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Fri. Mar 09, 2001

Les Nessman Lives!

Les Nessman Lives! – Les was the newsman on WKRP in Cincinatti, a show I always enjoyed because I used to work with those people (in 8 years of radio, I worked with ’em all … Johnny Fever was the best man at my wedding). Apparently, I’m not alone, judging by things I found like the Les Nessman Memorial Turkey Drop

Les always felt slighted that he lacked a real office, and had to make do with a cube in the bullpen. So he made imaginary walls. He laid out tape on the floor showing, as he put it ”where walls should be,” and had a break in the tape for the door. If people did not approach him through that ”door,” well, Les considered it rude.

Today I visited Susan’s place of business, one of those wacky Dot Com companies. While giving me the nickel tour, she pointed out the cubes of two designers. Complete with masking tape walls, openings for the door, and a dotted arced tape line to indicate where the door would swing, if there was one.

Les lives, even in the Dot Com World. In fact, he is used to illustrate bad network security: ”The news announcer of that radio station, Les Nessman, didn’t have a private office and couldn’t get one, so Les established his office perimeter with masking tape applied to the carpet. He got annoyed when someone walked through the ’wall’ instead of waiting at the ’door’ until invited in. To Les, his policy was sufficient. There are organizations today that likewise have policies that do not match reality and, so prescribe methods that are insufficient, while like Les Nessman, thinking – or pretending – that they are sufficient.”

I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from Les: ”In a situation like this, I always ask myself, what would my hero Edward R. Murrow think? And I think that Ed would think that this was censorship. Then I think about what my other hero, General George Patton, would think, and I think George would think that radio and television ought to be cleaned up, and if he were alive today, he’d take two armoured calvalry divisions into Hollywood and knock all those liberal pinheads into the Pacific! So as you can see, I’m a very confused man. And when I get confused, I watch TV. Television is never confusing. It’s all so simple somehow.”