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Day’s Verse:

For the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith… But flee from these things, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith…

1 Tim. 6:10 – 11

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The money reference is, of course, because today could be said to be devoted to marketing. After my classes finished—they were brief, because without Professor Trimbur everybody took half an hour, completed the assignment quickly, and left—Lesley and I began our IQP Bonanza, which actually wasn’t remotely as bad as I expected. We worked on questions, then interviewed Dean O’Donnell, a professor in the WPI humanities department. He provided us with all sorts of interesting information of questionable relevance. Then we called one Professor Schwartz, of Loyola-Merrimount University, who we found online and who has apparently been closely involved in the script writing process. This we expected to take a long time but consisted of a full 6-minute conversation in which we established that he didn’t have an hour to talk to us in, so would we email him our questions and call him back on Wednesday? Naturally we agreed to this situation, and that was that. Finally we talked to Errrrrrrwinnnn, who it turned out had been irked at us because he thought we were trying to get him to do our research for us. Glad I’d done enough research to make us sound industrious! He simply clarified his expectations, answered our questions, OK’d our outline, and emphasized yet again the marketing aspect of it.

Marketing? Did somebody say “marketing”? Lesley and I don’t like marketing! Marketing is what big corporations do to trick children into buying cigarettes illegally. Marketing is sneaky. Marketing is using buzzwords to convince investors that “customers” are buying your products. Marketing is deluding customers into thinking they need your Deluxe Anti-Suffocation Device, Guaranteed to Keep You Alive*. Marketing is for wormy little guys who sit behind desks, make graphs of how they think humans behave, and write papers about their graphs. Marketing is for people who liked Economics but liked tricking people too. Marketing sucks, and we’re going to write a paper full of buzzwords, tricks, and sneakiness to impress a wormy little guy sitting behind a desk who keeps huge stacks of The Academy of Marketing Journal in his bookshelves.

Sadly, I feel the urge to go do some Calculus homework. Is there ever a time in life after childhood when you can just play, do whatever you want, without feeling like you ought to be working/you’re wasting time/you should go do something more productive?

– KF –

*So long as you don’t fall into water over 2” deep, so long as you don’t encounter a person with a rope and passionate hatred for you, or so long as you don’t go into any anoxic environments.