Kurtz ignored this last part. "Why thirty-five thousand? That's a lot of data-mining."

Arlene carried over a folder of spreadsheet pages and notes. She stood by Kurtz's desk as he looked through it. "See, Joe, I was just grabbing bits and pieces of data from the Internet and tossing it all into an Excel spreadsheet—more or less what the present on-line wedding services do—but then I used some of our income to build a new data warehouse on Oracle81 and paid Ergos Business Intelligence to begin mining the database of all these weddings that other individuals or services had planned."

She pointed to some columns on the spreadsheet "And voila!"

Kurtz looked for patterns in the charts and columns. Finally he saw one. "Planning a fancy wedding takes two hundred and seventy to three hundred days," said Kurtz. "Almost all of them fall in that range. So does everyone know this?"

Arlene shook her head. "Some individual wedding planners do, but not the few on-line wedding-service companies. The pattern really shows up when you look at a huge mass of data."

"So how does your… our… Wedding Bells dot com cash in on this?" asked Kurtz.

Arlene pulled out other pages. "We continue using the Ergos tool to analyze this two-hundred-seventy- to three-hundred-day period and nail down exactly when each step of the operation takes place."

"What operation?" asked Kurtz. Arlene was beginning to talk like some bank robbers he'd known. "Isn't a wedding just a wedding? Rent a place, dress up, get it over with?"

Arlene rolled her eyes. Exhaling smoke, she brought her ashtray over to Kurtz's desk and flicked ashes into it. "See, here, at this point early on? Here's the bride's search for a dress. Every bride has to search for a dress. We offer links to designers, seamstresses, even knock-off designer dress suppliers."