Steve Prentice

Well the email is pretty quiet today, looks like most of my US colleagues are settling down to watch THE EVENT! I’m generally not a great one for politics, and I don’t live in the United States, but news coverage is reaching levels of hyperbole as extreme as any in recent memory. It’s actually hard not to get swept up with the enthusiasm and expectation – heck we need good news these days and everyone surviving a ditching in the Hudson only lasts for so long!

The level of expectation of President (elect) Obama’s shoulders in unbelieveable, seemingly across the globe, that one can only wonder how one man could ever meet even a fraction of it.  Political events tend to leave me reaching towards dead politicians from the past.  I am reminded on Winston Churchill’s great “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” or in this case perhaps to just one man. I wish him luck, because he is going to need it!

Much of the expectation is as a result of technology today. One of my colleagues Alan Weiner is readying a full array of technology to monitor multiple feeds and have the full “experience”. The days of reading about things days (or even weeks later in the case of “Mafeking Relieved!”) are long gone, although I’m sure it will dominate the printed media for days to come. Mind you, in an eerie echo of less pleasant events of the past, another colleague revealed that she was aware of a “major data security breach” that was due to be revealed today! As one eponymous civil servant in the UK famously remarked (not expecting to be heard on that previous occasion) “Today will be a good day to bury bad news!”. We will be watching – you have been warned!