The big blog

This particular cautionary tale is all over the web by now, but we have to help spread the word. You see, as big proponents of new media marketing in all its geeky, gadgety goodness, we feel compelled to share the darker side, too, in order to present a fair and balanced view.

Be forewarned, though. Dark sides don’t get much darker than this one. Or smellier.

Our tale begins with a 15-year-old girl walking down a Staten Island street. And, being a 15-year-old girl, she is not only walking, she is also texting. What she is not doing is looking where she is going. So where she ends up going is straight down an open manhole. And into the sewer.

Let’s rush to make it clear that the young lady suffered only minimal injury—a few scrapes, nothing more. Well, she also lost a shoe. But physically, she emerged largely unharmed.

Her trauma, though, may be only just beginning. Because now her parents have entered the story. And what’s their role? Why, they’re suing, of course. Who they’re suing is not entirely clear, but apparently the manhole in question was not cordoned off by cones or otherwise made safe for those who fly blind on their neighborhood strolls.

It’s a showdown, then, between one of civilization’s oldest marvels of infrastructure, designed to convey away society’s detritus, and one of our most recent inventions, built to facilitate the sharing of waste.

Whatever the outcome, and however tempting it may be to make light of the young girl’s poor judgment, you have to feel bad for her, when you consider how her parents are about to drag her through a whole different kind of muck. After all, she’s only 15. Who among us didn’t do some pretty dumb stuff at 15? And she didn’t have any malicious intent—all she was doing was texting. I mean, it’s not as though she was twittering.