The Frantic Day

Last Thursday night i was madly rushing about our local Westfield Shoppingtown trying to lock down a shirt, present, card and hair smeg for my friends wedding. It was a frantic search, after a frantic day, before having to head home for a frantic grab of packing for weekend ahead. At the last minute i decided to pop my head in to Harvey Norman to see if there were any X360 games in their discount bin.

Who could know that these next few moments would change my meagre existence forever (well, at least it would boost my ego for the next 48 hours).

A date with destiny

In the middle of the games section stood the dodgiest of games displays that I have ever had the glee and misfortune to see. Two pathetic and seemingly hand made posters adorned a flat wooden top, with a cardboard cutout of a PS3 standing upright. My first reaction was to just chuckle and walk away at the train wreck of an instore display, but something familiar caught my eye…

On closer examination it appeared that there was something propping up the cardboard cutout… something cream in colour and with familiar cabling, something solid and important that needed tying down. Surely it couldn’t be… an Xbox360!

Incredible! How on earth did the staff think that they could pull of such a scam and expect it to go unnoticed? Seeing as i was in such a mad rush, i didn’t have long to soak up the full implications of what i was about to do; roll off a couple of quick photos on my Nokia N70 mobile phone. My only thought was that it might make a couple of my colleagues at work have a chuckle, and at best, it might make it to my favourite gaming blog Joystiq as an afterthought reference to one of their witty posts.

In the spirit of being in a frenzy i drove home, bluetoothed the photo’s across to my iMac and posted the photos up to my flickr account using Flock [enough with the product placements already! - self in 3rd person].

Missed opportunity

I showed the photos to my wife Lea who merely humoured me and suggested that i should stop fooling around on the computer and get ready for the wedding. But at the back of my mind, i had an inkling that this could be an interesting story, at least to gaming fiends, but i didn’t have the time to properly strategise how i could best use the images. In a way, it was a kind of godsend because if i’d tried to manipulate it for my own promotional means it could have backfired and appeared inauthentic. So I wrote to Joystiq and linked them to a gaming website that i have been developing at my work. In hindsight i should have published it on my Seconds from Disaster blog, or our Big Brother Uncouth video podcast, or my honeymoon Vox Blog or even used it to promote my in-progress Ask A Swan Support video podcast, or my YouTube account, myspace, my old mn8 creative website… you get the drift. There are many things i could have used this to cross promote but i failed. Hindsight really is 20/20 vision. As an afterthough i posted the link to the flickr account on digg and went to bed.

Anyway… I awoke in the middle of the night and checked my mail at 1:30am to see if anything had been emailed to me from Joystiq. Nada. Going back to sleep I thought that it nothing was going to happen and i may as well just start planning for my role as MC at the wedding.

The day I 0wn3d the Internet

At 7:45 the next morning i logged onto Joystiq to get my daily fix of gaming news. And an article with my story was the leading blog post! I cannot remember the last time that i’d felt such elation (okay it was my wedding day but that’s different). Stoked that I’d made it onto Joystiq, I got ready for work glowing with the idea that there were people having a chuckle at my photos.

By the time i got to work, there were comments appearing on the flickr site and people were emailing me through the account. The diggs were starting to rack up and links to other articles appeared. By 10am i was being contact by the Sydney Morning Herald for an interview. Incredulously, i called them up and spoke to a journalist who told me that the story was everywhere, and that my pictures were the talk of every major electronics, media and gaming news service in the globe. I didn’t believe him until he told me to check out Techmeme, Wired, Gizmondo, Google News and gaming blog websites like Xbox360 Fanboy. By 11:30 the article on my pictures was on the home page of the SMH.com.au and friends and people i didnt know were emailing me links to the story.

Unfortunately the hectic theme of the past 24 hours meant that i was so busy at work i didn’t have an opportunity to soak it up. There were clients calling, proposals to get out the door, artwork to get to the printers, email designs to approve and job descriptions to post… It was so frantic i didn’t even have a chance to read the story. At midday i had to leave the office in another mad dash to start the 4 hour drive up the Bluey’s Beach for the wedding.

A time for reflection

The funniest part of the whole thing is that in my haste, the flickr account had some quite unpleasant commentary about the staff at Harvey Norman (i think i called them Fucking Clowns) and my other photo collections including my wedding and honeymoon photos were also on display for the world to see. I didn’t have a chance to make things private or refine my commentary. Like refugees being forced to flee a military coo, so too did i have to abandon any chance of internet access and adapting to fledging time in the spotlight*

It’s a surreal feeling seeing your humble pictures spread across other peoples websites. It’s even more bizarre to read commentary that questions the images authenticity, others asking why it’s even a popular story, and yet infinitely enjoyable to know that many, many people found the whole thing asa funny as i did.

If anyone knows of any other references to where the story was posted, i’d love to know about it.

*I apologise for my tasteless metaphorical reference