Look! They’re so sad they’re soliciting sex online!
This is a thankless job. We can’t make fun of everything equally every day and we definitely can’t go back and see how our flip frivolity and vituperative vitriol has affected our poor, mewling victims. But now we see what we’ve done and friends we are sorry.
Take Slideshare, for example. They posted a story bemoaning their fate:
Running a site like SlideShare, you get used to all the PowerPoint jokes. Heck, we enjoy them! When we first came out, the best coverage was comments like: Bore people around the world. We have been told that we are the worst website in the world (I have met the person who made the comment and he’s rather nice (and uses SlideShare now ;-).
That was us. We wrote “Bore people around the world.” And look at them now…
Scene: a dreary start-up office in a run-down strip mall in Mountain View, California. It is raining — snow is on its way. The partners are down to four and the employees consist of one emotional wreck who is nursing a ficus back to health and the CEO’s cousin Jimmy who once ran a cigarette stand in Greece. The CEO, Dr. Rashmi Sinha knows she’s out of her depth. She has a PhD, sure, but that never prepared her for the ribbings doled out by a gang of cretins on the Internet. She Googles Slideshare again and finds that that same story, headline SlideShare: Bore People Around the World, pops up. A tear trickles up and is already riding down her face when COO Amit Ranjan stands up to scream and scream and scream and then runs for the plate glass. His bald pate makes contact, bounces off, and he falls backwards into dreamland where CrunchGear doesn’t exist and his family still loves him. The team opens another bottle of Jack — Sinha eyes the drain cleaner in the break room but decides that’s no way for a former eBay consultant to go — and they drink.
Friends, this scene is real. This is what happens when you blog while under the influence of multiple narcotics, cough medicines (the same as narcotics, if cooked right), and Cafe DuMond coffee ordered from Cajun Grocer (the sell great Turducken) and drunk daily by the carafe full. Please. For the love of Pete, be kind to your targets.
SlideShare