Ah, the interwebs. Our hyper connectivity is a double edged sword. On one hand, we can build a network of thousands of followers, fans and 'friends' with whom we can be constantly connected. On the other hand, this false sense of familiarity can be problematic.
People feel as if these little snapshots of your real life, carefully extracted and edited are somehow the totality of you. And this can be dangerous. An offhanded comment, a melodramatic blog post, a heated exchange, they all take on greater meaning through the lens of the computer screen. What we say has greater impact and how we say it opens it up to scrutiny and miscommunication. When you type your words on a keyboard, you lose the subtlety of spoken word. Sarcasm gets lost. The tongue planted firmly in your cheek isn't always apparent. What is crystal clear to you isn't always clear to the people on the other side of the screen.
And last week all of this hit me squarely in the arse.
I don't know how you navigate it all and I'm not sure what to do about what happened. I have real friends from several lifetimes all living together on my personal Facebook page along with fans and friends of friends and people whom I do not know and have never met in real life. It can be confusing and disconcerting watching them interact. They really don't belong together, you know. It's easier to keep them compartmentalized neatly into different eras. High school friends, college friends, theater friends, punk rock music scene friends, home shopping television friends, craft friends...and all of them also reflect different aspects of who I am now, who I was then and how I got from there to here.
It has happened to me on multiple occasions that people decide to mine my Facebook friend list to build their own. The problem is that a good portion of the people on that page are not crafters and are not interested in being marketed to by crafters. It is my personal page after all. And, well, it's kind of surreal really seeing people gather up my friends like a bundle of sticks and place them into their basket.
I am not sure how I feel about the internet. I am not sure how I feel about what happened to me last week. I am not sure how I feel about Facebook and Google and other sites tracking me and filtering what I see based on their perceptions of who I am. I don't know if I like how the internet creates these false impressions, false connections and false perceptions and I don't know how you change it without completely unplugging.
And I'm not sure if I can.
It's a brave new world.
Love
Madge
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Dear John (Schnatter)
Dear John Schnatter:
You are are a miraculous, splendiferous, amazing asshat.
Firstly, I would like to state for the record that you have never served anything for which I'd plunk down even a fraction of my hard earned cash.
Your pizza sucks. It always has. I'd rather eat cardboard smothered in ketchup and covered in rabbit turds and I'd eat that when hell froze over. Even my kid has the good taste to know your pizza is crap. I'm now sure the lack of quality of your product is a reflection of your Free Market driven, penny pinching, corner cutting approach to making as much money as possible to support your lavish lifestyle while you pay your employees crap wages.
You simply can't help yourself, can you?
I am willing to bet that even if you increased the price of your crappy pizza, the people who willingly choke it down would pay more without batting an eyelash. According to Forbes, your 11-13 cents a pie speculation is incorrect, we're talking 3.4-4.6 cents per pizza.
Really? You are making this much noise over less than a 5 cent per pie increase, to insure the health of your workers, which is BTW tax deductible as a business expense? Wow.
Just wow.
I know in your eyes, I'm simply one of those people who want the free stuff. I keep wondering where this free stuff is and how I get some of it. Oooo...free stuff! WOO HOO! Not that I want it, to be clear. In fact, I don't really think this free stuff is free anyway and I also don't think it's much fun to be poor or lack health insurance.
But hey, I'm kooky like that.
Frankly, I find you and the rest of the asshats who are threatening to fire their employees, dun their patrons and raise their prices simply because Obama was re-elected morally reprehensible. I know you're just pissed off that you can't hire slave labor and pay them pennies and work them like dogs. I know you're mad that your boy Mittford Romnington III didn't make it to the White House. I know it has to be tough living in a 40,000 square foot mansion on a 16 acre estate surrounded by all of the stuff built on the backs of your hard working employees. Yes, they built that. Brick by brick...crappy pizza by crappy pizza. But hey, you go ahead and take credit for all of it and while you're there, why not fire some folks and cut back people's hours just to make a point?
Go you!
Your days are numbered, angry white man. The face of this country is changing and you'd be wise to change too.
Christmas is coming, though. Might I suggest any version at all of A Christmas Carol? There might be something in there for you.
Love
Madge
You are are a miraculous, splendiferous, amazing asshat.
Firstly, I would like to state for the record that you have never served anything for which I'd plunk down even a fraction of my hard earned cash.
Your pizza sucks. It always has. I'd rather eat cardboard smothered in ketchup and covered in rabbit turds and I'd eat that when hell froze over. Even my kid has the good taste to know your pizza is crap. I'm now sure the lack of quality of your product is a reflection of your Free Market driven, penny pinching, corner cutting approach to making as much money as possible to support your lavish lifestyle while you pay your employees crap wages.
You simply can't help yourself, can you?
I am willing to bet that even if you increased the price of your crappy pizza, the people who willingly choke it down would pay more without batting an eyelash. According to Forbes, your 11-13 cents a pie speculation is incorrect, we're talking 3.4-4.6 cents per pizza.
Really? You are making this much noise over less than a 5 cent per pie increase, to insure the health of your workers, which is BTW tax deductible as a business expense? Wow.
Just wow.
I know in your eyes, I'm simply one of those people who want the free stuff. I keep wondering where this free stuff is and how I get some of it. Oooo...free stuff! WOO HOO! Not that I want it, to be clear. In fact, I don't really think this free stuff is free anyway and I also don't think it's much fun to be poor or lack health insurance.
But hey, I'm kooky like that.
Frankly, I find you and the rest of the asshats who are threatening to fire their employees, dun their patrons and raise their prices simply because Obama was re-elected morally reprehensible. I know you're just pissed off that you can't hire slave labor and pay them pennies and work them like dogs. I know you're mad that your boy Mittford Romnington III didn't make it to the White House. I know it has to be tough living in a 40,000 square foot mansion on a 16 acre estate surrounded by all of the stuff built on the backs of your hard working employees. Yes, they built that. Brick by brick...crappy pizza by crappy pizza. But hey, you go ahead and take credit for all of it and while you're there, why not fire some folks and cut back people's hours just to make a point?
Go you!
Your days are numbered, angry white man. The face of this country is changing and you'd be wise to change too.
Christmas is coming, though. Might I suggest any version at all of A Christmas Carol? There might be something in there for you.
Love
Madge
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