Pitchmen
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The week this article on old Valley TV pitchmen appeared in Phoenix Magazine, Peter Piper Pizza founder Tony Cavolo passed away. Wish we'd had Twitter then to give props to the "Come on ovah!" man.
No, celebrity deaths aren’t increasing, we’re just noticing them more – and rushing to be the first to tweet ‘em. Twitter’s “Trending Topics” gives us all that creepy window on who everyone’s talking about. And being on top of this list is not always good.
“GangbangGirl” tweets “Hurry and comment on Karl Malden!” – presumably in a race to get her comment on the top trending thread of the day. Others rush to “RT” the day’s best one-liner: ”Fred Travelena does a great Michael Jackson impression,” goes to @ChipChantry, listed as a comedian in his bio.
Bad news travels fast in the Twittersphere, and crafting 140-character tributes to the latest departed celeb has replaced the daily crossword puzzle.
But sometimes Twitter also brings us into the lives of those actually effected by a celebrity death. People who were all ready to post their clever “Kaboom!” jokes about Billy Mays’ passing were derailed by the bracingly personal tweets from one YoungBillyMays, the 24-year-old son of the world famous pitchman. Following Billy Mays III on the day of his dad’s death took us along on a rollercoaster of emotions, from the creepy (his first: “My dad didn’t wake up this morning. I’m sure you’ll all hear about it. It hasn’ t yet hit me but it’s about to”), to the touching (“Man, I miss him”), to, around three days later, the just plain lame (re-tweeting a fan who wrote, “Today on my way to work in the rainclouds I saw a cloud that literally looked like a ‘thumbs up’”).
Along the way, the young Mays fielded thousands of tweets from fans of his dad, sharing one-liners (“Heaven just got a lot cleaner”), charicatures and Photoshop tributes to the bearded, bombastic TV presence they all grew to love. The hastily assembled “twitfam” urged all to wear blue the next day in honor of Mays’ familiar workshirt-and-khakis uniform, and Billy III shared links to photos of the many who did.
By the third day, Mays was appearing on news programs, hocking his home-made album on MySpace and plotting a Billy Mays Memorial Foundation . . . and followers began to level off, some probably searching for the grandson of Karl Malden. But while it lasted, the passing of a pitchman became personal, through our mass access to the online diary of his loving son and a sudden means of immediate connection with a real person behind the familiar face.
Laid Off, Inc.
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Don’t call them unemployed. A new class of “nontraditionally employed” corporate castaways are finding creative ways to survive – and in the process, quietly creating a new economy.
In a half-vacant business park in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, sits Gangplank, a 5,000 square foot office space that’s something of an anomaly in this dire economy: it’s actually filled with people, working. On this typical Wednesday morning, about 35 mostly young computer jockeys are spread out on 24 utilitarian IKEA tables, busily tapping away on their laptops, while down the hallway, five open-door offices are occupied by pairs of entrepreneurs leaning over each other’s desks, ardently swapping ideas.
Except most of the people buzzing about the bullpen today are not employed by Gangplank itself. Half, in fact, are not working for anybody.
Gangplank is the Phoenix area’s first “coworking” space, a twist on the old “free Wi-Fi” coffee shop environment that’s more about building a collaborative community out of the growing population of like-minded, skilled free-agents left office-less by the unemployment wreckage than selling them overpriced java and scones.
Three things have happened while the unemployed population has waited for the economy to rebound and new jobs to emerge. For starters, many of us have decided we don’t want ‘em — at least not the old style of jobs, top-down managed and rigorously controlled. We like our freedom, and the rewards for towing the company line have vanished. Secondly, we’ve finally discovered a use for all our social media links: our Twitter and Facebook pages are now our employment agents, marketing our skills and, surprisingly, paying the bills through referrals and leads to contract work. Lastly, thanks to the new frugality and the erosion of corporate benefits, we’ve discovered doing our own things may be enough. The paycheck we make may be equal to the quality of life we take.
Now enter coworking, a movement which physically gathers the new LinkedIn generation of self-employed freelancers and consultants into a whole new model of the workplace — the office as reinvented by those cast off by the old. In this office space, there’s no bullying supervisor roaming between the cubicles asking for mind-numbing TPS reports, and no downsizing efficiency experts nosing around to see who’s playing Tetris on company time. It’s the office as LAN party: young creative types toting their own rigs to link up and interact with others – only in this case for work, not play.
In “Laid Off, Inc.,” I take a look at this emerging movement, beginning with Gangplank, an experiment started by a group of Web developers who took advantage of the downturn to move into a space double the size of their old office for roughly the same rent, and then opened up the environment (complete with pool and foosball tables, a full Rock Band set for the Wii) to other free-agents in their field. It’s already paying off: five start-up companies have emerged from the collaborations since the space opened last October, netting the cooperative $3 million in business already, according to one of the principals.
“We’ve created gravity here,” he says. “A lot of smart people who’ve been tossed off by their employers are being pulled toward us now. And it’s working. We’re working!”
