Thursday, January 14, 2010

Serving a Life Sentence for Being I. T. Challenged

A struggling writer has few options for making quick money. One of the ways I discovered yesterday has one building "hubs", which are little more than mini-websites that carry thematic discussions from your writings. I was gung ho as I started building hubs and already imagined the house in Sarasota on the water, glass walls facing the Gulf. Then came the time to pull the levers, snap the glass ampule that would release the cash flow--basically I had to sign up for the ad engines that would generate the income each time some fool made the mistake of hitting a link off of my hub into someone else's domain.

The biggest of these money-machines is offered by Google, called ad sense. I went through the whole damn process and couldn't get it to work. After an hour and a half of profanity, weeping and gnashing of teeth, I discovered that I had been denied an account. After another thirty minutes it was discovered that I had been denied because I had already signed up for it a year ago on this very blog - the one you and two other people are reading. As it turns out, since I have such a paltry following on this blog, Google and ad sense gave up on me, banishing me to outer darkness. I then spent another hour trying to recreate myself on various free search engines to no avail. The Google monster knew exactly what I was doing. I couldn't find anywhere on their forums on how to speak with a human being so I have been excommunicated, declared a leper for the remainder of my natural life. No ad sense, no one cent a pop for the fools.

After two glasses of a lovely pinot noir to calm my nerves, I then sought out the next candidate, amazon.com. In filling out their associate paperwork, as it were, I realized that I had changed default email addresses and reset passwords so often in my surreptitious breaking and entering at ad sense that I no longer knew who the hell I was or how to explain it. I had already gotten my wife excited about the new home in Sarasota so I did the only thing I could think of to pretend to have a nice quiet evening alone watching her show, American Idol. I drank three more glasses of wine, popped a xanax and went to bed.

I realize the future of writing and publishing and capitalism all lay in cyberspace. It is for this reason that I am drinking the pot of coffee to cure the headache from the mild wine hangover so that at some point this morning I will have an epiphany of how to survive until cyberspace comes to me. This whole nasty mess has me lost in self-doubt not unlike my futile attempts with the prettiest girl in school in puberty. Humiliating.

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