by Jay Begler
Love In The Time Of Apps
Jay Begler
Copyright © 2014 Jay Begler
All rights reserved
ISBN-10: 1492853011
ISBN-13: 9781492853015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013923760
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
For Linda
CONTENTS
Part One: The Original Sheila
The Sheila Bolt
The Data Snatcher
The Human Cliché
Comedic Incompatability
Part Two: Love In The Time Of Apps
The Best Revenge
Romance In The Forties
Sophie’s Choice
Part Three: The Host-Pital
The Fashionable Policeman
Sheila’s Avatar
Host-Pital Speak
MED-TV
Part Four: The Road to Rating Purgatory
Pressed By The Press
The Poster Girl For Green Technology
Part Five: Great Moments In Medicine
The Electric Enema
Physiological Schizophrenia
Part Six: The Two Sheilas
Funny Girls
Compassion
The Obrah/Vinfrey Show
1 -800-DUMP PHIL/ 1-800-KEEP PHIL
The Divorce Emporium
Part Seven: The Low Lifes
The Solo District
Divorcing With The Stars
The America’s Most Unwanted Show
Jiffy Lipo
The Impromptu Funeral
Part Eight: The Trial Of The Century So Far
Grasping Lawyers’ Balls
Res Ipsa Loquitur
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Part One
The Original Sheila
The Sheila Bolt
Sheila Goodwin, the “Original Sheila” as she came to be known once she became famous, was struck by a spectacular bolt of lightning as she was trying on a dress in the large communal dressing room of a suburban clothing store named “Vogue.” Moments earlier, she had slipped on a black couturier dress and was pleased by what she saw. She thought, “This has to be the most perfect dress in which to attend a funeral; black, conservative, but revealing my thin figure, not too long, not too short, expensive but not ostentatious.” It didn’t matter to Sheila that there was no particular funeral on the horizon for her to attend. The important thing was to be ready just in case someone passed unexpectedly and she had to make an immediate appearance. This dress, in Sheila’s words, was for an “impromptu funeral.”
Sheila lapsed into a momentary daydream. She was in her perfect dress, walking at the head of a large and impromptu funeral procession with a bevy of celebrities and noted politicians. A second woman, who was also dressed elegantly in an identical dress and waving to an adoring crowd, walked next to Sheila stride for stride. Sheila could not make the woman out, but she seemed very familiar. Paparazzi and others called, “Sheila, Sheila, over here; love your dress.” For reasons neither Sheila, nor anyone else, could remotely imagine her daydream would actually become a reality. And, the most amazing aspect of her dream come true was the identity of the woman who was walking beside her.
Daydreaming about becoming famous was not unusual for Sheila. For most of her adult life and certainly during the waning years of her marriage to her recently estranged husband, Philip (“Goodwin”), one which shifted from a partnership to a contentious competition, Sheila longed to be famous. She believed, however, that celebrity would elude her, mostly because she had never accomplished anything out of the ordinary or had any special talents. That realization did not diminish her desire. If there were a God of Fame, she certainly would have prayed to him or her or it. For a time, Sheila even tried to conjure up an image of the God of Fame, but the best she could do was a gigantic Oscar statuette standing imposingly below the famous Hollywood sign.
As Sheila was wrapped within her celebrity reverie, a low-flying, small black cloud, which to all eyewitnesses, not one exception, resembled a profile of Abraham Lincoln wearing a baseball cap, drifted over Vogue. The cloud stopped and hovered above the store for several minutes. Then, with a clap of thunder, which sounded like a sonic boom, it discharged a single bolt of lightning. The bolt cut a large swath through the roof of the building immediately above Vogue’s communal dressing room and slammed down upon Sheila.
The bolt, however, was not a mere run of the mill, make your hair stand on end, stop your heart, burn your shoes bolt, but according to lightningphiles (there are such things, even a Journal of Lightning Technology, called “JOLT” a “Trade Paper”) the largest, longest, most powerful and ferocious bolt ever recorded. JOLT’s editors were so impressed by the bolt and by the woman it struck that they named it the “Sheila Bolt.” Sheila and her bolt ultimately made it to the Guinness Book of Records:
“History has recorded strikes of extraordinary positive giant lightning bolts, EPG. These bolts, though extremely rare, are thousands of times more powerful than ordinary lightning bolts. One such bolt struck the Central Region of Russia in 1906, destroyed 200,000 acres of a forest and was alleged by some to have caused Lenin, who was hunting for truffles at its outer edge, to develop tinnitus. More recently an EPG occurred in the United States striking a woman named Sheila Goodwin. (See Medical/Physiological Anomalies-Sheila Goodwin Page 364)”
If being struck by lightning was all that had happened to Sheila, there would have been some general scientific interest in the event and possibly two days of news stories. Sheila would have been famous, by Andy Warhol’s calculations, for far less than the 15 minutes allotted to her and the scope of her brief notoriety would have been local at best. In this case, however, the bolt totally encompassed Sheila and was nothing short of mystical. Unlike a true bolt of lightning it did not, to use an observation articulated by most network newscasters who thought they were being clever, “disappear in a flash.” Its light, large and rectangular in shape and about six feet thick, reached from the dressing room’s floor up through the hole in its ceiling. One observer later wrote in her blog that the light was, referencing Kubrick’s 2001, “monolith like.” Her observation spurred hot debates by other bloggers who fancied themselves as film critics. Inexplicably, the “monolith” had a life of its own and remained in place without any known power source for many months.
