdip-98 has room for the memory right on the motherboard, but he IBM will need and add-on memory card. But then he may as well get a multifunction card for the clock and the serial port that are built into the Clamdip. Unless he buys an AT. "Wait, I'm writing this down, and there are a couple of things I'm not clear about. I've got lots of clocks around here. What do I need with another one? And could you explain mutterboard, multifunctional card, and stereo port? Oh, and AT?" So you do explain, you do, half wishing your palms would turn hairy and your only possible response would be a muffled growl. Sometime in the next few minutes, you runinto the inevitable Moment of Truth. Your caller suddenly says: "Let me get this straight. If I buy the IBM, I also have to buy a multifunction card, a display card, a monitor, a clock, and extra memory? And that's all going to set me back maybe a thousand dollars above the base price of the machine itself?" "Thereabouts." "But on the Clamdip-98, I get all that stuff free?" "Except for the extra memory, which should set you back a hundred bucks installed." "So why in the world would I possibly want to buy the IBM?" Sighing, you agree that the Clamdip looks like a very good deal, and you recount the growing list of friends who swear by it. But you explain the problems the Clamdip folks have had keeping up with demand. You note that many Clamdips have been delivered without the benefit of manual, DOS software, or microprocessor. You observe that should something fail in a Clammdip-98, replacement parts may be transported out on the slow boat from china. You point out that Clamdip Computers has been in business for 10 long weeks. And you recount the cautionary tale of your friend who bought a business computer from one of the very biggest firms in the industry and can't get it fixed now that the company's making nothing but refrigerator-magnet novelities. "Okay, you've convinced me. I'll go IBM. True Blue all the way." You could leave it at that, but your conscience won't let you. You explain that he can't quite go True Blue all the way because IBM doesn't make a multifunction card. Then you remember that "TakeAGander" runs slower than a horse cart on anything less than an 8Mhz AT. You start asking questions and discover that your interrogator really doesn't need much more than a simple database manager and a decent word processor. You somehow convince him to go with a couple of good programs you know of. "Just a couple more questions. I see here a PC, an XT, or -- oh, yeah, here it is! -- an AT. And a bunch of models. I have no idea what the difference is. Tell me which one to buy. Remember, go slow. I'm writing this down." Deep sigh. You cooperate. You whittle down the selction. You come up with a couple of choices. You even suggest a printer and a dealer. "Now, one last question. My kid's got a lot of friends with Commodores. There's no reason why their programs won't run on this machine, right?" The transformation is complete. Your palms are sprouting luxurious tufts of silicon. You run outside and howl a 1,200-baud carrier tone at the telephone wires. "Don't stare," you hear a nieghbor tell her little daughter. "It's just the guy who knows all about computers. Come to think of it, there are a couple of questions I want to ask him about your TI 99/4." THE END