The strange literary pedigree of the LOLcat

Memes  are a relatively new idea that describes a very familiar concept.   Memes are like cultural genes.  They transmit cultural information and ideas through speech, gestures, and writing.  Memes can also be contagious and sweep through a population, such as the earworm.  Merely reading that the Macarena is an example of the contagious earworm is enough to have that damn music start running through your head.  You may not remember all the words, or the dance, but, oh, you remember the general tune and madness that went with the Macarena.

It’s cousin is the internet meme, those silly things that sweep the internet sporadically.  Internet memes are notoroious for mating with other memes and mutating into new forms.  Memes combine and mutate offline as well, but mass medias spreads them faster and the interent sends the rate of transmission to warp speed.  The internet meme probably most familiar to even inexperienced internet users is the LOLcat.

See, anyone can make a lolcat!

Internet memes appear to spontaneously appear out of nowhere, but even the Lolcat has a pedigree tied into original print media and constantly refers back to older memes.  The idea of a picture of a cat with an amusing caption is hardly new.  You can find whole books of them as soon as printing photos became economically feasible.

As soon as the photocopier became available, this type of picture was widely circulated through offices.  Sometimes it appeared via fax machine.   Virtually every break room had the many times photocopied picture of a cat hanging off a limb with some variation of “just hanging in there” as a caption through much of the 80s and 90s.  The photocopier allowed some basic mutation of photos and text as you could cut and paste an image and text together, but you still had to GET the picture and use a fairly expensive (if relatively common) piece of office equipment to distribute it.

Of course publishers continued to churn those out these images  on greeting cards, calenders, magazines, and books, but they were a lot more home made ones out there as well.

The internet just allowed them to be circulated more quickly and by a greater variety of people.  Digital cameras also allowed people to quickly generate the necessary photos. The production cost fell through the floor and there were no gatekeepers to tell people NOT to do things.  There are even websites that will do all the hard editing work. Just link to or upload a picture and type in the text! (such as ROFLBot, which was used in the photo above)

The internet version mutated and merged with the longstanding  literary tradition that animals are terrible typists (see The Silent Meow by Paul Gallico or The Bunnicula series by James Howe) and spawned the LOLcat we all know and love.  The LOL part refers to early internetism of LOL, which was short for Laughing Out Loud.  It was just faster to type and is now widely used in text messages.  But you still need to know what the abbreviation itself stands for to even understand the name of the meme itself.

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Dear "customer"- you're fired!

Everyone has difficult customers. Everyone has bad days where the next customer that asks for “that book, the new one, I think’s it’s red” is going to make you scream.  Everyone has transactions that are just one problem after another.

This is not about those customers.  Nor is it about the looky-loos that never buy anything. They aren’t customers at all.

customer your fired!This is about people who you’re better off not taking their money at all.  In down times it’s often tempting to hang onto anyone that gives you money… but these customers are such trouble that they end up COSTING you more than you make from them. You’re afraid to say anything about their bad behavior because of the fear of losing them.  They chew up time that you could be spending on other more productive parts of your business, they scare other customers, or they make your staff quit so you have to train new ones.  So if you call them on the bad behavior and they leave, it’s actually a win for you!

How can you tell if a customer should be fired, rather than that are just difficult?

Keep in mind, this is a PATTERN, not a single day.  You can have bad days with good customers.  You can  have difficult customers that are worth the time and effort to satisfy them. There are GOOD DAYS with that customer. It’s not overwhelmingly bad. The key with bad customers is that they are such a drain on you that they take more than they give back in business.

Sometimes simply telling people you aren’t putting up with this behavior may mean they change it and will stick around anyway… but be easier to deal with. They may just need a firm “no” to get them to stop the behavior that’s making them such a drain.  Sometimes it means they take their business elsewhere.  But for truly odious individuals, they may have already exhausted other businesses that will put up with this behavior. You may be the last remaining sucker that puts up with them.

Do you recognize these people?

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Insuring Your Rare Book Collection

There comes a time when the worst thing imaginable happens to a rare book collector and a book is lost for all time. Their house burns, floods, or the dog eats it, or maybe even an old college friend down on her luck pockets the venerated possession and runs. Yes, the worst-case scenario can happen … Read more

Bookstores: Some ideas to get customers in and keep them coming back

Every now and then, businesses fall asleep – especially the book- business, where store-frequentation just spontaneously lessens. Sometimes, there’s never really a reason. Other times, frequency is altered by the changing seasons, the various social events or lack thereof. During those times though, there’s always that extra edge you can have by pushing those slow-moving titles along, … Read more