Business has been slow the past two weeks. I'm hoping it's just a lull due to the holiday and not something more ominous. All the same, with too much time on my hands I tend to get morose. I needed a diversion and yesterday I hit on the perfect idea...
A Grand European Vacation.
Not a real one, of course. We can't afford that. We'll probably never be able to afford that.
No, I'm talking about a phony vacation.
On Facebook.
Yesterday I went on Flickr and started stealing people's vacation photos. By strategically PhotoShopping the boyfriend and I into the scene, we looked like we taking the Grand Tour. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I would upload them to my Facebook account, starting with out departure, tomorrow. Then it was on to London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Prague and Amsterdam. We may take a little side trip to Vienna. Haven't totally firmed up the itinerary. Every few days we'd jet to a new exotic local, and all of my Facebook friends would drool with envy.
"How lucky you are!" they'd write. "I wish I was there!"
"It's beautiful here" I'd reply. And after checking online for the current weather conditions for wherever we were supposed to be, I'd add a little local flavor. "There were rain showers earlier, but it's lovely now. Not too hot - it's 23C. That's 75 degrees for you back home..."
See, that's the thing about Facebook these days. Everyone lies.
What started initially as an almost magical way of connecting with lost friends and distant family has turned into a marketing tool, a way to promote a life you don't actually live. Everyone has turned their Facebook page into a storefront window on the life the want everyone to believe they actually live. Only the most carefully curated, spit polished version of events gets put on display.
I was slow to pick up on this trend. At the depth of the recession, when we were losing everything, it seemed everyone else was living simply wonderful lives. How could everything be going so wrong for us and so right for everyone else? Well, in a word, it wasn't.
One of my most insufferable friends owns his own business. When everyone else seemd to be losing their jobs and their houses, he appeared to be having a fabulous run of luck.
"It's Tuesday and I've already picked up TWO NEW CLIENTS! Life is good!!!"
"Having lunch with MY NEW CLIENT!"
"Business is GREAT!!!" Just signed up a NEW CLIENT!!!"
What he failed to mention is that for every NEW CLIENT he signed up, if they even existed at all, he was losing two. I just heard he went out of business.
And then there's a former colleague of mine from the entertainment business. We're around the same age and he suffered a similar fate; He was cashiered from his job around the same time I was. We both floated around through the freelance world and occasionally our paths would cross at various agencies. By mid '09, most of my entertainment work had dried up. So many agencies had gone under that there was a glut of younger (and cheaper) designers competing for a dwindling amount of work. I sometimes wondered what became of him, since I assumed he was probably in the same boat.
And then about a year ago he started posting new work to his Facebook account. Every few days there was a new poster design for some of the biggest films of the day. He's a wonderful designer and the work was amazing, but how was he scoring all these major coups? Even as I admired his work, something about the whole thing seemed fishy. How was he getting all these astounding commissions?
Well, easy. He wasn't.
The first clue that something was amiss was the work. It was beautifully designed, clever, tasteful.
The exact opposite of anything a studio would be interested in.
Plus, no studio legal department would let them be posted, especially for films that hadn't yet been released.
There was no way these posters were real.
And... they weren't.
Turns out he hasn't worked in over a year and was creating them on his own to give the impression he was in demand.
I'm assuming it didn't really work since he's still churning out fake posters to this day. It's a shame really because his fake posters are so much better than the real ones.
So that's what Facebook has become: The Liar's Club. My general rule of thumb when scanning Facebook is the sunnier the status update, the more dire the reality behind it. If someone mentions what a beautiful day it is, I just automatically assume they're losing their homes. If they post "interesting" articles, it means they have too much free time and are probably out of work. Or the husband left them. Or their daughter's knocked up. Or the son is in jail.
Facebook is much less depressing to read if you take this approach.
But back to our "trip". Ultimately I decided this morning not to go through with it, at least not just now. I realized most of my clients are Facebook friends and if they think I'm off on a European adventure they'll think I'm unavailable.
Or that they pay me too much.
