You’re Thinking Like A Marketer, Not A Customer

If you’re running a site to promote something (a product, an event, a way-of-life), and you’re doing so not simply out of the goodness of your heart,* but for financial gain, chances are you’re doing it totally wrong.

And if you are doing it wrong (and you probably are, trust me), then you’re losing money, losing audience, and losing sight of what makes your product/event/philosophy remarkable.

Nine times out of ten, the big problem is that you’re thinking from the point of view of a Marketer rather than as a customer. It’s nothing new to say this, of course, but I wonder if you could recognize it when you see it.

This is one of the biggest signs, and it turns people away before they’ve even had time to figure out where they are:

A homepage that screams “Buy This Now!,” instead of posing a polite, quiet, “How can I help you find what you’re looking for?” or even, “Hi! How are you today? Please feel free to take a look around and let me know if you have any questions.”

There’s a reason that brick-and-mortar salespeople** and cashiers and waitstaff and receptionists and pretty much everyone else use polite language like that above. They are there to serve you and assist you in paying for what you want to buy, not shove the Bison Burger Special down your throat.

Consider this bit of analogy:

It is raining. Hard. You don’t have an umbrella, but need to walk another twenty blocks down Fifth Avenue to get to your job interview. Crossing 36th Street, you glimpse a rack of umbrellas inside a store you’ve never shopped in before, a place called Jerry’s Stuff On Fifth. Sweet. Salvation. You open the door. *Ringaling!* You step inside, casually scanning the room from side to side to locate the rack of umbrellas you had noticed through the window, as you shake off a little of the rainwater and try to calm your breath. Without warning, you are ambushed by sales associates on either side, yelling and arm-waving and shoving Plastic Thermoses in front of your face.

“$9.95! Two for $15!!! Tell A Friend!!! Buy Now! Buy Now! $9.95! Two for $15! Only today! Special Special!”

You try to speak: “But...but...I just want an um—”

“Thermos Special! Buy Today! $9.95! Two for $15!”

If you don’t go running back out into the thunderstorm after enduring that, then I’ll eat my shorts. (Oh wait, I already did that.)

Make sense yet?

Here’s a translation of my little allegory:

Rain = Google

Umbrella = Search Query

Jerry’s Stuff On Fifth = Your Website

Plastic Thermoses Salespeople Of Doom = Bullshit Links and Flashing Banners and Fancy Rollovers and Embedded Commercials and BUY NOW MOTHERFUCKER Buttons that have absolutely, positively, NOTHING to do with what your customers want because you haven’t even bothered to ask them.

Any questions?

----
*Of course, even people doing stuff out of the goodness of their hearts routinely make the same mistakes. But the stakes are frequently higher when money gets involved, and for some reason, folks working for-profit tend to approach things with a much higher dose of ego, self-deception, and propensity for outright lying and other unethical behaviors that basically define “Marketers.” (Sub-note: marketers are not intrinsically evil. Marketers (capital M) are.) Go Back Up

**I am aware that a lot of salespeople are assholes. These are not the ones I am referring to. Have you stopped to think that your site acts like the very worst of the worst Timeshare salespeople? Go Back Up

Why I Don’t Care About A Recession

Subtitled: Why I Should Probably Never Consult On The Economy

So, everyone and her mother is fretting about the American economy lately. It’s of the major issues influencing the Presidential Primaries, and was the main subject of President Bush’s State of the Union earlier this week.

But I guarantee - guarantee - that if you ask people what exactly is wrong with the economy, the median answer will be (verbatim), “It’s bad,” whatever the heck that means.

Well, what does that mean, anyway? Not much. In fact, if you’re like me and actually think about how this (here or not yet here) recession affects you, you’ll see this so-called recession as a positive thing.

