In my family we have a rule. It’s called the self inflicted injury rule. Quite simply if you do something dumb and end up hurting yourself no one is required to offer you any sympathy. Sadly I must report that I am probably the most common recipient of a ruling of self inflicted injury. The two ladies in my life being kind, compassionate souls who have resigned themselves to living with all my little failings usually are generous without a strict interpretation of the rule. I am deeply grateful for that.
Needless to say I am not that generous outside my own inner circle. Which allows me to take the good folks at Best Buy to task for making a very tiny little piece of silliness into a major internet event.
It all began with a 25 year old Best Buy mobile phone
salesman named Brian Maupin. Brian really wants a career in digital animation and was messing around with an online service that will take your script and turn it into a quickie animated video. I’ve used the service, Xtra Normal, myself. It’s very easy and fun. In this case Brian used it to create an obscenity laced parody of the mindless devotion of some customers to anything with an Apple logo on it. Like the new iPhone 4. Now note that there is NO mention of Best Buy anywhere in the video. Nor is that any visual signs of the company either. The entire parody is of the rabid, brain dead responses of the customer. Despite the gratuitous obscenity it’s actually very funny.Well I thought so. Best Buy? Not so much. The video developed a huge following, it’s well over a million views, when someone at corporate saw it and did the math. At which point Brian was told to remove all other videos on his website that did mention Best Buy. He has a very small video company with a couple of his buds. Then they asked him to quit. He declined. So they’ve suspended him and told him that they are working on terminating his employment.
Remember if it hadn’t been for Best Buy drawing attention to the fact that Brian worked for them you would have NO WAY OF KNOWING the video was connected to them at all! Instead of having a quiet word with Brian and letting this all have it’s moment in the sun then disappearing they’ve made it a “thing”. The kind of thing that gets media commentators, oh say like me, to perk up our ears and start nosing around. Now they look ham handed in their PR efforts and like a dictatorial employer that may lash out at you for anything they don’t much like in your private life.
And those are completely self inflicted wounds. Nice job guys.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010
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