Maybe the Fee is Too Pricy

For them to realize
     your disguise is slipping. I think you’re slipping.

On Saturday I went to South Centre Mall. The place has gotten pretty classy in the last few years, at least compared to what it used to be. They’ve been advertising their new face, “comfort shopping,” quite blatantly to a fairly young target audience for a while now. That’s a wise marketing strategy; I mean everyone knows that we millennials seek comfort before just about anything else.

I sat down at the Food Court and was reminded that even the tables were rife with branding. “OMG! WiFi 4 Fre!” they said, with an uppity translation below it, something like, “stay connected with free wireless internet.” Somehow, that just made me angry. I pictured a board meeting with a bunch of 60-year-old men in suits, discussing the marketing tactics for the new campaign. “They like texting,” one says, “and they’ve lost the ability to write anything out in full.” “Surely they’d tack on that last e on free, though, don’t you think? Fre just looks stupid,” another says. “It does look stupid, but no, they are all borderline retarded,” the first replies. “True literacy will die with our generation. Speaking of, we’d better translate OMG, WiFi 4 Fre underneath, so people our age will know what the hell it means.” “Good thinking, sir, good thinking…”

Maybe it didn’t play out that way. And I’ll admit, Lamebook and the rest of the internet do reveal that my generation has, by and large, forsaken the English language for a quick, degenerate written dialect. But that stupid OMG! WiFi 4 Fre! still makes me mad for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. What I wind up with, though, is that I think it’s natural for people to reject falseness. “Posers”. That dumb slogan is trying to be young and current but to me it just screams pretention.

It got me wondering about “being cool” in general. It’s a bit of a paradox if you think about it. If someone doesn’t care at all about being cool, they probably have a better chance of being considered cool than someone who tries too hard at it. Or, the moment it is discovered that a cool person is actually trying to be cool, they aren’t cool anymore. It’s just sort of funny.