My name is Mathilde Salmon. I’m twenty-four. Officially, I’m still a student in art history (the beautiful lie), but in real life I work for my brother-in-law. The rich, handsome, cool one. The one who’s always rubbing his nose and never wears a tie. He runs a big digital design agency for web branding and development (translation: if you’ve got some shit to sell and you want to peddle it on the ’net, he’ll whip you up a pretty storefront with signposting straight to the (secure) checkout), and he enticed me into working for him last year.
He needed someone to work for him and I needed spending money. It was my birthday and we shook hands over a drink. Could have been worse, as contracts go.
As a student, I get all kinds of price reductions at the movies and in museums, gyms, and restaurants that cater to the universities—but since I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen now, my IQ has gone way down. I’m making too much money to go back to student dining halls. I don’t take advantage of any of that stuff very much anymore.
I work at home, at my own pace, and off the books. I’ve got a thousand names, a thousand addresses, a thousand pseudonyms, and at least that many avatars, and I write comments as phony as the day is long.
Think of the ticket inspector at the Lilas Metro station. Always the exact same spiel, right? I write the same stuff so often that I know it by heart.
J’fais des com’, des p’tits com’, encore des p’tits com’,
Des com’ d’seconde cla-a-ss-eu,
Des com’ d’première cla-a-asse . . .
I get sent endless lists of sites followed by the notes “ruin them” or “praise only” (if it’s cool it’s always in English, in the digital world). It’s basically all about tearing down potential clients and then building them back up again, before splashing positive reviews all over the discussion forums and giving them the best possible Google references—after they’ve forked over enough cash, of course.
I’ll give you an example. The company Superyoyo.com manufactures and sells super yo-yos, but their website is total crap (for proof of this, see all the snarky comments left, dropped, shared, Yelped, tweeted, poked, tagged, requested, pinned, unliked, un-loled, or chatted everywhere you can think of by Micheline T. (me), Jeannotdu41 (myself), Choubi_angel (I), Helmutvonmunchen (Ich), or NYUbohemiangirls (yours truly and moi, dude), and voilà, total panic in Yoyoland. But as it turns out, Mr. and Mrs. Yoyo, who have been informed of my brother-in-law’s wizardry thanks to a strategy as twisted as it is brilliant (too long and boring a story to tell here), fall for it and come begging: they absolutely have to have a brand-new shiny website! It’s a matter of life or death for the business! So my brother-in-law, the great master, graciously agrees to help them, and three weeks later, a miracle! All you have to do is type “yo” or “yoy” in a search engine and bam, Yoyoland pops right up (it doesn’t if you only type “y”; not yet, anyway, but we’re working on that day and night). And then, another miracle! Micheline T. orders ten of everything for each of her six grandchildren; Jeannotdu41 is thrilled and is going to sing the praises of Superyoyo in all the yo-yo hot spots in the world; Choubi_angel says they’re the coolest thing ever; Helmutvonmunchen vants to be a retailer uff dese yo-yos SCHNELL, and NYUbohemiangirls are sooooo excited cuz yo-yos are, like, sooooo French!
And that’s it. That’s all I do. I leave comments. And my brother-in-law, from his huge apartment in the 16th Arrondisse-ment, looks to diversify again.
It’s a fake good plan, not a real one, I know. I’d be better off finishing (starting) my master’s thesis, “From Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to Paul Jouanny: the history and design of watercolorists’ trailers and other vehicles used by open-air painters” (quite a mouthful, eh?) or thinking about my future, my biological clock, and my retirement plan, but tough shit. I lost my faith somewhere along the way, and maybe I just want to live in the open air, too.
Because, I mean, everything’s rigged. Everything’s just comments. The ice caps are melting, and the rich are only getting richer while the small farmers are hanging themselves in their barns, and they’re taking away the public benches to keep the bums from sitting on them. Frankly, I don’t see why I should break my back to get ahead when the world’s this fucked up.
So to forget it all, I play along with my brother-in-law and Larry Page: I lie from dawn ’til dusk, and I dance from dusk ’til dawn.
Well, I used to dance. These days I tighten my belt and hang around in the moonlight waiting for a guy who doesn’t even know I’m waiting for him.
It’s total bullshit.
I must really be lost insecure softhearted, to have gotten to this point.