Tue, April 5, 2005

Collaborator and longtime reader Brandon is finally thinking about ditching his troglodytic cable service and hopping on the DirecTiVo express train to Entertainmentsville. (C'mon everybody! Wish him well! Welcome him to the future!) We had a nice long chat, in which I laid out the myriad benefits of ditching the underground wire-pipe and getting all your happy, dancing light-box stories right out of the clear blue sky – I think he sounded genuinely convinced.

As part of my sales pitch, I pulled out my latest DirecTV bill to quote him the figure that I pay every month. (Which – to the chagrin of some comments posters – is $2 more than it was last month. Whatever.) After we got off the phone, I noticed a little blurb in the corner of my bill that says I can earn money towards my DirecTV bill by referring a friend. I proselytize for DirecTV all the time! I should be rolling in referral credits! Anyway, the blurb referred me to an insert that was included in the same envelope with my bill. Thing is: my bill is automatically charged to my Discover card, so when the envelope comes in, I pluck out the statement for my records (precious, precious records!) and throw everything else away. By now, some transient under a bus bench on South La Cienega is resting his weary head on a pillow made out of my referral credit insert!

Luckily, DirecTV has a website. Unluckily, it's a sluggish piece of shit. I tried to login last night and look up this referral information, and it wouldn't work. Today, I got through. Turns out, I can send Brandon a referral e-mail right from the site – so I did.

Here's the fun part. (Paragraph Four: the fun part finally shows up!) As usual, they offer you a box to add a personal message to the e-mail. I used that space to sell Brandon on the idea by pointing out that I get a credit plus he gets a bunch of discounts on his new service. In response to a joke he made last night, I referred to "generosity with laziness" in my message.

DirecTV.com wouldn't send the message. I got back an error which said I needed to clean up my language. (Reminds me of the "hot peppers" feature in the Eudora e-mail program a few years ago.) The bad word I had used? "Eros." First of all, how is "eros" a bad word? I mean, sure, it's a synonym for "libido" which is tangentially related to "fuck" – but nobody gets offended by "Eros you, pal!" Also, I hadn't used "eros" – I used "generosity." I think the site should know the difference! I felt like such a filthy spammer changing it to "gener-osity." (Although I guess I chould've changed it to "V1@agra M0rtgage!!!!!!!!")

Anyway, it reminds me of a web business that Andy and I were thinking of starting a number of years ago: called effin-a.com, it would be a subscribable service for people like DirecTV who have web forms or message boards and want to prevent any dirty language. They'd pass their input through a little script of our devising, and the script would either replace the offending language with asterisks, or return an error message to the user, admonishing them to clean up their act. The fun part was going to be keeping our script current by tracking down the latest slang ("asshats" is coming into vogue) and substitution schemes (á la "sh!t" and "bit¢h"). We never did it. (Obviously not; if we had, we sure as hell wouldn't be talking to you. This was back when you got a free Ferrari just for incorporating a dot-com business.)

But you can bet your a$$ that if we had, the damn thing would've known the difference between "eros" and "generosity"!

If you're thinking of joining DirecTV (or know anyone who is), I'd be delighted to be your referrer and share the wealth. Send e-mail to X1X and I'll fire off a referral note!

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