Check this out:

• The Fed is lowering interest rates, which means my student loans (all $500 Million of them) are decidedly more manageable. At last, I’m not being screwed into paying more in interest than the actual cost of the loan. Just barely, mind you, but lower interest means I can make a big payment on my loan and not have it all be meaningless. But where am I getting the money to make this big payment at a time when the economy is so “bad?” Well, that’s my next point.
• The government is going to be sending me money. Free money. No strings attached money. Assuming Congress is able to pass an economic stimulus package (which, yes, is a big assumption), most of us will be receiving a substantial check on top of our tax rebates. How substantial? I’ve heard numbers around $500, which isn’t too shabby. That could buy you an iPhone. Or two Zunes. Or three bundles of Rock Band. Or four things that cost $125 each after sales tax. But don’t rush out and spend that money on any of the above (except maybe Rock Band, because it’s amazing, but only one copy and maybe an extra guitar controller if they are ever released). That’s just what they’re expecting you to do. That’s what they want you to do. They who caused this whole mess in the first place. Why in Xenu’s name would you play into their hand? Dumb. Instead, do this: keep the money. Horde as much as you can. Keep your tax rebate, too. And the money your grandmother gives you for your birthday. Put it all in secret locations around your house. Put it in a savings account. Or, take advantage of the low interest rates and use the money to pay down some debts. Whatever you do, don’t encourage businesses and government by giving them the money. That’d just be enormously foolish. Remember: It’s all their fault.
  
• Everything I have any interest in buying still costs the same. I don’t know what other people are buying that is more expensive now. Maybe gas, but if you’re driving a car, I personally blame you for 95.7% of this country’s ills anyway, so I couldn’t care less about your transportation expenses. Apple computers still cost the same, iPods still cost the same, iPhones and the AppleTV are actually cheaper! I don’t usually buy food, so I can’t say anything about those prices, but I can tell you that the Chinese/Mexican restaurant that delivers to my apartment hasn’t raised their prices. And if they did, well, I guess I wouldn’t eat three nights out of the week. Whatever. A sacrifice during wartime for the greater good. Call me a hero. Call me John McCain.
  
• I still have a job. And they still pay me the same amount of money. So, um, some math here - a word problem, in fact: Kevin’s boss pays him $500 a month, and his rent is $125 a month before the recession. Now that there is (allegedly) a recession, he earns and spends exactly the same amount. How little does he care? Please show your work and express your answer to 5 significant figures.
  
• What about those Americans who are out of work, who can’t get hired because the job market is awful? Won’t they be devastated by a slumping economy? Well, yeah, but I have a very simple solution for them: Build up your credit rating by spending every last dime in your possession, and take out a $5,000 loan. Spend $2500 on a new MacBook Pro and a copy of Windows XP, which you’ll install and run using Boot Camp. Spend $100 a month on a Triple Play package (cable, internet, phone). With the remaining cash, buy every single O’Reilly book on Amazon, read them, and learn how to program. If you are artistically inclined, you can instead spend the money on a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3. If you are artistically inclined, but uncharacteristically financially intelligent, then spend the money on the programming books, and pirate a copy of CS3 via BitTorrent. Then call me. I will pay you to do my work. Whoever said nobody is hiring right now obviously only asked Yahoo.
  

See, things aren’t so bad, now are they?

8 Ways To Drive A Graphic Designer Mad

Amazingly funny (and tragically true) list that I wish I wrote.

A highlight:

When you have to send a graphic designer a document, make sure it's made with a program from Microsoft Office. PC version if possible. If you have to send pictures, you'll have more success in driving them mad if, instead of just sending a jpeg or a raw camera file, you embed the pictures inside a Microsoft Office document like Word or Powerpoint. Don't forget to lower the resolution to 72 dpi so that they'll have to contact you again for a higher quality version. When you send them the "higher" version, make sure the size is at least 50% smaller.

Check out the whole list. And behave yourself!

Related video. (Inasmuch as it is about torture.)

How Stupid Can iPhone Owners Be?

Apparently pretty freaking stupid.

