I love facts that used to be obscure until the internet became truly universal. Yes, the Coliseum used to be flooded for naval battles. Yes, Columbus didn’t actually discover America. And yes, the woman responsible for Mother’s day in the US ended up hating the sodding thing.
Having done celebrations for relatives myself, I guess it’s to be expected. After all, what could be more natural for something that you started off as a perfectly innocent celebration and worship service. A couple of years later, that little idea you had is an enormous celebration that everyone expects you do. And it’s no longer about the thing that you wanted it to be, but a gigantic drag every time it rears its ugly face around. Granted, it usually just ends up as a gigantic party that you start ghosting after year five or six, not as a full-on “holiday” co-opted by everyone who wants to make a buck (so…damn near everyone).
Worse still is when those same people (real people or corporations) decide to just try and make up holidays of their own. And the cringe cherry atop the horror sandwich is when they succeed. Take Black Friday, for instance. A day where you are only supposed to take a sick day off because of falling into a pre-diabetic coma in front of Ghostbusters.
Needless to say, if Black Friday and Cyber Monday disappeared, I believe the entire world would be better-off for it. Well, mostly, anyway. The videos of people trampling one another and beating themselves senseless over saving $100 on a $400 item they don’t need remains damn amusing. Admittedly, it only seems that way from the cheap seats. If my job transitioned from trying to sell extended warranties to trying not to get trampled, I expect I’dhave much less fun.
And now we have Prime Day. In a world where we’re extremely critical of Billionaires flaunting their wealth and where we no longer go “why?” if someone says they actively avoid Amazon, everyone seems to lose their reasons to hate on it as soon as it rolls around. Mercifully this time I didn’t need to buy anything, but I expect the increasing shipping volume will make a lot of people receive the dreaded “In-Transit, Arriving on time”, even after it most assuredly won’t. More concerning, as the event happened I noticed someone wearing a yellow shirt emblazoned with Prime day and the Amazon Logo. In the midst of the business park surroundings on which I was at the time, it seemed like a rare item drop. The kind that is a promotional tie-in that you don’t care about and you don’t use because really, why would you.
As the day wore on the drop became less and less rare as I realized that somewhere in this business park there had to be a contact center specialized in dealing with the more unpleasant results of Prime day and they were forcing them to wear something even when the possibility of having face contact was somewhere between 0 and 0.
Maybe it was in Case Jeff Bezos decided to drop into the call center unannounced.
