My rant last week about coffee house cyber-zombies prompted some interesting email.

One guy — let’s call him “Wade” — wanted to set me straight on the subject of zombies.

He said that strictly speaking, zombies are reanimated corpses brought back to life by voodoo priests and priestesses exclusively for the purpose of serving them as slaves.

All other examples of walking dead — like the mumbling critters hunched over laptops at my local espresso joint — are mere pretenders.

Wade told me that the most famous documented case of a gen-yoo-wine zombie is Clairvius Narcisse, who was pronounced dead in a Haitian hospital in 1962 and then buried.

But here’s the good part.

In 1980, Mr. Narcisse turned up alive and well.

He claimed he’d been drugged, buried, removed from his grave, and pressed into slave labor on a zombie plantation.

I dunno what made Narcisse wake up after 18 years. Or why, upon doing so, he didn’t turn into dust or something. Wade didn’t say.

Anyway, despite being corrected by Wade, I’ll stick to my sloppy use of “zombie.”

It’s just handy.

For instance, the word perfectly describes some business wanna-be’s I’ve known.

Ben Settle calls them “goo-roo fanboys,” people who latch onto a business guru and ape everything that guru does.

Kinda like zombies, right?

And I’ll go one step further and say that in my experience, a lot of business gurus act like bossy voodoo priests, too.

These “priests” usually argue their programs will net you tens of thousands in the next 60 days. And they’ll show you bogus photoshopped bank statements to prove it.

They’ll claim to have just 12 seats left in their webinars, when nobody’s actually signed up yet. Then they’ll inflate the number of folks that finally show up.

They often exaggerate the size of their email lists.

Their reported “response rates” are, as a rule, embellished.

And their zombified admirers follow blindly their every edict.

Fer kryssakes, don’t be a business zombie!

Any legitimate, honest business guru will concede that businesses very, very seldom make big bucks overnight.

They’ll confess that they had to put in long, hard hours — for many months, maybe years — before they started earning pretty good money.

They’ll talk about their failures as well as their successes.

They’ll suggest business strategies, methods, and tactics to you. But they’ll always insist you test, test, test.

In short, they “smell” authentic.

They don’t have that voodoo zombie stink on ’em.

Watch out!

You don’t want to wake up years from now with a hoe or pitchfork in your hand, do you?

P.S. You know who always think for themselves? Rhinos. Yep, it’s true! See for yourself right here.