Yesterday, Apple released an update to the iPhone firmware (1.1.1 - nice little video detailing the changes), which adds some cool features like a double-clickable home button that brings you straight to your favorites list, one tap away from making a call (this same action can also call up controls for music, so you can pause, adjust the volume, etc., without leaving the application you are using). Other new stuff includes the iTunes WiFi store (which works like BUTTER. Beautiful butter.), support for closed-captioning, louder speaker volume, some nifty little keyboard enhancements, and some security patches and bug fixes.

This stuff is all cool, sure - certainly not earth-shattering - but what I can’t comprehend is the reasoning that compelled people who had hacked their phones to install third-party apps (or even to unlock it for use on a network other than AT&T) to risk everything and attempt to install the update, even after Apple explicitly said that such updates would likely render their phones unusable. Well guess what? Apple wasn’t lying.

I guess for these (seemingly plentiful) people, the lure of being able to download DRM-laden music on the go and double-click a button was strong enough to trump the ability to use some great native third-party apps like faux-GPS, games, chat, VoIP (forthcoming, I’ve heard), etcetera, etcetera - not to mention the ability to, uh, make a freakin’ phone call with their phone.

What were these people thinking? If you hacked your phone, and had any sense whatsoever, you would have waited for the tech blogs and the development team who provided the hack to test the firmware update for you and report back. Now you’re screwed because of your overzealousness, . I, for one, am not the least bit interested in listening to you complain about something you brought on yourself.

My roommate has a hacked iPhone. His still works today. Want to know his secret?

He’s not a fucking moron.

I’m embarrassed to be associated with these idiots.

(Lots more on this subject on Techmeme)

How To Offend Someone

Offending people is quite simple, really. Just try out one of these plug-and-chug phrases, filling in the blanks with an appropriate word of your own (and modifying the sentence structure as necessary to not sound like a complete idiot who read some stuff on a blog and tried to use the knowledge gained in real life).

You can even string several into a combo of offensitivity to score mucho extra points-o (pretending to speak another language goes miles, as well) and earn a power-up bonus at the end of the level.

• Call him/her a _____.


• Talk about how all of “the _____s” are _____.


• Say that his/her mother is a_____ _____ with _____ _____s, and she _____ too many _____s.


• Casually mention how _____ his/her _____ is/are.


• Make a gesture referencing the ____ of his/her _____.


• Tell them to _____ themselves with a _____.


• Say “Your blog sucks.”
  


• “Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that your people were _____.”


• Speak. Really. Slowly. And move your arms a great deal.


• “Is it...a boy?”
  


• “Accidentally” forward him/her an IM conversation in which one of his/her friends talks about how much of a _____ he/she is, especially the way that he/she _____ in the gym last week.


• Say something extremely nice about his/her weight and/or appearance.


• Ask, “So, where are you from?”
  


• Or ask “Do you people _____ in _____?”


• And then say, “Oh, that’s weird.”

Leave your meanest lines in the comments. No censorship necessary.

Do You Use The Internet For Evil?

Are you using this precious web technology to commit crimes against humanity?

Here’s a checklist.

Do you...

• send non-business-sensitive emails using Bcc?
• chat with multiple people at once and copy/paste portions of one conversation into another?
• post bulletins on MySpace to call attention to your “awesome new pix!”?
• still use AOL? (Worse yet - are you still paying for AOL?)
• use the font tag?
• use HTML tables as structural elements?
• have a LiveJournal?
• belong to more than five social networking sites
• search the web using Ask.com?
• link to other sites because you were asked to in an email?
• read and agree with Andrew Keen?
• plaster AdSense all over your blog?
• stalk people by subscribing to Google Alerts on their name (as well as their Amazon wishlist, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr stream, and Twitter alerts)?
• forward emails? Ever?
• frequent any chatrooms or forums?
• comment on Digg stories?
• buy books from Barnes & Noble instead of Amazon?
• use Arial for anything, anywhere, ever, for any reason?

