World’s largest business networking site crashes under unbearable volume of self-improvement materials

PALO ALTO – The Information Age suffered a significant setback today, as Joind.com president and CEO Elina Lampert said the site was closing down for the next six weeks to upgrade its servers and networking hardware. Lampert attributed the cause of the e-gridlock to an “unprecedented” amount of self-help books, e-learning courses, and other materials aimed at helping, basically, “anyone do anything, without any consideration whatsoever of whether it ought to be done or not.”

The site, which after its humble beginnings as just another Silicon Valley startup 7 years ago traded at $359 this week after a May 2011 IPO at $75, apparently incensed its 40 million+ estimated users with what appears to be a permanent posting of its all-too-well-known logo of a yellow “Men At Work” sign and hardhat, modifying its customary “we’ll have things back to normal momentarily” to “we’ll maybe hopefully have things back to normal in approximately six weeks.” 

“I can’t understand it,” said Tina Yardley, a 45-year-old mother of four from Seattle whose recent Fifty Pounds Lighter on Egg Yolks and Cake Batter reached #2 on the best-seller list in Kindle sales on Amazon.com. “My sales all came from Joind – every one of them. What am I supposed to do now?” Yardley was referring to her e-book Clogged Arteries Work Better!, which she gave away for free to her 17,000+ business contacts on the networking website and which was her sole portal to Yolks and Batter. 

But the purveyors of e-counsel weren’t the only ones grousing about the six-week glitch – the users were the hardest hit. Take the case of Tommy Simons, an eleven-year-old in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Simons, a nearsighted and papuliferous sixth-grader with a penchant for Hostess snack cakes and Popular Mechanics, said the site’s going down has “horrible” ramifications for his social life. “I don’t know what to do now,” said Simons. “I have seven girlfriends, but I never learned how to get rid of them,” he said. Simons, who memorized every word of the best-selling e-book How to Get Seventh- and Eighth-Grade Girls to get Bieber Fever – For You!, said he’ll now miss the release of the much-anticipated free follow-up e-tome Grade School Break-Ups Were Never so Easy. Nor is that Simon’s only problem, who also taught himself the best putdowns for eleven-year-olds to use in taverns, learned the five most effective Brazilian jiujitsu submission techniques, and established a worldwide import-export business in light armaments. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he said.

Some authors are making the best of the situation. Among them is Joel Redmond, the author of a new book on selecting profitable investments and detecting accounting chicanery. Redmond, a Central New York financial planner with over 1,700 connections on the site, says he isn’t all that worried about the six-week hiatus. “I kind of look at Joind.com as a place where you can make up for not having enough people signing your yearbook in high school,” he said. “Do you know how cool it feels to have people from Kuala Lumpur and Hyderabad saying nice things about you, especially when they don’t know anything about you at all? Bonus,” Redmond said.

Redmond’s book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing, was released on Cyber Monday of this year on Amazon.com. Asked if he felt as though he contributed to the Joind.com e-debacle, he waxed bemused. “I don’t really post links to the book on Joind,” Redmond said. “Joind is more of a place where I collect endorsements I mostly haven’t earned from people I mostly don’t know, and hesitantly offer them in return to make the system work faster so my computer won’t crash,” he said. “Facebook and Twitter are for the book, mostly so my family and friends can say witty things like ‘what’s it like writing a best-smeller?’ and wheedle their way into some free copies.”

And what about Redmond’s e-learning mission? “I don’t really follow a lot of that stuff,” he said. “I sort of have a rule that if the author hasn’t been dead fifty years, she’s not all that interesting to me yet.”

The book Tradecraft is available at www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond.

###

Tradecraft “dangerous to financial democracy,” reviewers say

Sir:

We are writing this missive to you in grave and united protest regarding your new book Tradecraft: What Spymasters Can Teach us About Investing. Not only are your conclusions factually inaccurate, but some of the allegations made in your book are libelous, defamatory, fractious, and patently dangerous to financial democracy.

