Cynthia’s career paths did not survive the Great Recession. At least not at first.
Her organic farm was smothered by oppressive federal regulations. Her dog-walking service did not survive a lawsuit by a woman whose Pekingese fell into a manhole cover. And her web design initiative was derailed by some Ukranian computer nerds who who designed sites for $100. Her husband Mark, a gym teacher, had taken to suggesting they have another kid, do her “real work.” Cynthia was having panic attacks.
One day, she took a walk to get out of the house. She was sick of being broke, and tired of listening to Mark, who was always grumpy when football season was over and he had to find something to do on Sundays. Cynthia went to see a Tarot Card reader who told her to stop whining, get off her ass and try again. That’s what the cards said. She spent a week brooding, browsing the Web, looking at websites and blogs. Mark complained she was using up her bandwidth. She was waiting, she said, for inspiration. She had a $20,000 credit line granted by his bank in easier times, and one day she told her husband that she finally understood how things worked. She had experienced her epiphany.
Despite her husband’s skeptical and anxious pleas (she did not tell him what the Tarot Card reader had said about him), she would not tell him what she had in mind, only that she had a plan for the money. One day she came home with flowers and a bottle of champagne and had him sit down at the computer. After a few minutes, she told him to open her eyes. “Surprise,!” she said, “welcome to warnings.com.” The site has a powerful graphic showing scenes of rioting, theft, arson, weather disasters and personal grief and loss.
Mark thought it was a joke at first. He said it would never work. Why not try something more modest, like tutoring? She drank the champagne and gave the flowers to her sister.
Cynthia wished she had taken her mother’s warnings about Mark more seriously. She kept at it. There was a page for health warnings – cholesterol, blood pressure, breast cancer, strokes, even a special page for ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease (this was the new favored medical horror among literary novelists, many of them tiring of writing horrible cancer death scenes.) And links to all of the many warnings about the medications marketed over the past 30 years. One cholesterol pill lowered the risk of heart attacks but caused people’s noses to explode. A blood pressure medication had only one side affect claimed the ads – men over 20 who took it for six months or more grew the head of goats and chickens pregnant women gave birth to griffins and gargoyles.
There was a food warning page – processed foods, fast foods, fatty foods, high cholesterol foods, sugar, FDA warnings, consumer alerts, childhood and adult obesity and diabetes warnings, complete with charts, skull and crossbones, red arrows and exclamation points, GPS devices that located rotten pizza and giant cheeseburgers with six layers and 10,000 calories or more. One page pointed out all of the dangers from buying good and fresh food on small farms. There were no warnings about processed food made of plastic and gasoline and bought in supermarkets.
Mark was not even impressed when warnings.com racked up 50,000 views in one hour. But Cynthia wasn’t discouraged. She felt she understood how the world worked now. Finally, she was in sync. There was a Climate Change page with Storm Center, graphics showing real and possible tornadoes, volcanic explosions, wind and snow and rainstorms, hurricanes and typhoons, thunderstorms and floods. You could just tap in your address and be advised of the next likely catastrophe.
Cynthia said she was especially proud of the Childhood Warnings and Dangers Page, which was, to date, even bigger than the toxic cottage cheese and breast cancer warnings page. You could put your zip code in and red buttons showing dangers within 100 miles would appear – it was thick with pulsating red dots. There was an Internet Fright page, outlining all the ways computers could be dangerous to children – strangers, predators, abduction, obsession, addiction, stupidity and torpidity. Sluggish reflexes, illiterate adolescents and hostility. And a dangerous kids page where Goths and geeks and oddballs could be identified and hauled in for counseling and evaluation. And of playgrounds and wooden swings, certain brands of cottage cheese, dangerous toys and dolls from China, poisoned plastic elves from Bulgaria and a special listing of all the things that can strike children down suddenly and injure them. Warnings from psychologists about bullying, exposure to graphic language and sexual imagery, premature puberty, stunted growth from cheeseburgers.
Cynthia hired a half-dozen geeks – Mark complained that none of them ever spoke – and she added a popular “Bad Things Happen To Good People” page, listing anyone who had been injured, stricken with a chronic illness, or lost their dog or cat. And Cynthia considered a Heresy page to people who flouted conventional wisdom, flirted with socialism, advocated help for the poor, annoyed business people, believed in climate change or yelled at their dogs, could be identified and isolated.
The animal rights people came to her instantly, with alarms about dog food, abusive working conditions, hair brushes that turned skin purple, dog food company conspiracies, warnings about vaccinations that turned big dogs into mice, and made them pee on expensive carpets. That was when the first investment bankers showed up, offering tens of millions for a stake in her site. Cynthia almost fainted when she got an e-mail from Mark Zuckerberg wondering if she might consider an offer of $3 billion dollars for warnings.com People could sync the warnings with their Facebook pages, he said, and share warning photos on Instagram and be advised of warnings and cautions as they moved around, went to work, passed police radar and TV monitors, bought fatty popcorn in movie theaters. She told him thanks, please to check in later.
Cynthia paid off her bills, bought a second home in Martha’s Vineyard, rescued 600 dogs from the Caribbean and bought Rhode Island and set up a no-kill animal preserve there. She set up a media warnings page – collecting warnings from cable news channels, websites, the few surviving print papers. Fires, asbestos, home invaders, bombings, crack-ups, robbery and assault stories, Armageddon and global warming predictions, asteroids heading for earth, radiation drifting in from Japan – all the important stuff that serious news organizations reported every day.
A lawyer’s association threatened to sue her if she didn’t include legal warnings – poisoned food, personal injuries, libel and invasion of privacy issues, real estate scams, fights with neighbors. She devoted two whole pages to banks and how to keep from being robbed by them, tossed into the road, and having them steal your home and jewelry. And then there were the government agency warnings – they were free, and they cranked out warnings every minute. Bad soil, tainted food, FDA regulations, alarms about medications they had approved just a few years earlier, terrorist alerts, travel warnings, poisoned lettuce, rabid rabbits, stolen dogs, Grizzly Bear sightings, drug dealers, gun owners, tax fraud, dirty water, toxic sites, FEMA alerts. Cynthia hired a media adviser to handle all of the interview requests – Today Show, MSNBC, CBS Evening News, Time, Google News. She agreed to do a book on warnings, and had hundreds of thousands of hits on her You Tube channel, which published a series of video warnings each day showing footage of tornadoes, riots, Amber alerts, poisoned food symptoms, skin rashes, ingrown toenails and car crashes.
There was a new very successful page – Cynthia wanted to reflect the country’s leaders – Political Hysteria And Warning Page, listing all warnings offered by the candidates about each other. She started a Hate And Anger Blogs page and the server crashed from the traffic. One candidate was accused of wanting to raise gas prices, promoting heart disease, another of launching a religious jihad over sexual freedom. One candidate’s campaign took off when he warned his competitors were murdering grandmothers in the Midwest. There were warnings of conspiring with big business to pillage the landscape, still another tagged as a warmonger who would blow up the world. One innovation was the Online Hostility Page, which culled the web for the angriest, most hostile and disturbing public messages and warnings from the most cowardly, angry and anonymous posters.
When warnings.com hit 1,000,000,000 views a day, she e-mailed Zuckerberg back. Let’s do lunch, she said. Then she called a divorce lawyer and put him on retainer.