Got any more insidious offenses against common decency? Leave them in the comments!

Idiot Alert: Huge Overseas iPhone Bills

Dear internationally-travelling iPhone owners,

If you receive a cell phone bill for thousands of dollars upon returning to the U.S., I pity you.

I pity you, because it’s more than clear that you lack the ability to perform critical functions of the brain most commonly associated with the evolutionary ascent from Pongo pygmaeus to Homo sapien. Which is to say (more slowly so you may comprehend), you are a stupid monkey.

Here’s why:

Every single phone will incur the same exact international roaming charges for voice or data usage unless you’ve contacted your carrier about a specific travel plan.

The iPhone’s email-checking function is set to manual by default. This means that it is your fault and no one else’s that your phone is connecting to the server every 10 minutes. Turn it back off, dodo-face!

When the iPhone (hell, any phone) is off - yes off - not just sleeping (you know the difference, right?), it will not receive any calls or messages, nor will it attempt to download content from the web. Are you expecting a call or something?

What the heck are you thinking using the internet from a cell phone while overseas? Are you crazy? Turn it off! Go to an internet cafe, pay about a nickel an hour to check your MySpace.
What possessed your pre-primate brain to bitch about this to Consumerist and the New York Times like it’s somehow Apple’s problem and not AT&T’s (or any freaking cell company)? Really, it’s neither. It’s all you. It’s pretty clear that every cell plan in the U.S. does not cover international calls or data access, and that per-minute charges will destroy you. Have you been living under a rock? Two rocks? Do you remember a time not even 10 years ago when it still cost $2 a minute to call your grandparents in Pittsburgh from your land line in Denver? Just because you can now do it “free” as part of your still-a-rip-off Triple Play phone/web/cable plan, doesn’t mean that you can take that anywhere.

Why didn’t you even think to check with your carrier before traveling thousands of miles away to a country that doesn’t speak your language? You know, just in case.

The same reason you checked with your ex-girlfriend who went to Paris in the 80s to see if you should bring a roll of quarters to get into a public bathroom if you really, really, really had to go but were away from your hotel room.

You know, just in case.

Sheesh.

5 Simple Steps To Privacy Online

I will go very slowly for those of you who might be new to this.

1. Buy a computer.


2. Don’t sign up for Internet service.


3. Oh, I guess there are just two steps.
   

10 Things That Suck About FOOA: Day One

Day one of the Future of Online Advertising conference has ended, and now that I am at home in my cushioned rocking chair, I have had some time to sit and reflect about the events of the day. Here, uncensored, unedited, and unsponsored, are 10 things that really sucked about the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference. Just ten. Any more, and I’d be seen as ungrateful. My ticket was free, after all.

Okay, the list:

1. Free Wi-Fi connection - Powered by Urban Hotspots, the Wi-Fi was absolutely atrocious. It worked during breakfast, stopped functioning right as the conference began, and was annoyingly spotty the rest of the day. For a $1000 conference, this is pretty much inexcusable. And seriously - this is freakin’ New York City for crying out loud!


2. Lunch - One could hardly call this hour-and-a-half long “hor d'oeuvres and glorified potty break” a meal. A handful of busboy/girl-types made their way through the crowd offering scraps of food. A tiny piece of turkey wrap here, a few (really, just three!) veggie sticks there, a portion of Caesar salad in a takeout container fit for an anorexic king. It all tasted just fine. Quite a disappointment. The several snack times were also loath-able, as they consisted of little more than leftovers of the breakfast pastries (For the final break they had Kashi GoLean bars. I tried the peanut butter and chocolate one. It tasted...healthy.).


3. Web 2.0 - The number of people I overheard pitching their startups to each other was frankly disappointing. “Yeah, we basically started it with no outside funds, just our own money.” seemed to be the sentence of the day. What are these wonderful startups-to-be? “Basically it’s, like, a social network for xxxxx. I can’t believe no one else has already done something in this space!” It’s official - I’m over Web 2.0. Check back in a week or so for my eulogy. I’m serious.


