I’ve never been much interested in fan fiction or the fiction that inspires it, but there’s something about these characters moving in this medium that’s startlingly powerful. Both Mad Men and Twitter derive their stories and interest mostly from small revelations between carefully or carelessly controlled public and private personas (be it through multiple accounts or stolen dog tags). Like all fan fiction, the Mad Men on Twitter extend and bend the story beyond what’s possible in the stingy one-hour-a-week, one-way format of a TV show. But because Tweets are text and Twitter is a social space, @trudy_campbell and @harrycrane are able to avoid the visual dissonances that can befall a fat Batman at a comic book convention or a kitschy dinner theater performance at Disney’s MGM studios.

Within hours of @bettydraper’s email, I was following a dozen Twitterers in her orbit, including her daughter, her rival, her husband, his coworker, and his past. I followed as they converse with each other and us from 1963 – flirting, skirting, throwing dinner parties, and pouring gimlets, all using a technology that wouldn’t be invented for over forty years and whose only purpose is to capture “what people are doing right now”. @_PeteCampbell effortlessly closes the gap between his now and ours, simply by ignoring it.

Some of my favorite tweets:

“@ken_cosgrove I’ve got a stiff one for anyone who needs it. The Prosecco’s almost gone anyway. @Paul_Kinsey? @_PeteCampbell? Who’s ready?” – Sal_Romano

“Mrs. Draper is a cold, cold princess. Not much better than mom. I’m all alone.” – glen_bishop

Some articles:

• i am @bettydraper (Including dirt on her rivalry with @betty_draper
• Confessions Of A (Fake) Mad Man by @don_draper
• A Marketing Move the ‘Mad Men’ Would Love
• AMC decides to allow fans’ ‘Mad Men’ Twittering
• There’s Alka Seltzer in my Scotch (In which I trash Mad Men and AMC. What can I say, in retrospect, Season One was a necessary mess ;)

The green Infobar was sold out at Bic, so I moved on to Eiko’s W53CA, flagging down a rep. Before escorting me to his 3-card Monty table, he kindly warned me of the three or four “optional” programs I would be *forced* to sign up for, regardless of which phone I chose or where I bought it.

This was the first trade in I’d done since phone numbers were decoupled from carriers, and little did I know how absurdly complex the process had become since then. In this rant, I won’t even get into the different minute and packet plans, since they’ve been around long enough to be beaten on by more knowledgable critics than me.

Full Support Course vs. Simple Course
As far as I can tell, by buying the phone at the discounted price, I automatically signed up for Full Support. They are essentially supporting you by giving you a ¥21,000 (USD200) discount on the handset’s invisible retail price, but *locking you into the carrier and the phone for 2 years*, with penalty fees if you change either. Additionally, Full Support is the gateway for the standard diner menu of minute/packet plans, whearas the Simple Course, offers just a few cheaper plans with no prepaid minutes or packets.

Full Support is clearly nothing more than a tactic to scare beloved customers into sticking with au, now that they are no longer locked in. It seems to also be a replacement to the tiered handset pricing scheme that made new phones progressively cheaper the longer you held on to your previous one.

Call Designation Discount
This “discount” option costs ¥300 a month. It allows you a 60% discount on calls made to any three phone numbers. I guess this would allow certain people who call the same numbers all the time to select a cheaper plan with less pre-paid minutes, but even then it’s hard to know if the numbers would work in your favor since au doesn’t send detailed call records with your monthly bill.

I was forced to sign up for this option, but canceled it the next day. At worst, I’ll be charged the first month’s ¥300, but I’m sure there are plenty of customers who forget to cancel, and will now be short pocket change for a night of Karaoke once a year.

???? (Waiting song)
Ever call a friend on Docomo and hear some lame melody trying to make love to the dial tone? That’s Machi-uta, and it’s come to au at ¥300 per month.

I was forced to sign up for this twisted spawn of a focus group gone wrong wrong wrong. I canceled the next day.

Safe mobile support
This is essentially Apple Care for au, at, you guessed it, ¥300 per month. Five year repair warranty, discounted repairs on stuff not covered by warranty, discounted replacement costs, two free batteries over four years, and extra points. It’s actually not a bad deal for anyone who use a single handset for 3+ years, but for the rest of us, it’s just another sleazy fee.

I was forced to sign up for this too. I canceled the next day.

Everybody Discount
No it’s not the next Japanese dance craze. A few years ago, there was a “Wari” (discount) war between carriers, starting with a couples discount, followed by a family discount, then a students discount, second handset discount, a discount for the elderly, the left handed, and finally, gas station attendants with leap year birthdays. Au then decided that it’d be easier if they just gave a discount to *everybody*, but generously decided to keep all the other discounts, probably to take the sting off the second mortgage you take out to pay off all those ¥300 yen fees.

Believe it or not, Everybody Discount doesn’t cost anything, but is only available if you lock yourself in for two years. Wait, didn’t they cover that with Full Support?

In Conclusion
For all the convenience the mobile phone industry provides me, it has few competitors for my disgust. I’d like to believe that their convoluted games were forced by some genuinely unavoidable industry-specific economic factors that I’m unaware of, but deep down I suspect that they’d rather nickel and dime profits out of their customers with useless add-ons and devious pricing schemes than earn it through good ideas.

Postscript on the green infobar
Undeterred, I hit Ito Yokado yesterday, where I’d seen the model in stock the previous week. It was still available, but alas, only available to new customers. Apparently, after 6 years and $6000 of loyalty to au, I’m only worthy of grey or red & white check.

Update: This post used to include the Japanese terms for these crazy plans, but Wordpress chewed them up when I upgraded to v 2.7. Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) I don’t remember what they were called

“Award shows are tough to get right. They have no over-arching narrative, no common aesthetic, and enjoyment by the general public is only one of their purposes. But they are also a great opportunity to put the current thinking and values of an industry on display, improving awareness of how design works, and when it’s working.

The ADC and Ginza Graphic Gallery could be doing a lot more to embrace this opportunity. Here are a few suggestions on how.”

The same can be said of restaurants. Lesser chefs dazzle you with fancy names, cheap prices or insane portions, better chefs make sure you enjoy every bite. But I wonder how many chefs consider everything that happens after you swallow?

I’m not talking about poisoning or obesity here, just the couple of hours after the meal. Are there certain cuisines or dishes that put you in the same physical or mental state, good or bad, every time you eat them? Do you modify your choices, or eat whatever tastes good, regardless of the consequences? Do you know any chefs who consider this when creating a menu?

I think there are two reasons: First, being the client is tough work. It’s easy to take for granted how much client’s have to do to keep a project moving: gathering and editing content, scheduling photo shoots, building consensus. When we become our own clients, we are effectively doubling the workload we are used to for a website, and often chipping away at this workload off hours.

Secondly, good design projects are conversations between client and designer, who check and balance each other, propelling the project forward in the process. Without another team on the other side to volley back, you have to continually step under the net, adjust your perspective, pick up the ball and hit it back over.

While there are always one or two beauties, with the iPhone on its way, it’s become even clearer to me that the Japanese carriers release way too many phones. Their approach seems to be to split up the market into as many demographic segments as they can, and give each their own phone with it’s own brand message, form, color and feature set. This seems like a slightly more evolved variation on the “spray and pray” approach that you see with a lot of less fashionable Japanese consumer electronics, for which they long ago gave up on searching for names that don’t read like serial numbers.

Maybe this makes business sense, but it’s sure is dispiriting if you look for an aesthetic coherency from model to model, season to season.

Photo by Paul.