When Dave Snell first got into
consumer advocacy in 1997, he made a giant fool of himself. He cooked
up a hairbrained idea he named the Gemini Project. It had
the worthy (but pie-in-the-sky) goals of eliminating obnoxious spam, telemarketing and junk mail.
Dave heard a positive report on PBS
about Netscape Inc., which makes a browser that competes against MicroSoft's Internet
Explorer. Flying down to California, Dave couldn't get in to see the High Mucky-Mucks at
Netscape. So he left a locked briefcase with a receptionist, with instructions that only Netscape's
top executives were allowed to read it.
A few days later Dave got a call. "Is this David Snell, the guy who left the
briefcase?" said the voice on the other end.
"Yeah, it's me!" Dave prattled excitedly. "What did you think of Gemini?"
"This is the police. This is all highly suspicious. We're gonna have to get the Bomb
Squad to open this thing in the parking lot!"
Of course the police found nothing but papers! Dave didn't find it very funny back then,
but he can smile and joke about it now.