Revisiting a Keeper: Classmates.com - Fear the Mullet

Jon Reed notes: After I posted this Onion piece mocking Classmates.com to my Facebook profile, I decided to bring out this Classmates.com rant from my older "rantblog" archives. Originally posted on September 27, 2006, if I'd known how bad Classmates.com was going to be hammered by Facebook, I probably wouldn't have bothered with this one.

The most idiotic ad campaign on the web? Classmates.com. Preying on the not-so-nice reality that most of us would gladly trade our current lives for a letterman's jacket and a motorbike, the classmates.com marketing play is all about sentiment...("She married who?") Classmates.com wouldn't even exist if people didn't have an underlying disgust with their water cooler lives and the lumps on the couch they married. But all those folks in those adorable black and whites have turned into lumps too. Soon we'll all be that way unless we get off the couch and do something. Logging our out-of-shape asses onto the Internet and paying someone to help us stalk someone we once projected our adolescent fantasies onto isn't going to get it done.

I'm actually a big fan of high school reunions. Every single reunion I have attended has changed my life in some way. But the idea that we need a third party corporation to help us find our classmates is absurd. Google does a lot of it for free, and a private investigator can lend a hand with the rest. The biggest problem with tracking down old friends is that by and large, the ones you've lost touch with are the ones you're supposed to lose touch with. That kind of drift is natural - fighting it just leads to awkward "he's changed" encounters. The thing is, whenever you go to a real-deal reunion, what you find is always surprising. The people you were closest with back in the day aren't necessarily the ones you "click" with now.

I always leave a reunion with new friends I didn't even know in high school. But classmates.com isn't about meeting new people - it's all nostalgia marketing: find the one that got away! Let me save you the trouble: you don't want the one that got away. Trust me, they have settled into a life more dreary than you ever wanted to know. And if for some reason they are doing great, it's because they are doing GREAT - married, kids, good job, nice pets. So go ahead, log onto classmates.com, put on some Dan Fogelberg, grab that old stake, and drive it further into your heart. The past is powerful stuff; we should engage it on our own terms, on our own time. Classmates.com is a clever business, but I'd bet my mullet that it's broken a lot more hearts than it's helped.

Revisiting a Keeper: Verizon Encouraging Attention-Deficit Generation

"Anyone who has ever tried to give a presentation while some attention-deficit-disorder douchebag pounds text messages to vague social prospects knows that this kind of technology is nibbling away at the last remaining social conventions. " - Jon Reed on Verizon Mobile Sports, March 25, 2008

I'm going to publish plenty of new stuff on this blog, but I'm also seizing the chance to feature a few old classics from the archives. This Verizon Sports Rant was one of my faves:

Verizon Mobile Sports: Disrupting a Dinner Date Near You

"Verizon is running a clever series of commercials right now for its ESPN-driven sports update service, where you can get all kinds of sports scores and highlights right on your cell phone. On the surface, it seems cool for the so-called sports “nut” - if you want to get your sports updates wherever you are, why not give it a try? It’s the backstory that I find both amusing and a little repugnant. The amusing part? ESPN first tried to launch this service on its own, with its own phones and service, and suffered a rare, humiliating commercial failure.
There’s definitely something funny about seeing ESPN’s marketing turd all shiny and new with Verizon’s name and logo trying to cover up the warmed-over smell.

The second aspect, the repugnant part, comes into play with the idea that it’s somehow cool or appropriate to sneak peeks at your scores and highlights in the midst of all kind of formal occasions - in the case of the two commercials I’ve seen, company meetings and baby showers. It may seem harmless to promote such behavior, but anyone who has ever tried to give a presentation while some attention-deficit-disorder douchebag pounds text messages to vague social prospects knows that this kind of technology is nibbling away at the last remaining social conventions. I know this: if I see some glory days fraternity brother cheering when Alex Rodriguez manages to luck into a clutch hit in the middle of a talk I am giving, I’m gonna step away from my PowerPoint and pound his phone into shrapnel.

It’s great to have the convenience of updates, but is it too old-fashioned to wonder whether this makes us better human beings? If you can’t wait till you get home to find out whether the Sox left a runner stranded on third in the sixth, then you probably have a personality defect. The constant barrage of incoming information makes us terrible listeners, lacking focus for the people and projects that deserve our time and attention. I watch and listen to a lot of sports, and if I don’t see a need for such a service in my life, it makes me wonder about the headspace of the people Verizon is marketing to.

Of course, this problem is hardly limited to sports. I’ve been out on social occasions where someone got involved with a text message in the middle of a one-on-one conversation with me, without even bothering to excuse themselves or apologize. I guess it’s possible that I am such a terrible conversationalist that people are doing this out of social desperation, but I’m going to hold onto the illusion that it’s worth it to listen to me.

At any rate, whether I am worthy of focused conversation is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I’m not going to put up with it. The first person who checks their Verizon score update in the middle of a dinner date with me gets to contend with the bill all by themselves. They can watch the highlights all they want while I drive off in search of someone who still prefers human contact to constant childish stimulation."