Twelpforce? Best Buy, You Really DO Want Me To Hate You.

I was just sitting here on my ass, halfway watching the TV and contemplating on whether or not to switch to a gin and tonic, a maitai or stick with the beer when I saw some young gal standing in front of a stadium of blue clad people.  Always intrigued by cults, I paid attention.  And then she asked about cell phones and then cult was yelling at her about having plans and then something about the future . . .  and then I saw they were running their fucking Twitter page – calling it Twelpforce.

For fuck’s sake.

Few things make me want to climb a clock tower and start picking off people wearing blue polo shirts than the insistence of people on the Twitter cutesying the fucking vernacular up by adding fucking “tw” to every noun, verb, pronoun, adjective and adverb.  Yes, part of that last sentence would have read ” . . . tweeple on the Twitter twutesying the twucking twernacular .  . .”.    Pretty fucking annoying, huh?

But nothing takes the cake like a bunch of assholes from some corporate office (I’m looking at you, Best Buy!) jumping in on the act.  I can just see their fucking boardroom now:

Biff:  Hey, this Twitter thing seems popular with the youngsters! How do we take advantage of this?

Sven:  Well, Biff, we’re getting ready for a new push on our cell phone plans.  And people on Twitter, or, catch this – Tweeple! – will follow anything! Especially if it’s on television!  We can advertise our cell phone plans on TV, talk about us “helping” them with other home tech questions, and get these cwazy Tweeple to follow it and have an avenue for annoying the holy piss out of them only the way a mindless, bandwagon jumping corporation can!  And to give it the air of being useful, and getting us some “tweet cred” with the tweeples, we could call it “Twelpforce”! Get it? Twelpforce instead of Help Force?  Because it’s on Twitter!

Biff:  Great idea! Let’s get our best “tweeple”, heheheh, on it!  I’ll start getting our creative team on the television ad!

Sven:  Biff, don’t you mean “twelevision”?  Get it? Twelevision!

Biff:   Oh, Sven! You card!

And then these two assholes go off to the strip club to sniff a little cocaine and get lapdances, which somehow ends up with them in a hotel room together and some very embarrassing photos making it back to their wives.  But I digress.  Nothing makes a company look like a gigantic jackass than taking a ham-handed approach to appealing to a core audience of a specific outlet.  Sure, it makes sense for them to get Geek Squad involved in this and developing their core brand a little further.  And yeah, I can see how seeing other companies do a good job of utilizing the Twitter for building their brand and reaching out to their customer base would appeal to a company like Best Buy, especially if  you consider Best Buy has a spotty customer service reputation at best.  And it certainly makes sense that a gadget retailer would try to reach out to early adopters, though, to do that they should have been on the Twitter two years ago.

Jumping in now, with a fucking “cute” name just smacks of douchebaggery.  While I’m sure they’ll get plenty of people following them, which will make them the perfect fodder for other Best Buy marketing messages, I have a feeling this isn’t going to have the desired effect they intended.  It just seems like it’s too little, too late, too obnoxiously.  But what the hell do I know?  They already have over 4,000 followers.

Tonight I Was Thinking . . . .

About how I wish I were Mexican.  Not because I love Mexico or Mexicans necessarily, but mostly because then I might have been given a fucking cool name, like Guillermo del Toro.  Though honestly, as cool of a last name “del Toro” is (and is it waaaay fucking cool!), I’d be happy with Guillermo for a first name.  There’s not a lot of Guillermos around, or at least not around here.  And if someone said my name without rolling the “r”, I’d totally be that jackass that corrects them.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know Guillermo del Toro is Spanish.  But face it, Spaniards are just fancy Mexicans just like Englishmen are just fancy Americans.  I know all you Spaniards and Englishpeople (that isn’t a word, is it?) are probably pretty apalled by that, but it’s the truth.  We’re just the lowbrow version of you people.

And that’s okay.

Amazon Buys Zappos Blah Blah Blah

Yes, I realize I totally renegged on my “I’m going to start posting again, honest!” thing.  So, I was wrong.  But anyways, yesterday, unless you were passed out drunk under a tree and getting a nasty sunburn because the sun fucking moved (yeah yeah yeah, I know, I know, the earth revolves around the sun, not the sun revolves around the earth – save the fucking lecture, Professor), you probably didn’t find out about it until last night.  Which means you missed out on all the commenting and arm-chair CEO-ing that comes along with bullshit like that.

So anyways, it totally makes sense why Amazon would buy Zappos.  “What?!?!? They were a bookseller! They have no business selling shoes (or any of the other shit they sell on amazon.com for that matter)!  Why the hell do you think they should get in the shoe business, you ignorant, unemployed asshole?”  you may be thinking.  And hey, just because I’m unemployed, and maybe ignorant, and probably an asshole doesn’t mean I can’t do some half-assed business analysis a day late and after everyone has quit talking about.  Don’t tell me how to blog, MOM!

So yeah, it makes sense.  Think about it.  With the economy in the shitter, everyone is broke-ass like me.  But perhaps not as good looking.  Anyways, with everybody being broke, who the hell has money for downloading MP3s or buying CDs?  And books?  To hell with buying a book.  All these cheap asses are going to the library now or standing in the aisles at the Walmart reading shit. On top of that, who the hell has money for broadband?  You ever try buying shit or, worse yet, downloading anything over dial-up?  Exactly.  You might as well get a blanket and start a fire.

By now you’re thinking, “Okay, Mr. Shitty Logic, what makes you think people have money for shoes then?  No wonder you’re unemployable, you fucking moron.”  Ah ha, but that’s where it makes sense.  Poor people still need shoes.  And where are they going to get shoes if they have no money and no interweb?  By stealing them from rich people.  And where are rich people going to get their shoes?  They’re going to fire up the internet, go to Zappos.com and start avoiding the library where fucking poor people steal their shoes.  It’s called the circle of life, bitches.

So there you have it.  In a bizarre form of trickle down economics, it makes total sense for Amazon to buy a shoe reseller than say, develop an eBook reader that’s the size of a fucking laptop with none of the funtionality.