Once upon a time, in a picturesque city called Baghdad by the Bay, a plucky little concern known as Apple, and its most devoted tribesmen, came together each January. There they would meet, by the thousands, at a great encampment called Moscone.
This was no ordinary gathering, it was a veritable confabulation of the Apple tribes from across the globe. Lonely as they could often be in their own homelands, even ridiculed, the Apple tribesmen met this one time a year, to swap stories, and to barter their goods.
But most of all, they met to reassure each other that they were not alone. For these were the leanest of times for the Apple tribes, which had been dwindling in numbers for many years. The seers even predicted, with a degree of certainty normally reserved for celestial events, that the extinction of the Apple tribes was fated.
So the annual encampment at Moscone was a cheerful respite for the Apple tribes, a thing to anticipate, to embrace. And it was.
At Moscone the tribesmen implored Apple for material enlightenment. Often, Apple rained forth with commercial wisdom, and the tribes declared themselves amazed. But even when they admitted to being less than fully awed, the tribesmen knew deep in their hearts that on no other path was such reward possible. They also knew that wisdom did not always arrive on a schedule.
The tribes were patient. If illumination did not always come at Moscone, they could wait, confident in the knowledge that it would come, just as it always had.
Then, a truly remarkable thing happened: The wisdom of Apple began to be heard across the land.
Over the space of only a few years, it spread further and wider than it had ever done before, even in the best times any of the grayest graybeard tribesman could recall. The tribes multiplied beyond reckoning, and the annual encampment at Moscone along with it.
This turn of events should have been welcomed by the beleaguered tribes of Apple, and for many, it surely was. But growth in numbers did not please all of the tribesmen, many of whom complained about the profusion of unfamiliar faces at Moscone.
The graybeard Apple tribesmen noticed something else had changed: As a whole, the newest members of the tribe were an exasperating lot. If Apple failed to dispense precisely the wisdom they desired or expected, at precisely the moment they expected it, then they could become surly and resentful. They would ask, loudly, why they bothered coming to Moscone at all.
The graybeards wondered about this, too. But mostly they kept their voices hushed, noticing how quick the newest tribesmen were to ridicule anyone who counseled calm, or patience, or thinking about whether a better path was available. No, the new tribesmen fairly reveled in their disappointment.
Observing all of this was Apple. Already weary of being expected to dispense their commercial wisdom on a predictable schedule, they declared finally that they were no longer interested in calling the annual gathering of the tribes at Moscone. A wailing and gnashing of teeth was heard over the land, especially from the newest Apple tribesmen, who could interpret this in the only way they knew how, as an impending disaster.
The seers, for their part, rubbed their hands in glee at these developments, for they only proved what they'd been predicting all along: that no matter how large Apple's tribe became, it had been doomed from the very start.
Moral: Never worry about how bad things are now. Worry about them getting better.
