Eva Jaber ’28 (she/her) is a prospective English or international relations major. She is a member of the Cleftomaniacs, an a cappella group, an ESL tutor and hopes to encourage peace-minded advocacy on campus. Contact her at ehjaber@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
Disclaimer: If you received a LinkedIn-themed valentine from a stranger Friday, Feb. 13, that stranger was me. By reading on, you waive any right to sue me or The Flat Hat for involving you in a quasi social experiment or suggesting in any way that you were a cog in a larger plan to win me a corporate sponsorship and a free cup of coffee. Okay, love you.
Now that we got that out of the way, I want to welcome you to a special Valentine’s Day edition of Eva’s Apple! By the time this issue gets to you, the holiday will be behind us, but love is still very much in the air as I write the 16th issue of my satire advice column. Dear reader, you know that I love to try new things out with this column. You also know that I would never ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do or haven’t already done myself. So, for the first time ever, I will be writing this issue in real time as I test out my own advice.
Let me paint you a picture. I am typing this on my phone in my bed right now. Across the room, there is a basket of valentines addressed to no one in particular. I have carefully taped a QR code to my LinkedIn profile and the message “HAVE AN EPIC VALENTINE’S DAY. CONNECT WITH ME ON LINKEDIN PLS” to each one. Don’t worry, dear reader. It will all make sense in a moment.
You see, the question of the week is as follows:
“eva, how do i perfect my coffee order?”
The key to perfecting one’s coffee order is to try as many different menu items as possible at as many different cafes as you can. I don’t know about you, but my wallet can’t support an eight-dollar latte every day. So, the logical solution is to trick someone into footing the bill.
I’m going to bed now. When I wake up, my plan will commence.
Good morninggggg! Let’s get right to business. The grand plan? Find a way to make a whole swath of people follow me on LinkedIn to skyrocket my status as an entrepreneurial internet persona and thus accrue a couple hundred brand deals to fund my coffee-tasting expedition. It’s go time.
I’m now typing this one-handed on my phone, while my other hand holds a basket chock-full of LinkedIn valentines. Some of them have bookmarks and stickers. Others are cupcake themed. There are a couple that come with matching squishies. Did I drop a bag for this? Maybe. But don’t you worry. The 16 episodes of “Shark Tank” I’ve watched this week have taught me a thing or two about return on investment. I’m handing these valentines to strangers on Sunken Garden. I’m giving them to people I’ve never talked to in class. I gave a valentine to my boss. I gave one to President Rowe. I am green, gold and on the grind.
It’s now early in the evening on this fine Valentine’s Day. The LinkedIn requests are rolling in. A couple companies have reached out to me with deals to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars, but I signed an NDA, so I can’t say who. You just have to trust that this plan I’ve laid out is foolproof. Still, you would have to wait another year for Valentine’s Day to come along again, so I suggest you try it for a different, upcoming holiday. For example, March 11 is World Plumbing Day. You could give out plungers with your LinkedIn written on the handle. The possibilities are endless!
Get that cash in your account, that coffee in your mouth and that caffeine in your system.
Haters may say that we wouldn’t need corporations to pay for our bougie cappuccinos if we had a companion — a valentine — to foot the bill. To that, I say you are silly. You are weak. You are short-sighted. Did you know that the National Retail Federation expects consumer spending to reach $29.1 billion dollars this Valentine’s Day? You know what you could buy with that kind of money? You could buy the Mona Lisa two times over (about $20 billion) and still have enough money to spare to rent out Madison Square Garden in its entirety for an evening (upwards of $150,000) and fill every seat with a life-sized ice sculpture of that Norwegian biathlete who used his post-win interview to publicly beg for his ex to take him back (about $40 million). Then, you would STILL have enough money to buy about 77,911 Tesla Cybertrucks and melt them down into replicas of Olympic medals to give to each of the aforementioned ice sculptures. My point? Valentine’s Day is a sham made up by Big Charma to get you to channel your emotions toward consumerism and pining after some chuzz when you could really be accruing capital, making waves and drinking the perfect cup of joe.
Enough about you. Let’s get back to me. I will be spending the next two weeks hopping between Williamsburg coffee shops to spend the exorbitant amount of cash that just fell into my hands. Are you jealous? You look jealous. Preorder those plungers, and I’ll see you in two weeks.
