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It Ain't Necessarily So

Telemanagement columns, April 1990 to June-July 1992 (Plus a few more)

Introduction

By 1990, the PBX bubble, produced by the governmental decree that people should own and not rent their telephone equipment, had pretty well popped; business customers, in particular, had bought all the PBXs they thought they needed. This greatly reduced the demand for the BCR Manual of PBXs, so Jerry and I agreed it was time to let it go.

Ian Angus, president of Toronto-based Angus TeleManagement Group, had published a number of my articles in his several Canadian newsletters. He wanted me to continue “The PBX Scene” in his newly created monthly magazine Telemanagement, which combined Telephone Systems and Strategies and The Telemanagement Report. But the research for the PBX Manual each quarter, which I also used for the Scene columns, was just too much to do for the columns alone. So I looked for some other way to make a regular contribution to Telemanagement.

One thing that bugged me about much telecom news coverage during the 1980s was the way reporters, having little knowledge of telecom, managed to get almost all possible technical details wrong in their articles for the mainstream press. So I borrowed a concept from the Gershwins to exploit this situation. I would call a column “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and head it with a standard opening to warn the reader. After several attempts, this is what I came up with:

The older I get, the more I am convinced that it isn’t what we don’t know that hurts us; it’s all those things we know that just aren’t true. I have spent most of my professional life unlearning things. These essays are offered to illustrate specific examples of unlearning which I have found necessary, and to suggest a suspicious attitude toward what passes for reality which others may find helpful.

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