John wore a yellow hat and that made him stand out. He’d read about the idea in Lady’s Man Magazine and when he looked in the mirror, the effect was spectacular. So bedazzled was he with the heightened sense of being someone special that he failed to notice Taylor was wearing red socks when he sat next to him at the coffee shop. Taylor had seen the idea on a popular website which had also suggested that he shorten his pants legs so the socks would be more obvious. Taylor felt funny but was sure that he was getting more smiles and nods from young women on the street than he had pre-red socks/flood pants. Taylor was young and handsome. Most women smiled or nodded at him regardless of his red socks. He didn’t know that today. He was far too focused on the results of his red socks. Brenda smiled and nodded at him every day at the coffee shop, but today she decided that it was a mistake. She’d seen an infographic on Facebook which said that men who wore bright colors tended to be self-absorbed and misogynistic. Brenda posted a status update “Ugghhh…cute coffee shop crush proves himself to be a pig.”
John saw his yellow hat reflected in Brenda’s phone as he stood in line for a coffee and was slightly taken aback to realize he looked like the cowboy from Curious George. Then he noticed the words ‘coffee shop crush’. He set the yellow hat down on Taylor’s table and walked out of the shop. Over the next weeks he put together a blog, a website, and an iPhone app called Coffee Shop Crush. From the beginning it was a huge success. Within two months John was swimming in money and being interviewed on tech websites. He had beautiful women begging him for sex. Then someone posted a picture from that coffee shop before he’d taken off the yellow hat. It quickly went viral. It was a matter of minutes before someone had connected the hat with the ‘lame’ ‘pick-up artist’ magazine article John had originally read. In his next interview the first question was whether he read the Lady’s Man Magazine. All it took was his positive answer.
Coffee Shop Crush was destroyed by negative publicity about its misogynistic founder. Snarky graphics and jokes played through the feeds of Brenda and everyone else. A dozen opportunistic young women who had been on dates with John (and twice as many who had never met him) wrote expose’ about how creeped out he made them feel. John jumped from a bridge. He was dead. The internet quickly forgot about him.
Taylor wore a yellow hat and that made him stand out. He’d heard about the idea on a popular website and someone had left the hat on his table a few months before. When he looked in the mirror, the effect was spectacular…..