Your book claims that the officers of public companies are mountebanks and charlatans bent on gaming financial statements, riding the low roads to the gold-paneled safe deposit boxes of corporate boardrooms on the bending backs of the poor old worker hacks they employ. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we were offered a median amount of $50 million in additional stock options and equity compensation at the end of this fiscal year, not a one of us agreed without the most serious introspection and deliberation. We thought about it for many minutes. Some of us spent the better part of an hour on the matter. And, while we entertained the thought of refusing the packages, we only accepted them under the most extraordinary sense of responsibility to our shareholders. Self-denial, and only self-denial – not the Neronian excesses you seem fond of alluding to in your book – induced us to accede to these utterly well-merited compensation arrangements, which must surely be of the most minute consequence in the face of the profits our respective firms make. In fact, one of our firm’s stocks has actually broken even since we were appointed CEO. Several more are only slightly (5-35%) below where they were when we assumed leadership.

One of the most serious allegations in your monograph is an alarum for greater transparency in corporate financial statements. Tell me, Mr. Redmond – what good does it do to educate someone who doesn’t want to be educated? Why tell a man that his wife is cheating on him, even if she is? Why tell a 300-pound man he should stop eating so much or he’ll get heart disease? And why, why, why on earth should anyone ever tell investors that, in their own interests, sometimes our accounting teams need to “get surgical” with our financial reporting and make sure our “Miss Corporate” contestants have enough mascara for the judges – our auditors? We urge you, Mr. Redmond, to listen to the voice of reason, and accept the reality of the new financial reporting. It’s here to stay – and so are we!

Sincerely, The architects of every financial and accounting scandal in US history

Central New York man ecstatic about meteoric rise from #2,540,175- to #1,745,833- ranked best-selling author on Amazon.com

SYRACUSE – When 42-year-old Joel Redmond, a lifelong native of this sleepy college backwater known more for its DomeDogs and annual snowfall than its contribution to literary blockbusters, looked at his Author Central page on Amazon this past Thursday, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“It seemed the books were flying off the shelves so fast I couldn’t believe it,” Redmond said. “My ranking was over 2.5 million at midday, and then when I checked it again at 7:30 that night, I’d risen to just under 1.75 million. This is a game-changer,” Redmond said. “My audience literally may have just gone from one dozen to several dozen – who knows? Maybe tens of dozens,” Redmond said.

Redmond, a private bank financial planner with less liquid net worth than most parish priests, said he never intended to create the financial version of The Hunger Games. Asked about his literary research and writing process, he became unduly ebullient. “I’ts not that easy being modest,” he said. “No one in my family has ever become a #1,745,833 best-selling author before.” Pressed about his writing method, he hesitantly elaborated. “I remembered reading this quote by Dave Barry,” he said. “He said something like, ‘Most writers get all hung up on fact-checking, the story-line, and making sure what they write is accurate, which is really pretend writing, when you think about it. Real writing is sitting down and making up stuff from your head, which is what I do.’ And that’s been my inspiration,” he said.

Redmond, whose book is called The One-Minute Financial Planner, said it became available on Amazon.com in November 2011. Since then, according to Amazon, he has sold 11 copies of the book, which is available in softcover, hardcover, and e-book editions.

“My senior partner at my previous firm bought five, and then I think he got three more,” Redmond said. “My manager paid the publisher $2,200 to publish. We gave them away so people would listen to us help manage their money. Actually, he may have bought four more,” Redmond said. “I think he kept his water bottle on a copy – I’m not sure we ever unloaded them all.” That wasn’t the best part, though, Redmond said.

“It was the royalties – I would get $15, and then three months would go by and I’d get another $12. For awhile the money just kept coming and coming,” he said.

What’s next for this up-and-coming Michael Lewis? “I’m not sure, but I did just release another book,” Redmond said. “It’s called Tradecraft, and it’s also available on Amazon in softcover and e-book versions.” But the best news of all is yet to come: Redmond saw it when he checked his Author Central page for the third time.

“I saw the rankings for Tradecraft, and apparently I went up to #228,234,” Redmond said. “This is the most unbelievable thing that’s happened to me yet, since winning that $25 from the lottery ticket my co-worker gave me last month.” 

The website for Tradecraft is at www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redmond. 

###