4. CPC, CPA, CPM, CPI, CPU, CPMMORPGORLYROFLLOLWTF - There is no way that the presenters and audience members who spewed these inane metric acronyms at a rate of 10 per second have any idea which ones they were using. “Are we allowed to skip straight to CPA instead of starting with CPM for brand awareness and moving to CPC for educating and refining or can I just jump straight to monetizing my mechanical bull by selling it on eBay at a loss?” Yeah, no thanks. I think I’ll focus on the ROI of my LMNOP.


5. Overeager Conference Staff - During the final break, conference staff went through the rows of chairs collecting all of the “unclaimed” magazines that had been placed on seats for attendees. They also took anything else (like program booklets) that added to the clutter. Nice idea - to get a jump start on cleaning the auditorium - but one thing: no one was in his/her seats, so everything looked unclaimed. Including my schedule of events booklet in which I was taking notes. Yeah. At least they left my 12-inch-long PayPerPost pen that I intended to give to my roommate.


6. Powerpoint - I don’t think I need to explain why this is awful. Just take my word for it - some of the worst Powerpoint presentations I’ve seen in my life. Not across the board, but enough for me to seriously consider “forgetting” my glasses tomorrow morning.


7. Teenage Executives - Sorry, but if you are still in high school, you do not deserve to be wearing an “Executive” nametag. I don’t care if you just got funded by some clueless V.C. - you are still lame and you are not the next Mark Zuckerberg. Not fooling anyone, dudes. Get a diploma.
   


8. Creatives - First, I hate this name. Creative is an adjective, not a noun. Second, why does everyone with a Creative name tag have to wear jeans and an edgy t-shirt and carry a shabby-chic mail bag slash laptop case? I had a Creative tag myself, mostly because there wasn’t anything else on the list of possibilities that sounded good either: Developer? Publisher? Marketer? Media Buyer? Advertiser? SEO & SEM? Executive? So many great choices! I hate reductive labels like these - part of the problem with advertising (and business) today is that things are so segmented like this. Marketing in the future is not about “ad units,” it’s about an entire experience that can only be created by passionate people stretching across and blurring traditional boundaries of discipline, media, and demographic. You are your company’s own best brand manager. The medium is no longer the message. The message is whatever your audience decides they want it to be.


9. No Future - Until the final (and great) panel discussion, the closest anyone got to discussing the future of online advertising was when Kim Malone of Google mentioned that her company would be adding Cost Per Action (CPA) ads sometime soon. I realize that many in the audience might have found some of the previous talks incredibly enlightening and on-the-edge, but as a semi-outside observer of the industry, I can’t wrap my head around how prehistoric-sounding much of the discussion was. Maybe I just read too many forward-looking feeds to have an accurate perception of the industry.


10. One Woman - Yeah, only one woman spoke today - the above-mentioned Kim Malone of Google, who did a decent job, but wasn’t given anything terribly interesting to talk about. Two are slated to speak tomorrow, it seems. Two. That makes three. Out of about 25. This is just stupid for a ton of reasons I won’t get into here, but especially since the copy of Advertising Age they gave attendees had its annual feature on 25 Women to Watch, which showcased some pretty hardcore chicks who would’ve been awesome to hear speak. At the very least, any one of those women would have been far better than a couple of the male speakers today (I won’t name names unless you ask), whose talks were just painful and pointless and short-sighted.

So that’s 10. In spite of all that, I am looking forward to the second day. I’ll cross my fingers about lunch, charge my laptop a ton tonight, reach deep inside for some courage to strike up an interesting conversation with someone (not just hopeless networking b.s.) and hope for the best.

Finally, if you’re at the conference and on Twitter, why not Follow me?

