Cancer is treated as bad and horrible and foreign. It steals resources from your body and produces endless cells with no use that press on your organs and wither them. It creates at random making a twisted mass of tissue that appears alien in a way we associate with gristly horror movies. Cancer in one place in your body may never be noticed until you die of other causes and are autopsied. Cancer in another place may steal your memories from you and all your comfort. Cancer in yet another place or a different one or, in fact, any number of places will take your very life from you in service of its sinister creation of more new cells carrying its mutated DNA.
Cancer is not some tiny mite that sneaks into your body and starts propagating. It's not a bacteria or cold that infects you and festers in your body. It is not some tiny alien seed that gets to you through the air and proceeds to grow inside you. It does have many causes. Chemicals can cause cancer. Radiation can cause cancer. Smoking (though that's mostly the chemicals). Asbestos. The sun. Mostly things boil down to chemicals or radiation even though there are many different names for different kinds and different causes. One of the most blatant causes gets less attention than others. Old age. I guess old people die anyway but young people who get cancer caused by chemicals are a tragedy. Even birth control pills can cause cancer (though not for the reasons you think.)
The description is wrong, though. People do not "get" cancer. It is not catching. Everyone has cancer. Every single person in the entire world. And if they don't have cancer they have another kind of problem entirely. Namely, death. So which would you rather have? Cancer, which can kill you or the lack there of which will cause you to be dead much faster? Evolution chose cancer, obviously. If cancer wasn't good for us in some way than we wouldn't evolved so that every single cell in our body was cancerous. All of them. Your entire body festers with cancer from the moment you are born.
Before you become too bothered I will explain. "Cancer" is actually nothing more than the uncontrolled multiplication of cells. You could say that every time a woman becomes pregnant there's a "cancer" in her womb. Except that it's a special kind of parasitic cancer that grows into something adorable that we feel a biological imperative to love and cherish even though it's just a mass of cancer. Your cells divide and multiply as they grow old and need to be replaced or if you're injured. It happens constantly. But the reason that your cells don't divide out of control all the time is a special gene sequence that can be turned on and off to keep cells from dividing. Division is their natural state after all. But because division causes the DNA in your cells to literally unravel you want to avoid too much of it. That's where the special gene sequence comes in to force your cells to stop dividing unless it's necessary.
What causes the cancer in reality is that gene sequence becoming dysfunctional. Once it's broken it divides and, of courses, passes on the broken gene to the daughter cells which divide again. And again and again and again. Until it's stopped. Or it consumes you. Ironically two of the things that cause cancer are also used to destroy it. Chemical therapy and radiation treatments. Another cause of cancer is old age. By necessity your cells must divide in order to keep you alive. But though the division is normally not as rapid it does slowly unravel the DNA in your cells. The more it unravels and the older you get the more likely it is that the natural division of your cells will cause that very same gene to become broken and the already aged cells to begin to divide out of control.
Much like old age is the way in which Birth Control causes cancer. I know that women get prescribed birth control fairly often to "regulate" their cycles or to reduce the severity of the symptoms. But the way in which birth control pills are designed to work with one week of a placebo pill in the round dispenser forces a woman to have a period once in every twenty-eight days. Though you might be under the misconception that this is "normal" the fact is that women were not designed by evolution to have their cycles every twenty-eight days. Modern women go through three hundred or more cycles in their lifetime and it's not sheerly because they live longer. It's perfectly natural for a adult woman to go almost two years without ovulating. So why do we have a pill that forces a woman to have it once a month? Well, mostly because of the church but the real answer is that we shouldn't. Especially as all that extraneous cell-division caused by the egg bursting through the wall of the ovary every month leads to a higher cancer rate. And not just a higher cancer rate in the ovaries but a higher cancer rate in the breasts caused by the progesterone and estrogen in the pill making a woman's body think it's a little bit pregnant. And I won't even get started on the fact that diet causes breast cancer in men.
So it's not so much that there are more things around us that "give" us cancer these days. And it's not so much the fact that we live longer and have time for more cell divisions. It has a lot more to do with the fact that our cells naturally want to be cancerous. Of course there are things we could do to help prevent that from happening (like reducing radiation levels and changing the way birth control works) but those things don't change the truth. Because the truth is that all your cells are cancerous and there's nothing you can consciously do about it. Are you scared yet? You should be.
Seriously though, we've been doing all right with this cancer thing in the last few thousand years before the advent of modern medicine. I wouldn't worry about it too much. After all, if we didn't have cancer we'd all be dead.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Technology Timescales
Technology does not work on a normal timescale. In most things inventions that change an industry or change the way people think take years, decades, centuries even to come about. With technology they invent something to change the face of technology every year. Possibly even more often than that. And yet, as with some other things, antiquated technology can be vogue in certain circles. How quickly technology changes just makes it more interesting that people will go out of their way to spend more money on old games from their childhood than on new and arguably better games. But not all parts of technology work like this. Old computers and televisions are far from cult-like appreciation that some older technology warrants.
