Online promotion

My father was a mechanic his whole life. I am not speaking figuratively — I am talking about a man who lived with his hands inside engines, who could tell by sound alone whether the bearing was on the right or the left, who could diagnose a car by listening to it start from cold, like a doctor listening to a patient's heart without an ultrasound scanner, using only a stethoscope and years of experience accumulated in silence. He knew things that nobody had ever written down, things you wouldn't find in any manual, things you only knew if you had spent long enough under cars, in the cold, with skin cracked from grease and winter.

He never had a website.

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I realise now, with the distance of years, that he would never have imagined he might need one. Clients came by word of mouth — a neighbour would recommend him to another, someone who knew him from the neighbourhood would bring along someone from another neighbourhood, and this invisible, organic, almost tribal network worked well enough to fill his yard with cars to repair. But it worked within the limits of his physical world, bounded by the radius a rumour could travel from person to person. Beyond that, he didn't exist. He was, in the most technical sense of the word, invisible.

I think about this often — more often than I would have imagined — since I started working in web services. I have been working for nearly eight years with public institutions and private businesses in Romania, mostly small firms, neighbourhood businesses with serious ambitions or serious businesses with the humility of not knowing that Google Business Profile exists. And throughout all that time, I have watched how we — small agencies, independent consultants, people like me — repeatedly commit, with an almost impressive consistency, seven mistakes that cost us clients, cost us relationships, and ultimately cost us the meaning of our work.

I didn't catalogue them myself. I lived them. Some I made personally.

The first sentence you write doesn't have to be good. It has to be true. 'Today I fixed something and I wasn't sure I could.' Or: 'The client I saw today made me think of my father.' Or even: 'I don't know why I'm writing this.'

And the world read him. Millions of people read him. Not because he was an expert in anything. But because they recognised in his pages something from their own lives that they hadn't known how to name.

Yesterday morning I stood for about ten minutes in front of the bathroom basin and stared at the tap. Not because anything was wrong with it. But because I had just read an article about 'how to optimise your digital presence as a professional in the plumbing sector' and that phrase — optimise your digital presence — had lodged itself in my head like a bone in the throat.

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The tap was a tap. Its chrome lightly marked with limescale, the screw at the base tightened by hand by someone who knew what they were doing, the washer replaced probably a few years back, visible from the newer colour of the rubber. Someone had fitted it. Someone knew why that screw and not another, why that type of washer for the water hardness in this city. And that person, whoever they were, had most likely never had a blog.

I sometimes wonder what the internet looks like from where they stand.

I grew up with opinion polls on television. Every evening, after the news — always the same ritual: a bar chart, a round number, and a grave voice explaining what "the people" thought. Nobody asked where that figure came from. Neither did I.

Now I ask. And the more I ask, the more I find that the numbers in surveys resemble reality less and less, and look increasingly like a tool — sometimes for informing, sometimes for manipulating, and most often for brutally simplifying a complicated world.

I am not writing this as a statistician — I am not one. I am writing as someone who has learnt, over time, to ask a few questions before believing a figure. And I have the distinct impression that these questions — simple enough, when you think about it — are absent from far too many articles, debates, and Facebook posts.

A Headline That Should Give You Pause

"Survey: Romanians have lost faith in institutions."

Or: "60% of employees are dissatisfied with their boss."

Or, in the more polished corporate variant: "Study: 9 out of 10 customers recommend our product."

All of these headlines share one thing: they present a figure as though it were a universal truth, whilst saying nothing about how that figure was produced. And that is precisely where the whole story lives.

An honest headline would look quite different. It would read something like: "INSCOP survey, 1,067 respondents, telephone interviews, October 2025: 60% of urban adults report having no confidence in Parliament." That is information. Everything else is background noise with pretensions to revelation.