Social Network Overload

What happens if I don’t accept my friend’s request to join a new, niche social network? What if I know they fully expect me, of all people, to join? What if I’m tired of joining these services I know will become forgotten in mere months? Certainly I am guilty of serial joining, having accounts at...well, let’s try to count:

1. MySpace
2. Facebook
3. Scribd
4. YouTube
5. LinkedIn
6. Digg
7. Del.icio.us
8. Technorati
9. Livejournal
10. Blogger
11. Wordpress
12. Tumblr
13. IconBuffet
14. Flickr
    
15. Friendster
    
16. Geni
    
17. Twitter
18. Mog
    
19. Jaiku
20. Ebay
21. Amazon
22. Xanga
23. Okay, this list is getting too long. I could do this for hours. Exit list.

So, I’ve joined a ton of sites. I know there are a lot of little ones I’ve signed up for that, for the life of me, I can’t recall. Like a lot of bloggers (tech ones, to be sure), I am an early adopter, and I’m not ashamed of it. My philosophy is more along the lines of, “Sounds cool, I’ll give it a try” than “I want to wait and see how it does before jumping on the bandwagon.” And for the most part this doesn’t get me into trouble. Most sites these days require very little as far as commitment goes, and you don’t often need more than an email address to get started. Nice of them to make it so simple to sign up, but often they fail to provide any compelling reason to return regularly. All the names sound the same, too, so I tend to forget what they are.

If anything is true about the way in which I use these networking sites, it is that I very rarely use the vast majority of them. Often, I won’t even get a full profile up before abandoning it forever. I might forget my username (please let me use my email address). And I very rarely will “Invite your whole freaking address book” thing because that is not cool. But I like to check them out, at least. See what the deal is. Cool enough, but I don’t have the time, interest, or desire to become an active user of most of these things.

From that list above, there are only a couple sites I visit daily. A couple of the services (I’m thinking Tumblr, and del.icio.us) I haven’t really visited since signing up. Once I configured my Tumblr account, I left it alone to run. I only use del.icio.us to bookmark sites and articles (which I will check from time to time) - and I haven’t used it in the social respect, ever. I don’t look there for content.

Some sites, especially a lot of the new ones, are very niche, very narrowly focused. They tend to be about one thing. And they’re obviously designed to appeal to people really into that one thing. The problem is that they still, for the most part, operate in exactly the same way as all these other sites. Most of these new sites offer very little value if you don’t spend hours configuring your account. YouTube is great because there is a ton of content to check out even if you haven’t made a profile, even if you never make a profile. Digg is the same way. These services let you do a ton by default, and by joining you make the choice to contribute more in order to gain more. True, these sites started the same way - with nothing - but now that they are established, a new site has to work twice as hard to bring some unique content to the table and give me a compelling reason to return.

Too many of the new guys make you do too much. That’s fine if what you ultimately offer is really awesome, but if it’s something like, for example, what books my friends are reading, that’s just not worth it. Especially if you don’t give me a ton of options for adding my own books. Why force me to search for them one at a time when I might already have a database set up at home, or a text list, or use Delicious Library, or have an Amazon account? Why not build on top of these other services to let those who do use them have an easier time? Why not make it possible to grab the lists I’ve already written from my Facebook or MySpace profiles? Make it easy on us, please. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of brand new social networks vying for our attention, many of which are about the same thing yours is, and we’ll gravitate towards the ones that offer the best effort-to-value ratio.

I’m not saying to include everything, to become inclusive beyond a reasonable level, to allow syncing with every service - but pick some good ones, because there are a lot. The services that recognize this need for interoperability and communication are the ones that will succeed. Let us embed our YouTube videos, let us import our contacts and our interests and lists. Let us include our Twitter status. Let us add some news feeds, or republish our blog with no effort whatsoever. It’s not that you need to do more, you just have to do better, be more open. The more MySpace restricts embedding content from outside networks, the more they will alienate their users, who are not so young or naïve that they can’t see the real reason for these bans, which is making money. MySpace is dying a slow death because they’re not thinking of their users when they make these changes. Pretty soon, they’ll start to migrate to networks that let them do whatever they want and won’t remove the stuff they spent hours perfecting because of business disputes.

