Strangers in the Night

Continued from yesterday's Doobee Doobee Dooce.

This is what happened:

Daisy Mae had been working feverishly — and I mean that literally; she was barfing up chicken soup all over her sofa, where she lay in misery for days with the flu — on my new blog design. In between liberal doses of Tylenol for Cold and Flu (the best drugs, lemme tell you) and dashes to the toilet, she managed to create that awesome Sass as Santa header for me. I would link you to her blog, but she's between blogs right now, so instead I'll mention Tracy, because she's the one who recommended Daisy Mae to me. She's the goddess of web design. Daisy Mae, that is. Tracy is the goddess of snark. I have a shrine to both of them under my kitchen sink. But I digress.

I was so thrilled with my new pink Santa Sass blog, and so unbelievably giddy to see the end of the boring goth Blogger blog (Yes, Gentle Reader, I could hear your whoops of joy all the way to San Jose.) that I decided it was time to do some blog promotion. OK, shilling. Call it what you will. I knew the Bloggies were looming on the horizon, and I dreamed of making the nominations for BEST-KEPT SECRET BLOG, there being no category for BEST GOTH BLOG.

The next day I was reading Dooce and in between laughing at her stories and cursing her for being so popular without even trying (I mean, what did she ever do to deserve to be so famous? Get fired? Big deal; I've been fired lots of times and Soledad O'Brien doesn't call me up to chat about it.) I noticed a link in her right column, under the one that said "Advertise on this site." I'd already examined that as part of a lesson on Internet advertising I gave to my class last semester. I know it costs $4 million to be on Dooce's home page, and do I look like I'm Nike?

What I noticed this time was the link way down below that one, the one in three point type, that says Put your text ad on Dooce.com. I clicked on it, was redirected to a third party site called AdBrite, and saw what I was certain was a typo. It says it costs only $15 to place a text ad on Dooce for one day.

I was pretty sure they were missing at least a couple of zeros on that, but who am I to judge, so I decided to go ahead and cash in the cat's college fund and buy a one day text ad on Dooce. Reasoning like a spammer, I calculated that if only 1% of her forty billion readers accidentally clicked on my ad, well, I might just become famous too. And I wouldn't even have to be fired again.

I submitted my order, and specified the date of my ad for the next day, Tuesday, because scientific anecdotal evidence gathered from drinking binges with my blogger friends and from not drinking (yet) with Neil Kramer has suggested Tuesday to be the day of the highest blog readership in the blogosphere.

Grinning with self-satisfaction, I waited for Tuesday. Then I checked my Postmodern Sass email.

There was a message from AdBrite, telling me that it could take up to three days to process my order, and that I should call OR FAX if I have any questions.

Fax? What time warp did I just plunge into? I assumed this was an e-commerce system that could take my credit card and automatically process my ad. I mean, it's not like I have to FedEx them any creative; we're talking seven words here.

So I replied to the email, saying I wanted a particular date, not just any date, and if that was not possible to please let me know and I would cancel my order and place it again next week with a three month lead time, for fuck's sake.

I received an autoreply which repeated exactly what the first email had said, and then added that if I wanted to sell advertising on my site to click here.

I replied that I do not want to sell advertising on my site (I mean, what's the point of generating $1.37 of incremental monthly income? Who do you people think I am, Dooce?), but that I would like to BUY ADVERTISING FROM ADBRITE. This was apparently too much for them to grasp.

Then began the Who's-On-First-worthy barrage of parallel emails. Mine, written by me; theirs, written first by a robot, then followed up by a human. The various missives were clearly crossing paths, leading to confusion, though apparently only on my part. AdBrite, it seemed, found nothing odd about this encounter.

The next automatic email from AdBrite congratulated me that my order had been approved.

I wrote them asking if they would please verify that the order had been approved to run tomorrow, Tuesday, the date I had requested.

The next email from them said my money had been refunded and my order cancelled.

I wrote back immediately, asking what had happened (and demanding to know what would become of my $15 investment).

By this time it was almost Tuesday, so I went to bed.

The next day, Tuesday, I checked my email and had yet another message from AdBrite, this one saying that my ad had been "declined by the publisher, no reason given," but that if I had any questions I should PHONE OR FAX AdBrite and ask them.

I really wanted to phone and ask to speak to the robot, but instead I sent another email, foolishly believing this was an INTERNET ADVERTISING COMPANY and that they might be able to manage email communications.

Instead of replying to my message their next automatically generated email said that there had been a problem verifying my credit card information and, I swear I'm not making this up,that I should FAX THEM A COPY OF MY CREDIT CARD.

I replied, you must be kidding.

They replied, "If you're not comfortable faxing us your information, you can CALL US ON THE PHONE."

My last missive to them read as follows:

Dear AdBrite,

The difficulty you are having verifying my credit card information stems from the fact that I am communicating with you under my pseudonym, Postmodern Sass, however, as I explained when I submitted my order, all the credit card information, my address and phone number, and MY REAL NAME is correct. Obviously, your e-commerce system, which I can only imagine is circa 1994, can't ingest this information. When your company enters the 21st century, please let me know. Until then, there are plenty of other ad networks.

Of course, there's only one Dooce.

Does anyone have a fax machine they could sell me?

Next, the Bloggie nominations are announced.