Editor’s note: The views expressed in I Am So Popular are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

Once, I heard the writer Walter Kirn interviewed on Fresh Air and he was saying how, when he was a teenager, Mormons came to the door and his parents let them in and before you know it, they converted. And Terry Gross was like, Whoa, Walter, hang on a minute, who lets Mormons in and then buys what they’re saying?

And Walter said something like, You know, Terry, of the eighty qua-billion Make Your Penis Enormous spams that go out, there are at least a couple of takers. His parents happened to be in one of those vulnerable places so they fell for the crap. (Note: I am entitled to pronounce Mormonism crap. I was, I am not shitting you, once married to a Mormon. Fucking really.)

Moral of Kirn’s story: everyone gets sucked in at some point and a lot of times we get sucked in when we let our guard down thanks to loneliness or a shitty job we’re desperate to ditch or some rationalization that we’re not really addicted to whatever we’re addicted to.

Anyway, so recently I found in my PO box an unsolicited offer to make my life better. The notice said:

Spike, here’s a complimentary Conference invitation for you and a guest! Spike, discover how entrepreneurs and small business owners are creating income using the Internet. Also, learn how you can make money using…

And under that there were the icons for Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and MSN. I was promised that, for absolutely nothing, I could learn amazing secrets and receive $100 worth of food and gifts. And, as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a free ticket fluttered out. Actually, two.

exciting invitation to change my life!

Eager for a night of bullshit, a complimentary $100 meal and a free gift, I asked Garreth to be my date. You might recall that Garreth and I attended a WWE wrestling extravaganza awhile back, and sat ringside. We got to see Hornswoggle bite Mr. McMahon's ass up close. Garreth is a fan of learning as much as he can about anything he can—he’s actually Oxford educated! And we share the dirty secret hobby of actually reading self-help books and sharing how-to-improve-yourself bon mots via text messaging.

Of course Garreth was game. We were going to try to persuade our respective partners to join us, but as it happens, Warren would prefer to be hit in the nuts with a sledgehammer and Mary has a Just Say No Way In Hell to pyramid schemes, time share coercions, and any other plots to bilk. Plus Warren, upon scrutinizing the invite, laughed as he read from the fine print: StoresOnline does not claim to have an affiliation with Google, Yahoo, eBay or MSN. He also noted the gift, an mp3 player, was off-brand.

fake iPod

I’m going to give my extremely short take on the “seminar” before turning the rest of this column over to G. Here’s my version:

We show up, are forced to put on nametags, and are seated in the front row by some guys dressed like Mormons (interesting aside: the company putting on the soiree is based in Utah). The presenter comes out and as he gives his PowerPoint, all I can think is, I wish his brain had super titles like at the opera so I could see all the vitriolic things he’s thinking about how much he hates us and his job and so it could be revealed to me what dream he failed to live out—rock star? super model? tollbooth operator?— that meant he had to take this gig convincing people that his product would change their lives.

He told us normally the software they sell to get us rich by helping us build a web site through which we might sell vast quantities of anything, runs around two hundred clams. But tonight? TONIGHT? Fifty bucks!

You could see the roomful of sad dreamers sit up at this. You could feel all of them hating their lives and their jobs, thinking in synch: Fifty dollars? Fifty dollars? Why I could write a hot check for that and not go to jail…

There were other promises made—the upcoming all-day seminar which usually costs $500 but tonight—TONIGHT! If only we would sign up for their software… if we were READY TO TAKE THE RIGHT ACTION… well, then, they’d throw that in for free, too. Let me let Garreth tell you the rest:

I lap this stuff up. I see it as training. If I train on escaping unsold from something I really don't want, I might build up some resistance to being sold on things that I may want a little. And also, I'm a student of persuasion. As a REALTOR® I am constantly bombarded with opportunities for training, as it seems the real estate industry is 45% made up of helping people to buy and sell homes, and the remainder consists of helping REALTORS® to do that through courses, mentoring, seminars and 'presentations.’ So I was understandably excited about the prospect of a seminar with free food, good company and an imitation iPod Shuffle.