Lead the way with a service that allows users to bring together and manage all of these networks, all of this information. Help us manage the overload and help us do something useful with it.

If you don’t, Google will. And you’ll be forgotten.

For the record, I did join the network my friend invited me to yesterday. And I did start adding and rating books.

But I can’t remember what it’s called.

10 Reasons Pedestrians Hate Cyclists

Below is a list of reasons I am more afraid of bicyclists than I am of drivers. They are my reasons for not particularly supporting the monthly Critical Mass bike rides (where dozens of bikers take up entire lanes on the streets of Manhattan to protest the city’s alleged hostility to bike-riders, and its failure to make the roads safe for their chosen method of transit). I definitely believe in bike-riding. I definitely support it as a form of clean and functional transportation. I definitely prefer it to driving, myself. But, as a pedestrian, as the lowest in the food chain on the streets of the city, I am much more afraid of people on bikes. And I am annoyed at what I see as extreme arrogance and strong superiority complexes in a large number of bicyclists I've “run into” on the street.

These are all from personal experience. Dispute them at your own risk.

1. Bicyclists don’t pay attention to which streets are one-way.
   
2. Bicyclists don’t obey stop signs or traffic lights.
3. Cars make noise so you know they’re coming.
4. Cars have headlights at night so you can see them.
5. Bicyclists can’t ride in a straight line and often deliberately swerve around.
6. Drivers are afraid of killing you. Bicyclists think you’ll move out of the way.
7. Bicyclists don’t keep consistent speed.
8. Bicyclists randomly decide which side of the street they feel like riding on.
9. Bicyclists don’t use freakin’ turn signals!
   
10. Serious injury and embarrassment is much worse than death.
    

People With Umbrellas Are Tryants

It is raining like crazy this morning in New York City, and it got me thinking about this:

People with umbrellas are tyrants.

An umbrella-d man walks slowly down the street, taking up twice the space of a normal person because the umbrella is held so closely to his head. He gives nary a thought to other pedestrians - the fight for space on the sidewalk is passed off entirely to the umbrellas themselves, which, with their octagonal shapes, do not play nicely with one another in the sky above the man’s head. The incompatibility of the umbrella’s shape adds further to the space occupied by each individual, and this man would sooner push through the pack than raise or lower his umbrella to make space for ones occupying different levels in this urban forest. He even still walks beneath the thin awnings of the city buildings despite the protection of his little personal canopy. And many of his friends do the same, all but destroying the chances a non-umbrella-d man may have of keeping a little dry.

The umbrella-d man goes where he pleases. He is sure of himself and of his choice to carry. Not once does he consider the possibility that another might choose to face the world un-umbrella-d on such a morning. Herein lies his tyranny.

His disbelief in the possibility others might choose differently than he is the worst kind of discrimination. It is the unspoken, “You don’t exist” that silences dissent. It is the quiet, unknowing fascism which is hardest to combat because those practicing it aren’t even aware they are. They follow convention blindly, obediently, because they can’t, for the life of them, understand why anyone might make a different choice. They don’t even notice you - little man without an umbrella - and so they won’t move aside. Try to protest, and you are looked at as though you have lost your mind. “Get a freakin’ umbrella, idiot!” they say, edited for language, of course.

And so, those of us who choose to go through the world unprotected from the rain aren’t given the chance to enjoy the unique pleasure of water falling on skin - of the gentle massage from thousands of raindrops tapping on the shoulders, on the head - of the rejuvenating, life-affirming ecstasy of water. We can’t experience the joy of getting a little wet, because these umbrella-d tyrants slow us from our energetically rushed pace down the sidewalk. And we get soaked. Drowned. Flooded. It is not pleasant, not fair.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Nothing, that is, except buying an umbrella. But that is called assimilation. That is called giving in.

That is called letting them win.