I was remembering a great story from Library School today and wanted to share. A year or so ago I told the story of when I announced I was Bill Gate’s whore in library school. Bill gives a super-duper lot of money to American libraries and that’s my story and I am sticking to it. And using FireFox (of course).
So, in that same ColdFusion programming class I link to above, where we all did a final presentation, one of my classmates was Mia. She was super-bright and by the time the class ended she was far ahead of the rest of us. She’d taken ColdFusion and run with it.
Mia also had private Web design clients so we had something to talk about and generally sat in the same vicinity during class. She was a bit vague about her clients. I didn’t think much of it, I mean, client privacy and all.
During her final presentation, Mia gave us all some love. She hadn’t shown anyone what she was working on for the final project, which was actually kind of unusual, ’cause most of us were getting help from one another on our final projects. On presentation day, she was glowing. She gets up and says she has a variety of real-life Web development clients and has applied her final assignment to their advertising needs.
She brings up the screen. She has the look of a young mother whose three year old has just successfully used “global warming phenomenon” in a sentence. She has the look of a veterinarian who turns over an adorable puppy to its owners, knowing that is was a close call but her healing powers have been victorious.
Her customers were porn producers. Nothing adventuresome or even interesting, just sleazy, run-of-the-mill, het porn. Fake double-D shaved bodies with long, dyed hair in routine positions. Their advertising needs were those super-tacky blinking ads that either pop up or take over the top 1/4 of your screen and have those “close here” links that make the ad pop up like 15 more times if you click on it. The women’s breasts heaved up and down, their eyelashes batted, their asses wiggled in thongs that sparkled with colored lights, all in that tacky, back and forth Internet motion that is not live video but two images (butt to the right, butt to the left) being switched back and forth. Not PG, folks, not PG. Not sure where this advertising was going to take place. Actually, I know exactly where this advertising was going to take place.
And, of course, because she had multiple customers – all run-of-the-mill porn producers – we have like 5 different ads for 5 different clients with 5 different sets of thoroughly shaved and Photoshopped twitching models. And now she can put these ads up on different web sites, she can track the click counts for how many people get from what sites to her customers sites, and then have the system tally who gets paid what in advertising dollars. ColdFusion at its finest.
She steps aside, one arm up to display the screen like a model from the Price is Right. She is radiant. The professor’s mouth is half open. The rest of the class is sort of sneaking peaks at each other, like, ok, so is this cool or is this totally not cool or can we just damn her for producing tacky advertising and skip the whole “how do we feel about porn” question? Because Mia was definitely one of the gifted ones in the class. Nobody but maybe this one guy could beat her on technical skill. And nobody else was using their final project “in the real world” – no matter how Photoshopped that world was.
She sat down. I say, “Wow, Mia, your customers must be really pleased.” Her head bobs up and down enthusiastically.
Mia, wherever you are now, may your talents be used for – well – less tacky advertising. Or at least more interesting porn.
Plum Librarian LLC 