Signing in as Mister Gillespie, so as to protect the innocent and their personal privacy, I studiously avoided everyone's eyes. Much as everyone else was doing. It was like that corridor where you wait to give sperm samples for money. No one acknowledges that anyone else exists. If I can't see them, they can't see me.

Spike kept looking at her watch and announcing the minutes until dinner and I listened feverishly to the preacher.
And he was a preacher. There were some 200+ people in the room by my estimates, and we were all transfixed by the sheer simplicity of what he said.

Now, as a background, I have recently finished reading the Four Hour Work Week – a book that encourages us to throw off the shackles of employment and set up our own businesses using the interweb that we can manage virtually from a beach with a margarita in one hand and a fishing rod in the other. And this presentation spoke very well to the idea of setting up a fully operational e-commerce business in as little as three clicks.

The preacher raved and intoned and gesticulated in a very animated way. He told the story of the internet, and above small print that told us that the stories were not typical of the results of people using the system, told us fantastic stories of people selling things on the internet.



The girl to my left wrote "I can smell the bullshit" on her pad. For all my psychic anti-influence defence training, I started to believe. To believe in a better place where I could have a website. A business. A magic wand to cut away the ties to employment and fly on the magic carpet of the world wide web.



Only this was 2008. About nine or ten years ago, I had played a part in the formation of an internet technology company, which helped blue chip clients to develop their internet businesses. Even six or seven years ago, this sort of stuff would have been pretty neat. Before people had written books and movies about eBay stores and Yahoo stores.

I like to think that I was thinking all of this at the time, but in reality, I was pretty keen in the inform-a-frenzy. The idea of drop shipping, zero inventory, complete intermediation – putting myself in the middle of the buyer and seller. I could be that middle man – I could be the inefficiency in the market. I could tax every transaction and sip that top shelf cocktail with a marlin running with the bait.



Once I had suspended disbelief that I was actually a member of the studio audience in some infomercial, I started to think that I, too, could do this. I could sell rocks on the internet. Or sell bottled-anger. The key point that almost tipped me over the edge was that if I didn't do this now, then when would I? And the price was just fantastic for what was being offered. And then the price got slashed. And then slashed again.

As we gasped in disbelief at just how chronically insane the organizers must be to offer so many bundled products and services for one low price of $50, the e-shopping paratroopers descended upon us with order forms. I was at the point where I was thinking "Why not?" And then Spike confiscated my order form so that I couldn't buy.

order form for useless product

One paratrooper came up to us and asked if we liked the presentation. He even had an online business of his own. He didn't want to tell us what his business was, to avoid a conflict of interests, but he hadn't reckoned with the journalistic skills of my compadre, who soon ferreted out his product. Thinking about it, if he didn't have the sales-foo to resist joining the cult in the first place, he would be putty to Spike's crouching tiger journalism-foo in extorting his internet business. He left, defeated, and we got the $100 meal.

garreth eating $100 sandwich

In case you were wondering, the bag of chips, cookie and ham and cheese croissant each (not to mention the cult inducing fruit punch) were probably worth only $50 at perhaps the most expensive restaurant on New Year's Eve putting on an event at the top of the Eiffel Tower, so I'm guessing $100 value applied to both meals.

The Russians next to us were waiting for the MP Free player, and I was shocked and amazed that the preacher man was actually handing them out like so much free tainted candy at the exit.
 Spike grabbed one and gave it to me. She got one too. Not only did it kindly display the URL of the online store software on the box, I later discovered it was loaded with a Lionel Richie tune. Oh joy!

I literally rushed home, and plugged it into my PC. It took me a while to realize what the little gadget had done. It had installed itself as a portable drive. I immediately started to copy self-help books about not buying online shopping stores onto it.

The slightly more cunning thing it had done was to mount itself as a CD device and automatically run an install program on my PC. Which does who knows what? That took me aback, and it was all I could do not to smash the little box into bits. But I keep it. I keep it to remind me of all the online stores I didn't build.

Spike Gillespie is afraid to try her free mp3 player. She blogs regularly for LaunchPad Coworking and at www.spikeg.com. She is also head mistress for the Dick Monologues. Next show is August 27th and you can email her at spike@spikeg.com to reserve seats.