Centuries of relentless mischief-making had lost their appeal for the Devil and life seemed a dreary eternity. For almost three hundred years his work had gone uncredited and mankind had proven capable of creating more than enough trouble for itself. The future looked awfully grim for the Prince of Darkness and life was hell; until the day he heard some new arrivals blaming their fate on “computer error.”
The penny dropped quickly in the bottomless pit of his mind and he was exultant. “Hallelujah!” he cried, “that’s how I can really screw up universal peace and harmony, once and for all, by automating misery and desolation!”
The Devil knew how to make work for idle hands so he did a sly deal with his old friends in the computer industry and in two shakes of a demon’s tail, an infernal new contraption was born: The Impossibilitator – an artificial fiend that scared the unloving daylights out of him.
He needed some good advice on deployment and luckily his dominion of Hell gave him exclusive access to generations of world-class Marketing and Sales professionals.
Weeks of torture (focus groups) resolved the roll-out strategy for the spiteful new creation:
· Use Stealth · Make it Viral · Give it a Snappy Name
So the Devil’s wicked new weapon was quietly launched upon an unsuspecting world, without fanfare but with a snappy new name: iT.
Delighted with the monster, the Devil’s parting command was profoundly prophetic… Go Forth and Complicate!
His protégé showed a natural talent for the mission and very soon life became ever more complicated, as every corner of civilization trembled at the feet of the beast.
The reputation of iT as a global troublemaker grew and grew, until the Devil himself felt overshadowed by his own creation.
To regain his own power, he would have to break the grip of the troublesome monster. So he rummaged around the dankest corners of purgatory until he found a pair of scriptwriters and, with a little gentle persuasion, he tasked them to make iT simpler, by crafting the definitive almanac: The Devil’s Guide to iT. We publish it on every Wicked Wednesday.