Contained in my apartment there are two laptop computers and a desktop computer (keep in mind that only two people actually live in my apartment). There is a thirty-two inch HD LCD television and a PlayStation 3
. There is an entire bookshelf more than full of DVDs, BlueRay Discs and game discs. In a few years most likely my roommate's laptop will have given up the ghost and he'll have purchased a laptop with four times as much processing power that weighs less and has a longer battery life than his current one. It's very likely that I will have purchased a new computer as well even though I only got my laptop as recently as November. The television will have been replaced with something larger and thinner that will hang on our wall instead of sitting on a stand. The PS3, if it still exists, will sit dusty and rarely used in a corner of the living room. The bookshelf full of discs will probably no longer have any DVDs at all and the BlueRay discs will be considered inferior to whatever the next thing is and all the games will long have been traded back to the store to put toward purchasing new and better games.
All of this is true and yet me and my brother and sister-in-law and my nephew frequently spend time, sometimes hours, playing videogames on a system that came out when I was younger than my nephew is now. In fact, in addition to their Super Nintendo
they just purchased a original Nintendo
(though it has yet to arrive from the land of internet shopping). Some of the games for these two systems (such as the original Zelda
) are more expensive than brand-new games now. My oldest brother is actually working on fixing a broken Atari
for my previously-mentioned brother so we can play Frogger
and some of the other hundreds of dollars worth of old Atari games that have been sitting in a box in my brother's room at my parent's house since well before I can remember. Last night we switched from listening to a vintage vinyl of Jim Croce
to a burned CD of Guster music using the same all-in-one radio, record, tape, and CD player while we played a card-based strategy game called Dominion
. My nephew watches Dora the Explorer and old VHS tapes of WarnerBros cartoons or Mickey Mouse cartoons old enough to depict Mickey tripping balls after huffing some glue all in the same afternoon.
I recently watched a BlueRay movie, I don't even remember which one, but I laughed until my stomach hurt long before the movie started because of one of the warnings at the beginning. I don't have the exact words but the warning was something like: "This disc has been manufactured to the highest standards in BlueRay technology at the time of its manufacture. You may need to update the software of your BlueRay Player before you can view the contents of this disc." If you had been in the room with me when I read this warning you may have thought I was insane. I'll give you a hint about why I thought this was funny. Imagine if you had dragged out your old VCR and popped in the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie and it was preceded by a warning that the VHS you were about to watch had been manufactured to the highest standards in VHS technology and you might need to recalibrate your VCR before you could view the movie. So in the future when BlueRay is as by-gone as VHS is now and you happen to want to watch the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie for old times' sake in the middle of the night and you see that warning you're going to laugh, too.
And in the future when current top-of-the-line technology is considered antique and you can buy BlueRay discs at GoodWill for a dollar people around my current age will be buying back on eBay the same games they're so eager to trade in for better games now for the sake of nostalgia. Somehow, according to the timescale of technology, this all makes perfect sense. So if you want to invest in your future happiness... save your videogames. Or, you know, study hard in school, get a good job, make lots of money and buy the videogames on eBay when they come back into fashion.
Contained in my apartment there are two laptop computers and a desktop computer (keep in mind that only two people actually live in my apartment). There is a thirty-two inch HD LCD television and a PlayStation 3
. There is an entire bookshelf more than full of DVDs, BlueRay Discs and game discs. In a few years most likely my roommate's laptop will have given up the ghost and he'll have purchased a laptop with four times as much processing power that weighs less and has a longer battery life than his current one. It's very likely that I will have purchased a new computer as well even though I only got my laptop as recently as November. The television will have been replaced with something larger and thinner that will hang on our wall instead of sitting on a stand. The PS3, if it still exists, will sit dusty and rarely used in a corner of the living room. The bookshelf full of discs will probably no longer have any DVDs at all and the BlueRay discs will be considered inferior to whatever the next thing is and all the games will long have been traded back to the store to put toward purchasing new and better games.All of this is true and yet me and my brother and sister-in-law and my nephew frequently spend time, sometimes hours, playing videogames on a system that came out when I was younger than my nephew is now. In fact, in addition to their Super Nintendo
they just purchased a original Nintendo (though it has yet to arrive from the land of internet shopping). Some of the games for these two systems (such as the original Zelda) are more expensive than brand-new games now. My oldest brother is actually working on fixing a broken Atari for my previously-mentioned brother so we can play Frogger and some of the other hundreds of dollars worth of old Atari games that have been sitting in a box in my brother's room at my parent's house since well before I can remember. Last night we switched from listening to a vintage vinyl of Jim Croce to a burned CD of Guster music using the same all-in-one radio, record, tape, and CD player while we played a card-based strategy game called Dominion. My nephew watches Dora the Explorer and old VHS tapes of WarnerBros cartoons or Mickey Mouse cartoons old enough to depict Mickey tripping balls after huffing some glue all in the same afternoon.I recently watched a BlueRay movie, I don't even remember which one, but I laughed until my stomach hurt long before the movie started because of one of the warnings at the beginning. I don't have the exact words but the warning was something like: "This disc has been manufactured to the highest standards in BlueRay technology at the time of its manufacture. You may need to update the software of your BlueRay Player before you can view the contents of this disc." If you had been in the room with me when I read this warning you may have thought I was insane. I'll give you a hint about why I thought this was funny. Imagine if you had dragged out your old VCR and popped in the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie and it was preceded by a warning that the VHS you were about to watch had been manufactured to the highest standards in VHS technology and you might need to recalibrate your VCR before you could view the movie. So in the future when BlueRay is as by-gone as VHS is now and you happen to want to watch the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie for old times' sake in the middle of the night and you see that warning you're going to laugh, too.
