Choose Your Own Ad-Venture

 

You are Dirk Dredger, fresh out of college with a Marketing degree and ready to make your impression on the world.  You’re not sure if you want to start your own business or work for someone else, but you know you need to start earning an income soon (you have all those student loans to pay off now).

Unfortunately, just when you are about to make a decision that will ultimately determine your future, a huge spacecraft arrives from the planet Krjiktron-1 to launch an assault against Earth.   After blasting much of civilization with its death-beams, the spacecraft is successful in destroying most of life as you know it.

Homes, businesses, governments are all obliterated, leaving little remaining to be salvaged.  Sure there might be a few survivors, and yes it’s safe to assume your student loans have been absolved, but your education has become virtually worthless following a collapse of the entire commercial system, your family has likely been killed, and you really have nowhere to go and nothing to do except wander through the global wreckage that has been left behind by a most unexpected attack from outer space.

Feeling hungry, you start scrounging around for food, rummaging through the rubble of a dilapidated McDonald’s restaurant.    You find a handful of fries and a couple Chicken McNuggets, but food is obviously sparse.  Then you proceed to look around for a comfortable place where you might be able to sit and enjoy your paltry meal.    

As you’re about to bite-down into your first McNugget, however, a loud noise thunders from the sky above you, a great wind picks up, and lights begin to flash all over the immediate landscape.   Looking up, you see the same giant spacecraft that had devastated Earth only hours ago.  

A booming voice then descends from the massive structure, addressing you in your own language, and, incredibly, using your full name:  Dirk Dredger.    The voice gives you two options:  1) you can join the race of Krjiktronites on Krjiktornite-1, living forever as their slave, serving them in the most demeaning capacity known on their planet—an advertising consultant, or 2) stay on Earth, where you can work for yourself as a marketing analyst in a non-existent market and where you’ll probably starve to death within a short period of time. 

Faced with this devastatingly difficult decision, do you choose to leave the Earth behind and join the Krjiktronites as an enslaved advertising consultant on their home planet?

This is what happens if you do.

                                               

This is what happens if you don’t.

My First Date

 

When you reach a certain age and realize you’ve never had a date, the thoughts that creep into your mind can be rather unsettling:  I’m so pathetic, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to push myself to give it a try?  Maybe I’m just destined to never have a date. If I had a date, would I even know what to do?  What if I finally got a date but then was too scared to commit to going through with the whole thing?  Would I take it slow, or would I rush the process? What if I don’t like the date?  What if I do?   It just seems there are so many expectations placed upon a person who has never had a date that to say that it’s overwhelming is an understatement.   When people first discover you’ve never had a date before, whether it be friends, family, peers, or whomever, they all tend to give you the same blank stare of shock: “What?  You’ve never had a date”?

It’s that same look people give you when you tell them you’ve never been on a roller-coaster or had a coffee from Starbucks.  It’s just one of those relatively common experiences people assume we’ve all had.  

Not me though, it wasn’t until quite recently I had my first date, and I must say it took a lot of mustering of courage to get the job done. I did a ton of research and, after much deliberating, devised what I thought to be foolproof plan for ensuring that I found myself the perfect sample (talk about pressure). After all, I certainly didn’t want to be disappointed, what with it being my first time and all.  I therefore thought long and hard about the kind of date I wanted, knowing full-well that this would be the one to forever be stored in my memory banks as that which broke the ice for all other (crossing my fingers) future dates to follow.  Ultimately, I was just hoping my date wouldn't be  sporting a glazed kind of look and actually turn out to be stoned (that’d be the pits). 

So I started with a list, outlining all the qualities and traits I expected in a first date:   desirable to the eyes, soft and tender, sweet, definitely rich, preferably dark (from some far away and exotic place), and if size matters at this point, I would say the bigger the better (and why not, right? If it’s going to be your first date, you might as well go for the full meal deal).   Then I searched all the ads in the newspapers and the online date sites hoping to find some semblance of a match.  

I did, and this is what I found. 

It was a date made in heaven; surely an experience I shall never forget,  nor shall I ever tire of sharing with others.