Right now I am updating my sales forecast for next quarter with Lenny Kravitz wailing "Fly Away" through my cheap Canada 3000 headphones. I should hang on to these, as they could now be a collector's item, just like my Wardair tie. Lenny Kravitz I find a little cheezy, with his cliched 70s guitar riffs, but I bet a 14 year old would love it.

I chose to listen to this song because it reminds me of the time when I was working for this customer relationship management company as an inside sales rep. I picked a call off the queue, and I was instantly put on speakerphone with some startup company in Silicon Valley. There were three young men around the speakerphone, with Lenny Kravitz's "Fly Away" blaring in the background. They seemed so cool and carefree in their e-jobs, perhaps changing the way people buy transit tickets or return pop bottles with their soon-to-be-released zero-client, customer-focused solution. I remember thinking that I wanted to work in such an environment, instead of the one where I was stuck, with an English-born matronly boss, whose face had acquired the permanent scowl wrinkles on her jawline; wrinkles that are acquired only through a lifetime of mean disposition. I wished I too could fly away to southern California and take part in the revolution that promised to change everything but in reality changed very little.

The cool startup workers nonchalantly bought about $500 of software on their Amex, treating me as if I were someone who was just so out of it, so not part of whatever it was that was going on.

I really have to watch my spelling when I am stoned.

For the first time since the early 1990s, when I felt I was part of the demographic that had the term 'slacker' attached to it, I feel that my lifestyle and many marketing campaigns have intersected. At times it feels like these people are trying to convince me to live their lifestyle. The stongest influencer is the Banana Republic, aiming its ads squarely at people like me and my wife. I have had to impose a ban on that store, just because I now feel each time that I go in there, I am admitting that I can no longer make my own choices, and that they know best for me. Douglas Coupland called this a 2+2=5ism.

Now they have an ad with the young couple and child lying in bed. It screams to me that I should be having a child and living this fast paced yet balanced urban life surrounded by grey flannel and the New York Times; ambitious, aware of the finer things in life, but without forgetting that what really matters is spending time with my well-clothed family.