And in the future when current top-of-the-line technology is considered antique and you can buy BlueRay discs at GoodWill for a dollar people around my current age will be buying back on eBay the same games they're so eager to trade in for better games now for the sake of nostalgia. Somehow, according to the timescale of technology, this all makes perfect sense. So if you want to invest in your future happiness... save your videogames. Or, you know, study hard in school, get a good job, make lots of money and buy the videogames on eBay when they come back into fashion.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Killing Songbirds and Other Disgusting Stuff
I'm pretty sure you know at least one terrible person. You probably know several terrible people. You may even be one yourself. I know you know a terrible person because you've heard the expression "kill two birds with one stone." They mean, of course, getting two things accomplished by performing one action. The implication is that by doing one thing two things that need to be done will be accomplished. The literal meaning of course can be easily imagined as a particularly mean-spirited young boy throwing rocks at birds on a telephone line and trying to kill more than one bird with a single rock.
People who gripe about paying an arm and a leg for something clearly haven't considered their words very much, either. If you literally lost an arm and a leg but serendipity gave you something great in return like a nice new handicap-friendly house it would be accurate to say you paid an arm and a leg for a house. But when your teenager promptly loses the cellular phone you bought them it's downright offensive to lament that they lost a piece of hardware that you payed an arm and a leg for.
"I need that like I need a hole in my head." An expression meaning something you definitely do not need (as except in rare cases your average person does not need an additional hole in their head other than the natural ones). This can be easily misconstrued however. People could assume that since you do need some holes in your head that whatever you're referring to is something that you actually need or that, for some reason you want to create a new hole in order to kill yourself (such as with a bullet).
Giving someone "a taste of their own medicine". Taken literally this is not even slightly vengeful. It's actually almost caring. Because if you give someone their medication and their medication is, say, an epipen when they're in anaphylactic shock then you've saved their life. There's really no way to construe it as poisoning or paying someone back unless you assume that the person you want to go against was handing out a poison they made up in the guise of medicine which is rarely the case.
Inviting someone to "break a leg" when they are about to perform in public is cheerily wishing painful bodily harm in front of a crowd at the expense of a friend (as you never say "break a leg" to people you don't know). The meaning, grotesquely, is actually "good luck."
Asking someone to lend you their ear so they'll pay attention and hear what you say when not only would it make it much harder for them to hear anything you say they would also be seriously distracted by the pain of having their ear cut off and all the subsequent bleeding and mess. They may even become unconscious and not be able to hear you at all.
I cannot imagine a circumstance in which you would need to "chew someone out" unless they were trapped in a large piece of food and you had the use of nothing but your mouth to free them. Even then there are probably certain people who would be better punished by not being chewed out. After all, shouldn't annoying jerks be left trapped in a big chocolate bar and not given a harsh talking to?
I'm not sure why people talk about the Hunchback of Nontre Dam when they mean two things are identical. A dead ringer of bells just doesn't equal two identical things.
When someone complains that someone else is just "beating a dead horse" when they raise concerns about something they mean not to bother with talking about something that's already been decided on. I have to say that it doesn't seem like anyone would voluntarily want to physically beat a dead horse as that would be unsanitary and also the horse lovers of the world would rip you apart.
Graveyard Shift refers not to actually having to work in a graveyard or mortuary but for some reason working between midnight and eight am. Why between those hours? Graveyards exist all day long. They don't exist any more prominently at night. I can only assume that for some reason they mean this time of day because those are the hours during which you would probably least want to be in a graveyard and would rather be at your job if given the choice?
I find that spitting is a very inaccurate and messy art form so I can only imagine that a "spitting image" means something of very poor quality.
"Wearing your heart on your sleeve" seems like a very poor way of communicating feelings unless your sentiment is "I am dead because my heart has literally been ripped out of my chest" in which case the observation is very clear though most likely the only people who get to see it will be whoever discovers the body and the police.
Intestinal discomfort as a means of judging other people seems like a justification for random decisions. Any statement saying that someone says they made with their "gut feeling" I take to mean: "I don't know why I made this guess and I may be an idiot."
Someone "loosing their head" can only happen in a cartoon. It's mildly humorous to see a cartoon character walking around with their head under their arm but unless you were around King Henry VIII it's unlikely you've seen someone who "lost their head." It doesn't make sense that people who "lost their heads" to be enraged because dead people don't have much of any feelings at all. At least not after a few minutes anyway.
Acting like a chicken that has been detached from the container that holds its nervous system. I am undecided about this one. On the one hand there was a chicken that survived having its head chopped off until it eventually choked on its own phlegm and died. So they could mean that someone has lived blindly until they choked on their own phlegm and died or they could mean that they are simply acting dead as a chicken with it's head cut off usually tends to do.
So if you don't know any disgusting people you're very lucky and I'd like to ask you to pity me as I struggle not to gag at the thought of pain and spurting blood when someone asks me to lend them my ear. I want beg and tell them I'll be sure to listen if they just let me keep my ears.
People who gripe about paying an arm and a leg for something clearly haven't considered their words very much, either. If you literally lost an arm and a leg but serendipity gave you something great in return like a nice new handicap-friendly house it would be accurate to say you paid an arm and a leg for a house. But when your teenager promptly loses the cellular phone you bought them it's downright offensive to lament that they lost a piece of hardware that you payed an arm and a leg for.
