The Isle of Man: Time Warp

Listen, the Isle of Man is a strange little place. You know what else was strange? The year 2000.

I present, for your viewing pleasure, excerpts from the Isle of Man Yearbook (2000). This full-colour document was intended to entice business owners and tourists to the island, but I have a feeling it mostly languished in piles at the airport. It's an absolute masterpiece of what I call the Y2K aesthetic, and hopefully gives you an idea of the corporate culture which dominates the island to this day.

Welcome to 2000, where we've just sort of figured out photoshop. This woman symbolizes wealth. These legs symbolize the Isle of Man. This barcode is not placed well. These letters are unnecessarily shiny.

Have you heard of the Internet? It's a great place to keep money. If you're not on the internet, you can call us and we will tell you about it. For some reason we think that fish in a teakettle is a good symbol for Online Banking.

Manx Radio remains the island's primary source of local news. Their hosts are very conservative and extremely defensive about the island in all matters, but have pretty good taste in music. Also, listening to Manx Radio is the best way to find out if the ferry is coming today and whether there's any traffic on the single road from my town to Douglas (the main city).

If you look closely at the pie charts on the left-hand page you can see that nearly 40% of the national income was in the finance sector in 1998. Not much has changed...

I think this is my favorite out of the set. Why on earth did Manx Air think that colour combination was a good choice? And look at that laptop! Cutting edge technology! Come to the Isle of Man for all your business needs!! Sadly Manx Air has been defunct for several years now, and we're all stuck using the much more prosaic services of EasyJet.

Transport on the Island is fairly entertaining. We have a wonderful network of narrow-gauge steam trains which run throughout the year, a rare horse-drawn tram and a terrifying electric train which climbs our local mountain 'Snaefell'. However this ad is absolute nonsense, as any "corporate client" who got taken on these routes would be very confused. There's really nowhere to go, you see, unless you want to hold a meeting in a drafty cafe on top of a mountain.

The Electric Train also has a frightening tendency to experience brake failure. No one has died (recently), but the fact that it goes hurtling down the mountain on a regular basis is enough to put me off it.

Finally I bring you...the Watercolour Server Fire of your nightmares. I hope you've enjoyed this brief selection of artifacts from the not-so-distant past, and feel like you know a little bit more (or less?) about my island home!

Did this make you laugh? Make you think? Want to know more about the bizarre place that produced this all as part of an official government document? Let me know in the comments!

This is the third installment in my Isle of Man series, you can find the first two here: https://steemit.com/travel/@donovanpage/the-isle-of-man-an-introduction and here https://steemit.com/travel/@donovanpage/the-isle-of-man-tax-haven

Follow my blog to find out about the Manx take on deadly motorcycle races, mutant sheep, ancient gods and more!

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