Ouch! We blew another opportunity. That really hurts.

And in a pinch, antipsychiatrists always come in handy. These are your people who would be the first voted off the island in "Survivor." Even Mother Teresa hates antipsychiatrists. As it happens, antipsychiatrists love getting on committees and serving on boards, which they see as golden opportunities to stick it to the man. What the antipsychiatrists are too stupid to figure out is that their antics are nothing more than "I got a library card" with the volume on high. Thank you for sharing.

Heaven help if a token consumer were to actually take a genuine interest in the discussion at hand. The entire system - top to bottom - is simply not designed for that. Worse still would be the prospect of the token consumer coming up with an original idea. The magnificently inefficient enterprise that we charitably refer to as health care would spontaneously implode. The Rapture, End of Times.

"You did what??!!" I asked my housemate in disbelief. Paul is an anomaly, a rare combination of someone with intelligent things to say who gets on well with everyone he meets. More rare still, Paul actually listens and pays people respect. So even if it's not in their best interest, the people who set agendas invite Paul to their meetings.

You know you've made a telling point when you are met with stony silence. That's what happened when Paul dropped our consumer algorithm bunker-buster on this high-powered meeting. Two micro-seconds of stony silence, then onto the next discussion point, with not even a decent thank you for sharing.

But after the meeting was over, at least two people signaled to Paul that they wanted to learn more.

So now the ball was in my court. I needed to come up with a position paper and a sample algorithm or two. Why me? No one listens to us.

Paul and I both know that, of course. Which is why we're going to do these algorithms ourselves. Not just talk about it. Talking will get us something that no one wants ten years from now.

Naturally, we can use all the help we can get. From personal experience, I have found that we can rely on the good will from the very people who set agendas once we take the initiative. The dynamics instantly change. No more tokenism.

But doing it involves a lot of hard work. As I said, we can use all the help we can get.