"I need that like I need a hole in my head." An expression meaning something you definitely do not need (as except in rare cases your average person does not need an additional hole in their head other than the natural ones). This can be easily misconstrued however. People could assume that since you do need some holes in your head that whatever you're referring to is something that you actually need or that, for some reason you want to create a new hole in order to kill yourself (such as with a bullet).
Giving someone "a taste of their own medicine". Taken literally this is not even slightly vengeful. It's actually almost caring. Because if you give someone their medication and their medication is, say, an epipen when they're in anaphylactic shock then you've saved their life. There's really no way to construe it as poisoning or paying someone back unless you assume that the person you want to go against was handing out a poison they made up in the guise of medicine which is rarely the case.
Inviting someone to "break a leg" when they are about to perform in public is cheerily wishing painful bodily harm in front of a crowd at the expense of a friend (as you never say "break a leg" to people you don't know). The meaning, grotesquely, is actually "good luck."
Asking someone to lend you their ear so they'll pay attention and hear what you say when not only would it make it much harder for them to hear anything you say they would also be seriously distracted by the pain of having their ear cut off and all the subsequent bleeding and mess. They may even become unconscious and not be able to hear you at all.
I cannot imagine a circumstance in which you would need to "chew someone out" unless they were trapped in a large piece of food and you had the use of nothing but your mouth to free them. Even then there are probably certain people who would be better punished by not being chewed out. After all, shouldn't annoying jerks be left trapped in a big chocolate bar and not given a harsh talking to?
I'm not sure why people talk about the Hunchback of Nontre Dam when they mean two things are identical. A dead ringer of bells just doesn't equal two identical things.
When someone complains that someone else is just "beating a dead horse" when they raise concerns about something they mean not to bother with talking about something that's already been decided on. I have to say that it doesn't seem like anyone would voluntarily want to physically beat a dead horse as that would be unsanitary and also the horse lovers of the world would rip you apart.
Graveyard Shift refers not to actually having to work in a graveyard or mortuary but for some reason working between midnight and eight am. Why between those hours? Graveyards exist all day long. They don't exist any more prominently at night. I can only assume that for some reason they mean this time of day because those are the hours during which you would probably least want to be in a graveyard and would rather be at your job if given the choice?
I find that spitting is a very inaccurate and messy art form so I can only imagine that a "spitting image" means something of very poor quality.
"Wearing your heart on your sleeve" seems like a very poor way of communicating feelings unless your sentiment is "I am dead because my heart has literally been ripped out of my chest" in which case the observation is very clear though most likely the only people who get to see it will be whoever discovers the body and the police.
Intestinal discomfort as a means of judging other people seems like a justification for random decisions. Any statement saying that someone says they made with their "gut feeling" I take to mean: "I don't know why I made this guess and I may be an idiot."
Someone "loosing their head" can only happen in a cartoon. It's mildly humorous to see a cartoon character walking around with their head under their arm but unless you were around King Henry VIII it's unlikely you've seen someone who "lost their head." It doesn't make sense that people who "lost their heads" to be enraged because dead people don't have much of any feelings at all. At least not after a few minutes anyway.
Acting like a chicken that has been detached from the container that holds its nervous system. I am undecided about this one. On the one hand there was a chicken that survived having its head chopped off until it eventually choked on its own phlegm and died. So they could mean that someone has lived blindly until they choked on their own phlegm and died or they could mean that they are simply acting dead as a chicken with it's head cut off usually tends to do.
So if you don't know any disgusting people you're very lucky and I'd like to ask you to pity me as I struggle not to gag at the thought of pain and spurting blood when someone asks me to lend them my ear. I want beg and tell them I'll be sure to listen if they just let me keep my ears.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Are You Stuck in your job?
Are You Stuck in your job?
-or-
Face Value
While I was at work yesterday, busily straightening things (I often busily straighten things because it gives me an excuse to stand around and not actually do anything), a woman came in and asked if I worked there. The fact that I actually work there is, if I am not standing behind the counter, not immediately obvious to customers as there is not really a dress code and we don't wear name tags though a good hint in the winter at least is the fact that I am not wearing a coat. I said that I did and the woman said something that took her a little while to say but that the automatic filter my brain uses translated as having no meaning whatsoever. She handed me a piece of paper, smiled, and left.
I waited until she had gone to look at the paper she'd handed me. Even though it was simply black on white I assumed it was some kind of flier trying to sell me something. My eyes immediately went to the center of the flier where people always put a picture of the product or the most important text. What I read in the center made me back up and dismiss immediately throwing the paper away or handing it off to my boss. "You are invited to a Business Overview Open House".* Back up. Back up. What in the world is a "Business Overview Open House"? My first thought was that it was some kind of job fair. But the wording didn't really jive with that concept. No. The wording seemed to imply that it was a presentation about one specific business.
I decided to start reading the paper from the top. The first words that greeted me were: "Are You Stuck in your job?" Oh. Right. It had become immediately obvious to me what kind of "Business Overview Open House" this was going to be. The flier was so classic an example of one of those kind of businesses that I have to wonder that it's still worth the time of the people running them to make them work. If I had started reading at the top of the page the first words would have immediately made me realize that the rest of it was a waste of my time. And yet- enough people must believe it in order for it to be worth the money to rent a conference hall, drive all around town handing out fliers, register a domain name for a website, and bullshit at a bunch of people for an hour.
