Dirty Little Secrets
When I was in college, a friend ran the cable tv feed from outside the building through his window. We plugged it into a signal booster and piped it to our friends’ rooms through the foreign language tv network cabling, and ran cable above the ceiling tiles (so nobody would notice) to connect to our rooms. We enjoyed cable tv for a few years from that little endeavor. Nothing as scandalous as an illegitimate child, but a dirty little secret nonetheless.
There are, of course, much bigger dirty little secrets out there. They’re everywhere. Some are actually spelled out in footnotes somewhere. Others are discoverable if we’d only look hard enough. Many, I’m sure, are very carefully guarded and will never be known to anybody who is not connected to them in some way. Here are a few I can think of:
- The brand new Korean grocery store down my street offers super fresh produce at ludicrously low prices. Migrant farmers are California grocers’ dirty little secret.
- Southwest Airlines is the airline industry’s stock market darling. Their financial performance seems to do consistently well while other airlines are toppling like dominos. Are they so much more efficient at operations that they can make money while others lose it hand over fist? Southwest Airlines’ dirty little secret: They locked up fuel prices via long-term contracts a while back. In hindsight, this was a brilliant move that has contributed the most to sustaining their profitability of late, and will really impact them when the contracts expire.
- Remember Intel’s 386 chip? (yes, back before the Internet). They sold a less expensive version that did not feature a math coprocessor, called the 386SX (back then they tried to make their products SeXy. They’ve since given up). The dirty little secret: 386 and 386SX chips were actually the same- they were all manufactured with the math coprocessor function. Intel simply disabled the coprocessor on the ones they sold under the 386SX name so that they could have two pricing tiers.
- What do you picture when you think of San Diego, California? Blue skies and ocean breezes with sandy beaches warmed by the sun? Well, San Diego is frequently subject to a gloomy marine layer, which is a blanket of fog-drenched air that is several hundred feet thick and blots out the sun, leaving the area chilly and overcast.
- Ashlee Simpson is a bad singer. This was a well-known dirty little secret, and she was ultimately outed during an equipment malfunction while performing on Saturday Night Live. She joins Milli Vanili in the Lip-Synch Hall of Fame for Most Embarrassing Career-Ending Performance. Gee, between all the bad singers and fake backup bands that are there for looks and don’t really play the instruments, I guess most of pop music packaging is one big dirty secret.
- Buy a computer from Dell, then call them asking to return it for a refund. Chances are the operator will look at her computer screen and then offer you some sort of discount if you would be willing to keep the computer. Some MBA or McKinsey consultant told them that it would be cheaper to offer these rebates than to process the returns. My friend who told me about this likes to call this little secret the Dell Special Discount.
- A majority of people who have ski racks installed on their cars don’t actually use them. They are just there for show. I saw that in a survey somewhere. I guess that’s a lot of people’s dirty little secret.
That’s about all the dirty little secrets I can think of for now. Oh, and I don’t eat vegetables. Don’t tell that to anybody I know. Or to any migrant farmers.
tags :: jokes : humor : rants : secrets