According to some of the women in the dressing room, Sheila appeared to float up and into the light and remain suspended in it between the floor and the ceiling. After about 30 seconds, she fell unconscious out of the light and onto the floor. When she did so, Sheila was totally enveloped by a self-sustaining, ultra-bright, cocoon of light. Virtually everyone in the room ran to where Sheila was lying to assist her, but not before taking photos of her on their smart phones and transmitting them via Apps all over the globe. Thus, for example, seconds after Sheila hit the ground, Zaya while drinking a Diet Coke in her Yurt on the outskirts of the Gobi desert received Sheila’s photo and patched it over to Nomin who was participating one village over in a FaceTime conference with Max Schnell the licensing agent for her hot new $95-a-jar face cream, “Mongolian Mud.” As soon as she passed the photo on to Schnell, who lived in a garden apartment across the street from Vogue, he made a mental note, which was not a mental note at all, but an App by the same name, to remind him to check up on Sheila to see if her celebrity might create some licensing opportunities. Nomin then replied to Zaya with the Mongolian characters for holy yak shit: “OMG.” Onlookers, clutching their garments tightly against their bodies, formed a circle around Sheila and stared in disbelief. As if on cue they all whispered “OMG.” Stories a
bout one person saying “Holy yak shit,” were never confirmed.
Many of the women in the dressing room (and one voyeur) who looked directly at the light for more than a few seconds were temporarily blinded. Most of them ran out of the dressing room with their eyes closed and their hands in front of them for protection, since they were unable to see, pausing only when they inadvertently touched a garment whose fabric felt good to them.
For several minutes, the monolith of light also emitted an unusual sound. Those who heard the sound fell into two camps: people who said it sounded like “zap” and people over 50 who said it sounded like “aarp.” One woman said it sounded like “crap,” but her account was not deemed credible because she wanted Sheila’s dress and suspected that it might be singed. Whatever its sound, the decibel level of the bolt was enormous, equivalent to that of a significant explosion. Smoke began to rise from the dressing room’s floor and filter quickly into the store. Patrons, dresses in hand, ran in panic for the nearest exits. Vogue reported over $60,000 worth of merchandise gone and never returned.
EMS workers arrived at Vogue within minutes of the lightning strike and were bewildered by what they saw on the floor: an intense cocoon of light in the vague form of a body. Understandably, the EMS workers were reluctant to put their unprotected hands in the cocoon of light, which might have been radioactive, electrically charged or otherwise dangerous. After several frantic hours, with policemen, firemen, and members of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Homeland Security conferring with each other, it was decided that the phenomenon surrounding Sheila was merely light and not dangerous. Nevertheless, this large disaster entourage waited for the arrival of personnel from some unknown federal agency. A large black van appeared. When its doors opened, several men and women dressed in stylish Hazmat suits bearing the initials UFA, for “Unknown Federal Agency,” as well as Ralph Lauren Polo logos, lifted Sheila onto a stretcher, hung her Louis Vuitton purse on one of the stretcher’s handles, and placed her in a waiting ambulance.
Within 24 hours of the Sheila Bolt, news of the strange self-sustaining light that surrounded Sheila together with photographs of her ensconced within her cocoon of light were carried on every television station and social media site in the country. Virtually everyone on Facebook, for example, received an Instagram photo of Sheila from a friend with a notation like “Irving likes a photograph.” A video taken at Vogue and uploaded into YouTube went viral within hours. A film studio issued a press release that it was planning a movie about the event and had several “hot prospects,” for the leading role. Sheila, a woman essentially unknown outside of her suburban locale was about to become famous. And though Goodwin didn’t know it at the time, he was on the cusp of becoming infamous.
The Data Snatcher
In news features about him, Alex Pragat was characterized as a “Data Snatcher.” The term refers to the commercial practice of collecting, organizing and selling the vast amounts of data about individuals that is found on the web or extracted from their computers via software programs often called “spyware.” While Pragat had many competitors, his company, Pragat Corporation, was the largest, most successful and, given its aggressive methodology, most controversial data extraction company in the country.
So sophisticated and powerful were Pragat’s tools that with a few key strokes its researchers could produce a person’s dossier so steeped with personal information that it was likely that anyone who read it would know more about the individual in question than his friends, neighbors, or even his wife. To test the efficacy of and to improve its data snatching software, Pragat’s researchers would, on a daily basis, extract data about and track a specific group of people, all of whom were actually named “John Doe” or “Jane Doe.” Over the years, the researchers learned so much about their various Does that they began to feel a special kinship with them. When one John Doe died of cancer, for example, the staff made an anonymous gift in his name to the American Cancer Society.