First, I'd like to try to imagine taking all of this at face value without knowing what I already know. You with me? Alright. Let's go. "Are You Stuck in your job?" Yes. The economy is dead. I applied to sixteen places before getting a single interview and I have to thank my nervous inability to shut up for getting me the job I have because my boss hires people because she likes talking to them. No really. I asked her about it. The job is simple enough that anyone literate can do it. Ideally my boss likes to hire people who like to read but it's not a requirement, you just have to be able to have a pleasant conversation with her.
"Do You Feel Like You're Worth More Than You're Getting Paid?" Abso-freaking-lutely. I work for minimum wage and if I ever want a raise I have to petition the company that owns the company I work for and hope they're feeling like I am an amazingly hard worker who deserves it even though they have no idea who I am. There are two pay levels where I work. Me and the manager. And the only way to become manager is to achieve seniority among the peons and then pray that my boss has a heart attack.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Really? Never really happened to me before. I could go for that. Seems like everyone else always has all the luck. "Visit: pplsucesschannel.com"** I am uncertain about why the webadress is printed here under the previous statement instead of at the bottom with the contact information but whatever, that does not concern me greatly. They have a website, they must be a legit business.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Oh my, the large font and the fact that this one statement takes up a quarter of the page makes me feel as though this is very important even though what a "Business Overview Open House" is is not clear.
"This Thursday, February 3rd, 2011" Okay, this Thursday. Alright. I am fired up to go to this and I will not forget because it's happening this week. "Located at the" Semi-classy Chain Hotel, 357 One of the Main Roads in Your Town, for some reason the postal code for your state and then the zipcode as though the last two are important for you to know to locate this place.
"Registration: 7:15 PM Presentation: 7:30-8:30 (Free to all guests)". Oh? I have to register. Meh. Going to assume the presentation is following the registration and not twelve hours later and oh- Hey. Look at that. It's free to all guests. And I was invited so I must be a guest.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Thirty-nine years? Wow. That's twice as old as I am. That must mean this company is legitimate. I am motivated and I'd certainly like to be my own boss and taking control of my future sounds great. I can't wait to go to this thing.
Flier Lady, Manager Contact information including phone number with areacode for my state. Oh. And there's contact information if I have questions, yet another sign of legitimacy.
Now, let's go back and re-read without all of the assumed optimism and a keener eye for howling errors than the imaginary person reading it before. Should I start with the obvious errors? There's a lot of unnecessary capitalization at the beginnings of words. I assume this is done for emphasis but if you want to make it look less awful you definitely need to follow-through with it. You shouldn't half-ass an unnecessarily capital-rich sentence or you'll end up with: "Are You Stuck in your job?" It just looks funny apart from being grammatically uncomfortable. As my friend assured me some conventions of grammar don't matter that much as long as you're consistent.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Not only am I uncertain why this is in parenthesis but that comma (located smack-dab in the middle between those two non-independent phrases) does not belong there. Words like "if" and "might" don't really belong in exclamatory sentences so that exclamation point probably doesn't belong either. Also, seriously, why is the web address right below the parenthetical statement instead of with the rest of the contact information? I don't get it.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Again with the awkward capitalization and failure to punctuate appropriately. The date and location seems okay at first but the lack of a qualifier (am or pm) for the time of the presentation itself is puzzling. "(Free to all guests)". Again, really, parentheses? They're so out of place I almost forgot to add them when I typed the quote and again punctuation is a thing which most people enjoy.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Oh god. Run-on sentences. Exclamation points. Inconsistency. Spelling errors. Oh god. Oh god, I just know that the grammar nazis of the internet are getting that uncontrolled twitch in their eye as they read this.
Now, if I can manage to stop cringing every time I look at the paper I can check the legitimacy of this flier. I'm going to ignore the website and get to that in a moment. Let's get to that paragraph at the bottom again. Meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a thirty-nine plus year old industry? Who are these people? Customers? No. More likely they're people who at least supposedly have been doing the job that's being pitched to you as your future job. Whether these people actually have or not is debatable and the only thing that's really important is that these are testimonials. Testimonials are used to make you think that it's possible and even easy to make money at this job. They will use certain key words and phrases to convince you of what your optimism wants to hear without actually lying or saying anything definitive at all. And that thirty-nine plus year old industry? Notice that they don't say that either the business you would be working for is over thirty-nine years old or what the "industry" itself actually is.
Now the name of the "Manager" and the phone number listed after it. I looked up the name in whitepages.com for my city. No hits. So I took a chance and checked for the entire state. We're in luck. The name is unique enough that I got only one hit. The town listed for the person is near-by where I live, maybe a forty-five minute drive tops. The age listed matches Flier Lady. And the listing says she's married. Flier Lady was wearing a wedding ring. (No, I wasn't checking out Flier Lady to notice this I just have some extreme difficulty with eye-contact with people I don't know. I can tell you a lot more about the hands of our regular customers and what they buy than anything else about them because that's what I look at.) Now, I know that area code is for this state but the regional code is for a cellphone and not a town. So I use the reverse lookup on whitepages to see about this cellphone. The owner lives in the same town as the listing for Flier Lady so I'm not going to bother punching in my own phone number (and paying them two bucks) just so they'll text me the cellphone owners name. So, what kind of manager of a supposedly thirty-nine year old business runs around handing out fliers to people like me, eh?
