A Pre-Valentine’s Day Tale of Nefamy

Zoe and I ran into Michael’s after school today, because I’m the kind of mom who goes, “Oh, no! Your Valentine’s Day party is Friday and we are completely unprepared!” We were on the hunt for the Valentines themselves and some kind of little trinket to attach, because unlike when I was a kid, you must now also give gifts to the 24 little Valentine banshees in your class. A crappy piece of folded paper printed with Scooby Doo in two colors doesn’t cut it any more. Turns out that Michael’s doesn’t carry Valentines, although we found some cute erasers and washi tape (the washi tape is unrelated to Valentine’s Day but I have a small, unexplainable addiction to washi tape) so it wasn’t a total loss, but that’s not my story. Oh, no, friends. My story is much more nefarious.*

As we entered the store, a slightly-disheveled woman in her 40s sitting to the left just inside the door caught our attention. She sat at a small, skirted table with scraps of white paper, a little vase of pens, and a glass jar that held more paper. She thrust a scrap at me and said, “Win a gift card! Write your name and phone number on this and you can win!” I took the paper and saw that the jar had lots of scraps with names and numbers already. I also noticed that there were absolutely no identification markings of any kind on her, on the table, or anywhere around, which seemed odd for a promotion. The little pieces of paper outside the jar were about the size of a normal raffle ticket and completely blank.

I’m in marketing and communications. I know marketing trickery. I can see it a million miles away, and this whole scenario wasn’t adding up. Good promotions require companies to look like someone barfed the logo everywhere because consumers are jerks and need to see something seven times for it to sink in. There are studies that prove this. There are also studies that say marketers shouldn’t call consumers jerks, but I ignore those.

So I asked, “What’s this for?” And the following conversation unraveled while Zoe stood and watched like she was enjoying a match at Wimbledon.

“It’s for a drawing!”

“For what?”

“A gift card!”

“A Michael’s gift card?”

“Yes, a Michael’s gift card.”

“Where does my phone number go?”

This is the part that kills me. She points to the jar with the other scraps of paper and says brightly, “It goes in there.”

Which is when I decide that there is no way on God’s green earth she is getting anything from me, but that it would be fun to mess with her.

“No. Where does my phone number go. Who gets it?”

“No one gets it. We do not sell or give away your number.”

“Okay, but who is ‘we?’”

She is silent, and I can tell she’s getting aggravated. The chipper “win a gift card” lady is gone, replaced by the “seriously, just fill out the dang piece of paper. I’m not getting paid enough to deal with this stuff” lady. So I try again. Because now I’m on the hunt. Because now I’m not leaving the store until I find out what the heck she’s doing there.

“Is this a Michael’s promotion?”

“Yes, it’s for a Michael’s gift card.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking. Is Michael’s the sponsor? Who is the sponsor?”

“It’s a Michael’s gift card.” (There should be a huffy font for this line. Alas.)

“I get that it’s a Michael’s gift card. Who is sponsoring the promotion? Who is running this? Who is paying you?

“…It’s…it’s for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch.” She looked really mad now.

Satisfied, I dropped the scrap of paper and said, “Not interested.” Zoe and I went off in search of Valentines, trinkets, and unanticipated washi tape. My child got a lecture about how important it is to find out who someone really is before you give your private information while the raffle lady glared at me as we wove in and out of the aisles. We purchased our erasers and washi tape, and I declined forking over my email to Michael’s for the millionth time. Only because I did once and they bombarded me into next Wednesday with their sale emails and ain’t nobody got time for that. And because I was in super-protection mode about my personal information by this point. I’m like a freakin’ privacy ninja.

On our way out, I watched two women stop and hand over their information to the crabby raffle lady without asking a single question. God knows what list they’re going to end up on, because I don’t even truly believe she was with the Post-Dispatch. I’ve seen promotions run by the paper, and those people are insanely proud of their logo. Plus they have more lawyers than reporters now and so everything they touch has at least 1,200 words of legal mumbo-jumbo printed at the bottom. I thought about all the scraps of paper already in the jar. So many people just blindly fork over information to someone with no identification, no markings, not even a formal raffle ticket with an official privacy disclaimer. We hear all these warnings about online confidentiality, and yet folks will hand over their contact information to a stranger without asking a single question. It boggles my mind.

Just so you know, because I’m sure you’ve been on pins and needles since I started my tale of nefariousness, we found Valentines cards at Walgreens, and they have Grumpy Cat on them so they are awesome. They say things like, “Am I happy it’s Valentine’s Day? Nope.” and “I had a Valentine once. It was awful.” and “Grumpy this Valentine’s Day? Good.” Zozo and I love Grumpy Cat, and we cackled right there in the aisle as we read them so it was a good find. Way better than Scooby Doo.

They should have Valentines that say, “Don’t be an idiot. LOVE your private information. Don’t share it with strangers!” I’d probably be the only person who buys them, though. This is why I don’t write Valentine’s Day cards for a living. I care too much, people.

*Really, that story wasn’t quite so nefarious as I first made it sound, but I’ve been dying to use the word “nefarious” here and I saw an opening and seized it. Clearly I live in a bubble and don’t know true nefariousness. Which is way too long of a word and should be shortened to nefamy. Like infamy, only with evil undertones.

#blog#daily life#personal essay#writing

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