Lately I've been slowly coming to a realization: "work" sucks. I know it's a revolutionary position, but I don't care who I offend here. I can't afford to, my happiness is at stake here.
A co-worker of mine often tells me the story of a person he worked with at another job. This person was a bartender, who one day had the brilliant idea to put pancake batter in a spray can. Fast-forward years later and we can only assume this ex-bartender is either very rich or living off of pancake batter and spray can propellant. I like to think it's the former, although the latter is funnier.
That got us talking, and we decided that we need to do something immediately to get off this treadmill and start making decisions today to ensure a better future tomorrow. Sure he's a musician and I'm an actor, but we're talking about real solutions here, not pie-in-the-sky idealism and artsy nonsense.
Our first idea was (in my humble opinion) fucking brilliant. Building off of the pancake-in-a-can, what about sausage? Most sausage is ground meat (usually scraps, though there are exceptions) stuffed into a tube made of... skin, something?
What if we just toss out the skin altogether? There are skinless sausages out there, but they are expensive, top-of-the-line meat products.
I'm thinking more along the lines of a meat by-product. You know, the way sausage was intended?
Listen up, here it comes: toothpaste tubes.
That's right, sausage meat in a toothpaste tube. You just squeeze it into the pan, sizzles right up. Delicious!
Then I realized that brick-and-mortar products, real physical inventions, are not going to get us to the promised land. Start-up costs are high, and the price of failure is bankruptcy. No, a real game-changer of an idea has to be something involving the internet. In other words, something that doesn't actually exist.
While joking that I do not, in fact, like his wife (he thought I was joking, I actually do not, in fact, like her), I realized: Facebook. I know, there's already a Facebook. But hear me out.
Social networks these days are all about who-knows-who and favoritism. It's just "I like you" and "you're my friend". Being this way, there is no possibility for any true innovation in the field. Every social network will necessarily be identical to every other, except perhaps in some trivial way (a Facebook with only status updates? Try Twitter. Facebook skewed stupid? Myspace. Facebook for pedophiles? Orkut.)
Here is my modest proposal: Hatebook.
This is the place you go in order to tell the world who you can't stand, and you do it right to their face.
"Drew doesn't like Bob, and thinks that you might not like Bob either. Click here to Hate Bob."
"Trudy has left a comment on your picture.
'What a terrible picture. Your child is ugly and seems a little retard. I hate you.'
Click here to read the comment online!"
"Sina would like to join the group 'Drivers against Shakespeare", but doesn't like anybody in the group, so she won't."
If you ever start liking someone, you just remove them from your Anti-Friends list! There are no groups or fan clubs, just lists of "Clubs I would join if I didn't hate everybody here." Apps on the site would center around relative levels of dislike for various people, comparing and contrasting.
I think this idea stands a chance to really take off soon, I just need to get a team together to implement it. I'll start working on a Gantt chart now. Anyone interested in helping out? I'm pitching to VC funds tomorrow, my downstairs neighbor actually operates a VC fund out of his living-room so, you know, there's some capital right there.
Did you also notice... I was going for a world-record in hyphenated phrases.