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Friendless Man Smites Internet Marketing Copy Writing to Find Heaven On Earth
Posted July 13, 2008 
Comments(18) And now for a literary interlude…
For Philadelphia-based Internet marketing copywriter Gideon Pulver (“Pulverize Your Copy!”), perhaps it was the last “P.P.P.S.” that finally drove away the last of his readers.
Gideon awoke on that day as he had on any other day and sleepily checked his email, but little did he know that this day was going to be oh-so different. Apparently, his last remaining client had canned him. In his email box was a message the client had forwarded to him that had been written by an irate person on the client’s email list in response to a sales letter which Gideon’s copy had spawned.
“I am not your ‘friend,’ nor have I ever been, so please do not address me as such!” said the angry email. “I am TIRED of these long sales letters where I scroll down and down and down, never to find the price of the ‘proven system’ you are pushing among all the bolds, the italics, and the exclamation points!!! Worse yet, every letter has even more inane P.S’s and P.P.S.s than the last one!”
Gideon was crushed. What had he done wrong? Why, he knew his AIDA—Attention, Interest, Desire, Action—better than his ABCs. He could brainstorm problems and highlight the solutions that his well-paying clients offered faster than Madonna could break up a Yankee ballplayer’s marriage. And his calls to action were as irresistible as a motherlode of catnip was to, well, jonesing housecats.
Never one to dwell on his problems, Gideon staunchly moved on, checking the rest of his emails. Gideon became positively giddy to discover the announcement that a new Web site had launched: Such a Catch! dot com, the premiere dating service that catered to Internet marketers. No longer would he have to deal with the prospect of dating civilians who knew little about the lingo, let alone the complex and sophisticated world he lived in. Gideon took a brief moment to daydream, picturing himself with a curvaceous redhead, snuggling by a fireplace, lustfully whispering “Ka-ching! Ka-ching!” to each other. He happily sighed. Gideon promptly joined the membership site, paid an outrageous fee, and quickly filled out his profile, creating the user name “Mr. (Copy) Write.” Surely that would grab the attention of his very own Ms. Right!
The time came quickly when Gideon would meet his Such a Catch! match. He agreed to meet Carolyn—that was her name—at a neighborhood bar, which was bustling with an after-work crowd. Gideon currently had no job, but Carolyn did and it was the only time she could arrange to meet him. A petite brunette hurriedly walked in and sat down next to Gideon’s stool, introducing herself. It was Carolyn!
They had a few beers and things seemed to be going well until Gideon stopped finally talking about himself and Carolyn had the chance to interject that she was not a copywriter but was, instead, a copy editor of press releases. “I have to fix other people’s bad writing. Let me put it to you this way: being a copy editor is like being a psychic of doom. You see things other people don’t and you try to warn them but they will not listen. You know? A slash, not a dash! A slash, not a dash! If an organization’s proper name uses one and not the other, figure out which is right and use it; don’t use one and then, in the very next sentence, switch to the other like…I don’t know…someone who goes to a dance with one person and leaves with another. Won’t anyone listen to meeeeee?” Carolyn threw her head back and howled as Gideon instantly realized he was guilty of using incorrect and inconsistent slashes and dashes, and even more heinous offenses. With this insight, Gideon began to feel he was choking on the bile of his own poor self-editing and had to get out of the bar and into the street.
He walked quickly through a narrow alley, and the epiphany came just as surely as a magnificent Technicolor sunrise lit up the city of Philadelphia. Just how long were Gideon and Carolyn in that bar? That’s not important; what’s important is that, as Gideon walked towards the light, he suddenly felt lighter, aye, it was as if he even lost some physical weight in the process. He knew deep in his bones that the life of an Internet marketing copywriter was not for him. All those rules, all those crazy editors who he knew should be correcting his commas and quotation marks but didn’t because no one ever had the foresight to use editors, all those ungrateful clients depending on him to sell their useless solutions to problems that don’t really exist—that was not the real Gideon! No! He would…he would become an experimental haiku poet! And move to Omaha, Nebraska, which, according to a magazine he had just read, had become populated with hipsters. He could see himself now performing at open mics wearing jaunty black berets. Women would buy him drinks and hope he was an emotionally distraught artiste who would immortalize them in words.
Gideon composed his first haiku on the spot:
Listen up, you noobs:
Internet marketing sucks!
Omaha awaits.
Disclaimer: Real News’ copy editor Carolyn is happily married and was never in a Philadelphia bar with Gideon. The incorrect and inconsistent slashes and dashes are all too real, however, and bug her to this day. She does not know how she ended up in this story.
graphics: iStockphoto.com
