Freelancing with my Groupon
Shortly after I lost my job I immediately set about combing Craigslist and every other listing of media jobs for opportunities that didn't involve the phrase "turn-key operation" or "stuff envelopes at home." Thanks to some friends who I assigned to comb different parts of the Web, I landed my first and only gig thusfar with Groupon.
For those of you who haven't clicked the Facebook ads in Chicago, Boston or Denver the premise of the Web site is simple.
When the moon is in the Seventh House and the seventh son of a hanged man is in a trance state, the site's sales force hits up businesses with a proposition.
The Banality of Hoaxing
On April 1, 2008 you couldn't click on a link without first hitting the mute button.
It was all you could do to protect yourself from the potential minefield of "Rick Rolls" that was the Internet's response to April Fool's. It had been a running gag in the months ahead but the sheer pervasiveness of the meme that day pushed it into the mainstream.
Later that year we'd see a live demonstration at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, leaving many news anchors conused and bewildered as they attempted to figure out what was going on. Thankfully, it was the death knell of the Rick Roll and probably the first paying gig that Mr. Astley had in years.
This year the tricks have been equally uninspired. For the particularly lazy we simply announce in our Facebook status that our ideologies and worldviews have changed to the polar opposite, and that we're now gleefully awaiting the rapture.
What are we recovering?
The mall was oddly croweded for a ghost town. The weakest shops at the Independence Mall had already disappeared and others were following it. In front of the Best Buy there were plenty of cars but stepping insde there weren't many carrying shopping bags or taking things up to the counter, just browsing.
My younger brother rolled his eyes, he had seen the same behavior when he worked at Circuit City. People thinking about what they might be buying if their credit card limits hadn't been slashed, and if they weren't trying to save up money in case they lost their jobs.
While recently there have been a few sparks of hope, the American economy is still in the doldrums but government wants to fix that.
The Weeks of Living Lazily
I spent half-an-hour stuffing a box with the accumulation of almost two years of a job that I alternately loved and hated. I had been warned, and when I saw the e-mail in my box that morning about a meeting with the boss at the end of the day I knew that it was coming. So I quietly packed up my stuff, indifferent to what was going on around me, and left the office. My one regret was that I didn't raid the supply closet.