Now I'll check out their website. First I try a little trick I know to evaluate potential scams. You type in the business or address you think is suspect along with keywords like "scam" or "phony" or "rip-off" or "ponzi scheme" and Google it. No hits from the Better Business Bureau or even Yahoo!Answers. That's only marginally comforting. It just means that if this is a scam or scheme it's not very widespread. I type just their url into google (and no I'm not feeling lucky, thank you). I get a handful of hits. One of them is a domain name registry company. The registry informs me that this domain name was purchased on the sixth of January of this year. The website is not yet a month old. I'm feeling like there should be some alarm bells going off in most people's heads. I check the website itself. I don't get a WoT (which is Web of Trust, a Firefox add-on that will prevent you from going to pages full of nasty viruses and warn you when you are being inexplicably redirected and it has ratings for websites based on trustworthiness) warning which is also marginally comforting. The website is exactly one page and contains a thirty-minute video and two paragraphs of information.
As for the content of this website. Well, I tried watching the video, I really did. I watched a solid two minutes of it before I was ready to smash my face against my keyboard. If you want to know what the video was like- well I'll put it this way: Have you ever seen a thirty-minute infomercial in the wee hours of the morning? It was like that except instead of acne cream or rotisseries this was trying to sell you a... uhm... "business opportunity". The infomercial originally aired on January first of this year on the Fox Business Network. Bolded for reasons I'm sure you can discern.
The following is the text content of the website: "Publicly traded Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. gives individuals the opportunity to make a living while making a difference. Our sales force, comprised of Independent Associates across the United States and Canada, are involved with our company because it provides them unlimited income potential and the ability to set their own hours. They work as often or as little as they like. The service they share with others is something everyone needs and is affordable.
Their members benefit greatly from the legal service and identity theft shield plans. They receive access to professional legal counsel for things such as buying a house or a car; creating a will; handling a problem with an insurance company; dealing with identity theft; and much more where legal review should be routine, but rarely is. These events can be among the most important events in a person's life, yet there is a tendency for them to take place without proper legal review. For Pre-Paid Legal members, access to legal counsel is only a toll-free phone call away."
I only found one obvious grammatically uncomfortable sentence in this one (the last sentence of the first paragraph) but it's riddled with key phrases that make you think that not only can you make a lot of money by doing hardly anything but that you're actually helping people. Phrase intended to induce comfort and imply legitimacy: "Publicly traded company". Phrases intended to imply you can make tons without doing anything: "make a living" "unlimited income potential" "set their own hours" "work as often or as little as they like" ("They" referring to the sales force which the company wants you to be a part of.) The entire last paragraph is intended to make you think that the service you are selling would be helping people.
The website is copyrighted by a company called "Pre-paid Legal Services, Inc". For a fun trip, type that into Google or straight into your url bar and check out their website. Be sure to check out the page where they explain that they'll pay you $100 for each $26 referral you make to them and how that works. It made me actually literally laugh out loud. It was that funny.
So, allow me to summarize. There's this company, Pre-paid Legal Services, and they want to pay you $100 every time you sell someone a $26 dollar referral. I can't imagine that that twenty-six dollars isn't monthly. And if, by some miracle, that's not twenty-six dollars every month from each person they are going to send these people so much crap mail that if they ever need legal services they'll hire them and get money from that. And if the people don't hire them they could still make money from sending them junk mail or selling their mailing list to other companies who send junk mail. More than likely it's at least the first two if not all three.
Sure, you can make 100,000 dollars a year if you can sell just three "referrals" three hundred and thirty-four days a year (which, even if you worked five days a week every single week of the year at a regular job is seventy-four more work days, or two and a half months of extra work days). But do you know 1,000 people? Or how to go about convincing 1,000 people every year to buy this service? Most likely you can sell the service to your friends and family and co-workers (if you're smart enough to keep your day job) and that's a few hundred dollars for you while your friends and family shell out hundreds more to this company and receive a bunch of junk mail and start to wish they didn't know you before they finally sell their soul to the devil or cancel their credit cards in order to stop paying out on their subscription. And you'll still be stuck at your day job (or trying to find a new one) at the end of it all.
To conclude the question I ask you is not "Are You Stuck in your job?" but "Do you really think opportunities like this are better for you than the company who made them up?" And with that, I'm going to go get paid minimum wage to read and shuffle some books around because I have to go to that job I'm stuck in.
*Please note that I have intentionally kept the fidelity of any quotes used (spelling and grammar mistakes included) unless I otherwise mention that I've added emphasis or intentionally altered information to protect the identity of myvictim subject.
**Please note that there is actually a typographical error in the website name as it is listed on the flier. It should be pplsuccesschannel.com with two Cs in success.
-or-
Face Value
While I was at work yesterday, busily straightening things (I often busily straighten things because it gives me an excuse to stand around and not actually do anything), a woman came in and asked if I worked there. The fact that I actually work there is, if I am not standing behind the counter, not immediately obvious to customers as there is not really a dress code and we don't wear name tags though a good hint in the winter at least is the fact that I am not wearing a coat. I said that I did and the woman said something that took her a little while to say but that the automatic filter my brain uses translated as having no meaning whatsoever. She handed me a piece of paper, smiled, and left.
I waited until she had gone to look at the paper she'd handed me. Even though it was simply black on white I assumed it was some kind of flier trying to sell me something. My eyes immediately went to the center of the flier where people always put a picture of the product or the most important text. What I read in the center made me back up and dismiss immediately throwing the paper away or handing it off to my boss. "You are invited to a Business Overview Open House".* Back up. Back up. What in the world is a "Business Overview Open House"? My first thought was that it was some kind of job fair. But the wording didn't really jive with that concept. No. The wording seemed to imply that it was a presentation about one specific business.
