Did you know that women 4,000 miles from here are being oppressed? Do you want to stop the local college bar from closing down? Petition to help legalize marijuana? Sign up for Students For Bush? Copy of the "Watchtower"? Foam party on Saturday? Join the Ron Perlman fan club?
Want me to get out of your face? Just take a flier.
If you've been on campus for more than two minutes between the hours of daytime and not-daytime, chances are you've had at least a dozen run-ins with the various characters on ASU's big, bright campus who want to inform you about ... something. Who knows what it is, but it can usually fit on a slip of paper that you can fit into your back pocket and forget about until laundry day when it comes out all crumbly.
As ubiquitous as these "pamphleteers" are, no one really talks about them. They're the proverbial lone "elephant in the room" that everyone sees, but no one mentions; kind of like me whenever I drop by the newsroom (get it? Elephant? Republican? It's funny).
What's further intriguing is how grimly we await getting through the doors of the Memorial Union when pamphleteers smilingly guard the entrance, or navigating the veritable gauntlet of unsolicited information that is Hayden Lawn at lunchtime. Honestly, what's the big deal? You smile, take the flier, and if you don't want it then crumple it up and toss it at the next wastebasket.
Yet we humans have this implacable fear of unwelcome slips of paper. If I were a wise man, I would have conducted polls and interviews with a wide range of the student body to determine the answer, but fortunately I'm not, so I did something much more creative/stupid: I printed up my OWN fliers and went undercover as a pamphleteer myself (my cunning disguise consisted of sunglasses, but only because my fake, handlebar mustache is currently in police custody -- don't ask).
And again, rather than taking the predictable route and creating fliers for seriously worthwhile causes (find Jesus, free Tibet, save "Angel," etc.), I instead made completely meaningless pamphlets sarcastically informing students of a party they were not invited to, how much it cost to make fliers at Kinko's, and, of course, "ninja crime."
Five minutes of pamphleteering convinced me that I never want to do it again in my entire life. You want to know something about handing out asinine fliers to hordes of complete strangers on their way somewhere else? It's awkward, tedious and annoying. And hot.
Not to be deterred in my quest for journalistic truth and justice, I did something very unusual, and conducted some serious interviews with a few actual, non-me pamphleteers. I'm happy to report that they were friendly, polite people who the student body has no reason to live in fear of. In fact, neither Robert from Dos Gringos nor Clifford from Student Travel (yeah, just two -- look it was a slow day, OK?) had any juicy horror stories to share with me -- although I'd say that Cliff's given statistic of hours of hot-sun pamphleteering bearing a meager 3-4 percent average increase in business is pretty horrifying or at least depressing news -- nor did they say they ever felt awkward going about their thankless, underpaid duties. I guess I am just too shy for this business.
However, there lurks a dark underbelly to this whole enterprise, and like many dark underbellies, it involves ... robot takeover. A group of obviously mad scientists at the Institute for Applied Autonomy (make sure to find them online at www.appliedautonomy.com) has utilized the latest in interactive voice-technology and Japanese cute-technology to create the Pamphleteer or "Little Brother" robot. This mechanical monstrosity is designed to, in their own words, "bypass the social conditioning that inhibits activists' ability to distribute propaganda by capitalizing on the aesthetics of cuteness." I'm NOT making this up.
That's right. Once more science has run amok and tried to improve on nature, this time in the field of handing out fliers to strangers. And I don't care how well the robots outperform the humans, because I've done enough Hollywood-based research to know that in a few short years those robots will be outperforming us right into a virtual reality dream world whilst they harvest our body heat for energy. Uh-uh, no thanks.
So to sum up: the next time a fellow human hands you a free pamphlet, just smile and take it, because it's more awkward for him than for you. Besides, you're helping to prevent the Robot Holocaust.
Eric Spratling is a public relations senior and he freaking hates robots. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu. Read his blog and his pamphlets online at asuwebdevil.com.
