Ryan Morlok’s Blog

In the never ending soap opera that is ACM, the following email, apparently spam, appeared on the mailing list today:

Hi everyone. I’m a casting director in Los Angeles
and I will be in Chicago next week, casting for season
three of “Beauty and the Geek”.

I’m emailing as many college students as possible
because I need to find smart guys, ages 21-29 who
would want to team up with a gorgeous girl and compete
for a substantial cash prize.

Please don’t let the term “geek” fool you, it’s really
about intelligent men who aren’t that confident around
hot girls and think something like this would be fun.
The show will film for a few weeks this summer in Los
Angeles and if you haven’t seen it, it’s a very
good-natured, funny show.

The open casting call will be Saturday, April 15th,
The Rock Bottom Brewery, 1 W. Grand Ave. at State St.
from 12pm-5pm. If you know anyone you think would be
interested, feel free to send them this email as well.

Thanks!
Kamala

True to form, the intruder was immediately punished. Clausen promptly flamed the woman for all her mistakes in life.

Ms Fritzler,

I will give you props: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~cclausen/props.jpg for
the text-only email without any type of HTML garbage in it, however if
you intend to capture the computer “geek” from UIUC, please consider
these tips:

1) DO NOT use an @yahoo.com or other free email service. Your address
looks like lots of other SPAM that we all receive on a daily basis.

2) I don’t watch tv and totally thought this was some kind of huge joke
until I asked a few people if it was a real tv show. Please provide a
link to a credible website that lists said show. Maybe IMDB or tv.com
or the show’s official website.

3) Pick a better email subject. I realize that “University of Illinois”
is VERY specific to you, it however conveys no information what so ever
to the recipient of the email as almost every single email we receive
has something to do with the “University of Illinois.” An example would
be “chance to be on Beauty and the Geek - UIUC.” That way we have some
idea what the message is about BEFORE we even open it, and you have some
idea when we reply knowing that there is a -UIUC in there.

4) Please don’t CC that many people in the same email. Several of the
email alias you emailed get redirected to mailing lists and are
automatically set to discard any message that is sent to more than 10
addresses. If you must send to everyone at once, BCC them so that the
mailing list software doesn’t know how many people it went to and so
that recipients don’t reply-all to a HUGE number of people.

5) This message does in no way infer that I am indeed a geek. I can
assure you that I am not. I’ve failed out of school. Twice. Just
ignore that fact that I use 1st person pronouns to refer to us geeks.

6) Why film in Los Angeles? Thats the home of “beauty.” You should
film in the geek home in some dark computer lab, not in some fancy house
set in the bright sun. Us geeks HATE direct sunlight and need to stay
out of the sun’s harmful rays in loud, musty, dank, dark computer labs.

7) Us geeks don’t need women. We “make” our own:
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/gallery/SameerDress/aaj (I’m on the left,
Sameer, the ACM secretary, is on the right.) Yes, I am wearing a pink
shirt. And yes, sameer is in a dress (with matching shoes!)

Solicitation via email is not something geeks look upon as a good
thing. I’d suggest you change your recruiting to instead contact the
leader of various student organizations. In the case of ACM@UIUC, that
would be acm@uiuc.edu, not EVERY address on our contact page. The chair
person can then forward the email to our various membership lists as he
sees fit. (The chair himeself is in no way, shape, or form a geek of
anykind.)

9) The people at OTCR are NOT geeks at all. They are business
wanna-be’s. Stay FAR away from them.

10) I can assure you that nearly all women end up hating me after about
20 minutes of conversation. The question is, are you now one of them as
well?

—–

I am curious as to how you determined that ACM@UIUC would be a good
group to email? What made you think that there were intelligent people
here?

—–

Are you the same as this person:
http://mymovies.imdb.com/name/nm1449871/?

CDC

Now at this point one, after Clausen flames someone, of three things usually happen:

1. The person gets mad and flames back, starting a flame war on the list
2. The person is embarrassed (not realizing that Clausen is more likely out of line than they are) and apologizes profusely
3. The person is too timid and disappears

But today was not a normal day. Instead, the following reply came:

You are the best! this email is great. I love it. I
now have to go back and re-do all of my work and
follow your advice.

Are you by any chance 21-29? you’re very funny. My
casting associate and I laughed out loud about not
filming in LA but rather in some dank, dark
basement…..

I don’t have a choice on the yahoo email. we work
freelance so that’s all I have. I should probably get
my domain name so I can look more legit, right? and
yes, that link to imdb.com was me - very impressive!!

And thus, by being his somewhat abusive self, Clausen received a personal invitation to audition for a nationally known TV show. Everyone is ACM is trying to get him to agree. If you’d like to follow the entire thread, you can do so here

This entry was posted on Friday, April 7th, 2006 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.