I decided to start reading the paper from the top. The first words that greeted me were: "Are You Stuck in your job?" Oh. Right. It had become immediately obvious to me what kind of "Business Overview Open House" this was going to be. The flier was so classic an example of one of those kind of businesses that I have to wonder that it's still worth the time of the people running them to make them work. If I had started reading at the top of the page the first words would have immediately made me realize that the rest of it was a waste of my time. And yet- enough people must believe it in order for it to be worth the money to rent a conference hall, drive all around town handing out fliers, register a domain name for a website, and bullshit at a bunch of people for an hour.
First, I'd like to try to imagine taking all of this at face value without knowing what I already know. You with me? Alright. Let's go. "Are You Stuck in your job?" Yes. The economy is dead. I applied to sixteen places before getting a single interview and I have to thank my nervous inability to shut up for getting me the job I have because my boss hires people because she likes talking to them. No really. I asked her about it. The job is simple enough that anyone literate can do it. Ideally my boss likes to hire people who like to read but it's not a requirement, you just have to be able to have a pleasant conversation with her.
"Do You Feel Like You're Worth More Than You're Getting Paid?" Abso-freaking-lutely. I work for minimum wage and if I ever want a raise I have to petition the company that owns the company I work for and hope they're feeling like I am an amazingly hard worker who deserves it even though they have no idea who I am. There are two pay levels where I work. Me and the manager. And the only way to become manager is to achieve seniority among the peons and then pray that my boss has a heart attack.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Really? Never really happened to me before. I could go for that. Seems like everyone else always has all the luck. "Visit: pplsucesschannel.com"** I am uncertain about why the webadress is printed here under the previous statement instead of at the bottom with the contact information but whatever, that does not concern me greatly. They have a website, they must be a legit business.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Oh my, the large font and the fact that this one statement takes up a quarter of the page makes me feel as though this is very important even though what a "Business Overview Open House" is is not clear.
"This Thursday, February 3rd, 2011" Okay, this Thursday. Alright. I am fired up to go to this and I will not forget because it's happening this week. "Located at the" Semi-classy Chain Hotel, 357 One of the Main Roads in Your Town, for some reason the postal code for your state and then the zipcode as though the last two are important for you to know to locate this place.
"Registration: 7:15 PM Presentation: 7:30-8:30 (Free to all guests)". Oh? I have to register. Meh. Going to assume the presentation is following the registration and not twelve hours later and oh- Hey. Look at that. It's free to all guests. And I was invited so I must be a guest.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Thirty-nine years? Wow. That's twice as old as I am. That must mean this company is legitimate. I am motivated and I'd certainly like to be my own boss and taking control of my future sounds great. I can't wait to go to this thing.
Flier Lady, Manager Contact information including phone number with areacode for my state. Oh. And there's contact information if I have questions, yet another sign of legitimacy.
Now, let's go back and re-read without all of the assumed optimism and a keener eye for howling errors than the imaginary person reading it before. Should I start with the obvious errors? There's a lot of unnecessary capitalization at the beginnings of words. I assume this is done for emphasis but if you want to make it look less awful you definitely need to follow-through with it. You shouldn't half-ass an unnecessarily capital-rich sentence or you'll end up with: "Are You Stuck in your job?" It just looks funny apart from being grammatically uncomfortable. As my friend assured me some conventions of grammar don't matter that much as long as you're consistent.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Not only am I uncertain why this is in parenthesis but that comma (located smack-dab in the middle between those two non-independent phrases) does not belong there. Words like "if" and "might" don't really belong in exclamatory sentences so that exclamation point probably doesn't belong either. Also, seriously, why is the web address right below the parenthetical statement instead of with the rest of the contact information? I don't get it.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Again with the awkward capitalization and failure to punctuate appropriately. The date and location seems okay at first but the lack of a qualifier (am or pm) for the time of the presentation itself is puzzling. "(Free to all guests)". Again, really, parentheses? They're so out of place I almost forgot to add them when I typed the quote and again punctuation is a thing which most people enjoy.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Oh god. Run-on sentences. Exclamation points. Inconsistency. Spelling errors. Oh god. Oh god, I just know that the grammar nazis of the internet are getting that uncontrolled twitch in their eye as they read this.
Now, if I can manage to stop cringing every time I look at the paper I can check the legitimacy of this flier. I'm going to ignore the website and get to that in a moment. Let's get to that paragraph at the bottom again. Meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a thirty-nine plus year old industry? Who are these people? Customers? No. More likely they're people who at least supposedly have been doing the job that's being pitched to you as your future job. Whether these people actually have or not is debatable and the only thing that's really important is that these are testimonials. Testimonials are used to make you think that it's possible and even easy to make money at this job. They will use certain key words and phrases to convince you of what your optimism wants to hear without actually lying or saying anything definitive at all. And that thirty-nine plus year old industry? Notice that they don't say that either the business you would be working for is over thirty-nine years old or what the "industry" itself actually is.