Pragat sold the data to a variety of purchasers, mostly advertising and marketing firms and sometimes, though no one at the company could be certain, a front for a government agency. One of the things that attracted purchasers to Pragat Corporation was the highly sophisticated and proprietary software that it used to give a specific numerical value to each piece of personal data it collected in respect of predicting behavior and trends. On a scale from zero to 30, for example, each of the tens of millions of individuals in Pragat’s database could be rated for such things as purchasing preferences, reactions to certain types of advertising and projected behavior. The latter category was of particular interest to the FBI one of the largest of Pragat’s customers, though the interaction between the two was classified.
Despite the continuing success of his company, Pragat had a growing concern about the future of his business. He was beginning to see his company’s market share of the data mining industry erode in the face of competition from companies that seemed to form overnight, get funded immediately, and be run thereafter by men and women less than half his age. Pragat realized that to keep his company profitable and viable he needed to change his business model. His problem was that he had no idea of how to accomplish this goal, nor did the members of his new business team who met weekly to consider the issue. Pragat and his team were stumped.
The solution he was looking for came to Pragat as he was perusing a Zagat’s New York restaurant guide for a place to have a business luncheon in midtown Manhattan. He would later give the moment some gloss by calling it a “financial epiphany.” Halfway down a page containing two interesting seafood restaurants, both passing initial muster with him because they were each rated 26, Pragat stopped, looked at his ceiling and half laughing said in a low, but optimistic voice, “holy, holy, holy, shit!” A moment after his religious/scatological utterance, Pragat summoned his new business committee to his office and proposed that the company launch a web-based guide which rated people much in the same way as Zagat rated restaurants. “So, for example,” he said, “Oprah might be a 29, Madoff a two.”
One team member, who got the concept instantly, asked, “I can understand Oprah as a 29, but why would Madoff even get a two rating?”
Pragat smiled and replied, “I’m assuming that he’ll garner lots of votes from felons, particularly con artists who admire his work and also from members of the Ponzi family.”
Pragat could see from the expressions on their faces that most members of his team were skeptical. “Look,” he continued, “we have the ability to know virtually everything there is about a person from the data we collect. And we already apply values to the data, coincidently using the same zero to 30 rating scale employed by Zagat. Why not simply change the nature of the values we use so collectively they reflect the inherent worth or merit of an individual?”
“Is that possible?” one of the members asked.
“I don’t know, but it certainly is worth a try. Let’s use our John and Jane Does to test out the idea. We pick some categories that might be used to measure the inherent worth of an individual, say morality, personality, and sense of humor. I don’t know if in the end these are even valid categories, but we can use them for now just for testing. Have our software department develop formulas to measure the Does in each of these categories on a scale from zero to 30. Then, have our software folks apply the formulas to the relevant data we have on each of our Does; you know, shopping habits, Facebook entries, and search histories. A John Doe that frequents porn sites, and says salacious things on his Facebook posts, for example, might get a four in the morality category. On the other hand, if he seems to donate a great deal to charity, he might get a boost in that category. Once we have the results of this little pilot study, we’ll send out investigators to where the various Does live, develop some phony pretext to ask their friends and neighbors about them. For a small reward, say $20.00, we’ll have them complete Zagat like questionnaires in which they rate their friends zero to 30 in our test categories.”
Six months later, Pragat and his team had the results of their preliminary investigation. While these were far from perfect, everyone realized that Pragat’s idea might well become a reality. For the next year, under a cloak of extreme secrecy, an army of survey experts, sociologists, historians, a wide range of PHD’s, ethicists, philosophers, clergymen, economists, attorneys, and a bevy of the best software engineers and mathematicians that money could buy, worked in earnest to develop a foolproof personal rating system.
The threshold issue for Pragat’s team was the personal categories to be used for the thirty point rating system. After a great deal of debate, often heated, the team decided that the ratings should be applied to the following categories:
[S] Standing in the Community. This theoretically encompassed accomplishments, wealth, position, power, and general reputation. Standing also included certain essential individual characteristics such as morality, empathy, compassion, spirituality, and kindness.
[L] Likeability. Some people had a high standing in the community, but were not particularly liked.
[P] Personality. This category embraced a person’s interests, optimism, and ability to communicate.
[A] Appearance, factoring in age. Thus, a 60-year old could receive a 28 if he or she looked great for a person of that age.
[H] Sense of Humor. While Sense of Humor could have fallen into the Personality category, the team used to construct the survey believed that Sense of Humor was so important that it required its own category.
The numbers in each category would be tallied and divided by five with the final number being the individual’s Pragat Personal Rating or “PPR.”
In addition to the data mined from the internet, Pragat planned to establish a website that housed questionnaires. These were also modeled after Zagat’s restaurant questionnaires, but utilized the various PPR categories. Anyone who wished to complete a questionnaire was asked to identify the individual who they were reviewing by name and address and other identification criteria and to rate the individual using a zero to 30 rating scale. Respondents were also encouraged to include pithy comments like those found in Zagat’s restaurant guides.