Hurrah! It’s time again for my favourite week of the year: the week when tech writers are given a much needed break from the day to day drudgery of reporting and analysis and are instead encouraged to spend time away from their keyboards; having dinner with family members, taking long walks with husbands and wives, kicking around a ball with children.
Yes indeed tech writers, stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone: it’s time for International Fuck It Let’s just Phone It In Week.
The week was kicked off in vintage style by the Financial Times’ Cardiff Garcia with a post entitled “How to write about the Groupon IPO when you don’t really care“. The post, which opened with the line “Asinine joke about how this IPO isn’t the kind of discount you’d find on the Groupon site itself. Shoot yourself” perfectly embodied the spirit of IFILJPIIW, managing to both entertain readers and show total contempt for them at the same time. Kudos, Cardiff.
Meanwhile here on TechCrunch, our very own Erick Schonfeld also chose Groupon as the subject of his IFILJPIIW post. With classic Schonfeldian pluck, Erick didn’t even bother writing a single fresh word: instead he just copied and pasted one of his own tweets! Brilliant.
Traditional media got in on the fun too, with the New York Daily News’ Nina Mandell employing the classic IFILJPIIW trick of reposting an article that has been written four billion times before, and simply updating the headline and date. The result: “1500 people show up for 16-year-old’s birthday party after she forgets to set Facebook settings“. Well played, Nina! (Not to be outdone, the Washington Post’s Rob Stein reports that “Cellphones [are] ‘possibly carcinogenic‘” LOL!)
Of course, there are publications for which IFILJPIIW poses an annual challenge: how to mark the event when your writers already phone it in most weeks? Business Insider’s Henry Blodget solved the problem with deft irony by massively over-reporting a virtual non story. Unphoning in a total phoner! Brilliant! Now back to the slideshows of cute programmers!
Speaking of cute, here’s a video of a duck following a puppy. What do you think of ducks following puppies? Tell us in the comments!