Now the name of the "Manager" and the phone number listed after it. I looked up the name in whitepages.com for my city. No hits. So I took a chance and checked for the entire state. We're in luck. The name is unique enough that I got only one hit. The town listed for the person is near-by where I live, maybe a forty-five minute drive tops. The age listed matches Flier Lady. And the listing says she's married. Flier Lady was wearing a wedding ring. (No, I wasn't checking out Flier Lady to notice this I just have some extreme difficulty with eye-contact with people I don't know. I can tell you a lot more about the hands of our regular customers and what they buy than anything else about them because that's what I look at.) Now, I know that area code is for this state but the regional code is for a cellphone and not a town. So I use the reverse lookup on whitepages to see about this cellphone. The owner lives in the same town as the listing for Flier Lady so I'm not going to bother punching in my own phone number (and paying them two bucks) just so they'll text me the cellphone owners name. So, what kind of manager of a supposedly thirty-nine year old business runs around handing out fliers to people like me, eh?
Now I'll check out their website. First I try a little trick I know to evaluate potential scams. You type in the business or address you think is suspect along with keywords like "scam" or "phony" or "rip-off" or "ponzi scheme" and Google it. No hits from the Better Business Bureau or even Yahoo!Answers. That's only marginally comforting. It just means that if this is a scam or scheme it's not very widespread. I type just their url into google (and no I'm not feeling lucky, thank you). I get a handful of hits. One of them is a domain name registry company. The registry informs me that this domain name was purchased on the sixth of January of this year. The website is not yet a month old. I'm feeling like there should be some alarm bells going off in most people's heads. I check the website itself. I don't get a WoT (which is Web of Trust, a Firefox add-on that will prevent you from going to pages full of nasty viruses and warn you when you are being inexplicably redirected and it has ratings for websites based on trustworthiness) warning which is also marginally comforting. The website is exactly one page and contains a thirty-minute video and two paragraphs of information.
As for the content of this website. Well, I tried watching the video, I really did. I watched a solid two minutes of it before I was ready to smash my face against my keyboard. If you want to know what the video was like- well I'll put it this way: Have you ever seen a thirty-minute infomercial in the wee hours of the morning? It was like that except instead of acne cream or rotisseries this was trying to sell you a... uhm... "business opportunity". The infomercial originally aired on January first of this year on the Fox Business Network. Bolded for reasons I'm sure you can discern.
The following is the text content of the website: "Publicly traded Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. gives individuals the opportunity to make a living while making a difference. Our sales force, comprised of Independent Associates across the United States and Canada, are involved with our company because it provides them unlimited income potential and the ability to set their own hours. They work as often or as little as they like. The service they share with others is something everyone needs and is affordable.
Their members benefit greatly from the legal service and identity theft shield plans. They receive access to professional legal counsel for things such as buying a house or a car; creating a will; handling a problem with an insurance company; dealing with identity theft; and much more where legal review should be routine, but rarely is. These events can be among the most important events in a person's life, yet there is a tendency for them to take place without proper legal review. For Pre-Paid Legal members, access to legal counsel is only a toll-free phone call away."
I only found one obvious grammatically uncomfortable sentence in this one (the last sentence of the first paragraph) but it's riddled with key phrases that make you think that not only can you make a lot of money by doing hardly anything but that you're actually helping people. Phrase intended to induce comfort and imply legitimacy: "Publicly traded company". Phrases intended to imply you can make tons without doing anything: "make a living" "unlimited income potential" "set their own hours" "work as often or as little as they like" ("They" referring to the sales force which the company wants you to be a part of.) The entire last paragraph is intended to make you think that the service you are selling would be helping people.
The website is copyrighted by a company called "Pre-paid Legal Services, Inc". For a fun trip, type that into Google or straight into your url bar and check out their website. Be sure to check out the page where they explain that they'll pay you $100 for each $26 referral you make to them and how that works. It made me actually literally laugh out loud. It was that funny.
So, allow me to summarize. There's this company, Pre-paid Legal Services, and they want to pay you $100 every time you sell someone a $26 dollar referral. I can't imagine that that twenty-six dollars isn't monthly. And if, by some miracle, that's not twenty-six dollars every month from each person they are going to send these people so much crap mail that if they ever need legal services they'll hire them and get money from that. And if the people don't hire them they could still make money from sending them junk mail or selling their mailing list to other companies who send junk mail. More than likely it's at least the first two if not all three.
Sure, you can make 100,000 dollars a year if you can sell just three "referrals" three hundred and thirty-four days a year (which, even if you worked five days a week every single week of the year at a regular job is seventy-four more work days, or two and a half months of extra work days). But do you know 1,000 people? Or how to go about convincing 1,000 people every year to buy this service? Most likely you can sell the service to your friends and family and co-workers (if you're smart enough to keep your day job) and that's a few hundred dollars for you while your friends and family shell out hundreds more to this company and receive a bunch of junk mail and start to wish they didn't know you before they finally sell their soul to the devil or cancel their credit cards in order to stop paying out on their subscription. And you'll still be stuck at your day job (or trying to find a new one) at the end of it all.
To conclude the question I ask you is not "Are You Stuck in your job?" but "Do you really think opportunities like this are better for you than the company who made them up?" And with that, I'm going to go get paid minimum wage to read and shuffle some books around because I have to go to that job I'm stuck in.
*Please note that I have intentionally kept the fidelity of any quotes used (spelling and grammar mistakes included) unless I otherwise mention that I've added emphasis or intentionally altered information to protect the identity of my
**Please note that there is actually a typographical error in the website name as it is listed on the flier. It should be pplsuccesschannel.com with two Cs in success.
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