Operation: Bent on Change
http://bent4president.webs.com/
I tore down another one of the tiny flyers I had illegally posted all over Talge. I looked at the inscription and let out a chuckle. “Michael Bent 4 President,” it read. Smiling to myself, I stuffed the paper into my pocket and thought about how innocently this whole fiasco had begun.
“Hey. If this guy ran for president, would you vote for him?” I asked, pointing at Michael.
“Yeah!” my friend Aaron exclaimed. “He would win too – he knows like one-third of the people here!”
“Guys, I don’t know that many people!” Michael laughed.
“Yes you do!” I responded. “You can’t walk to the lobby without saying ‘hi’ to someone you know! You would be able to talk to the people and hear what they have to say about the issues!”
All of a sudden, Aaron’s face lit up. “Dude! I got it! We could say ‘Vote for Mike: He’s BENT on change!’”
Later, after all the laughter and talk of presidency had subsided, I retired to my room and stared at my wall in thought. I considered the possibility of Mike actually running for president and assessed the usage of the great campaign slogan Aaron had come up with. After a while, I had an idea: I would make a “Vote for Mike” poster and stick it to his door. Excited, I began to comb through his Facebook pictures for something that looked moderately presidential. After looking through all of the photos, however, I realized that I could do more than just make a poster. I thought to myself: “why stick a miniscule amount of information on his door when I can stick a massive amount of information on the web?”
With that, I decided to create a website. The next day, I began to lay out the groundwork. I collected photos from Facebook, edited them for size and quality, and strategically stapled them onto various webpages. I added captions to the pictures that were meant to establish Michael’s credibility and scribbled down ideas that might later benefit the site. After three hours, I leaned back and smiled at my work.
As soon as I hit the “publish,” I went down to Aaron’s room and gave him a tour of the site. When he finished laughing and stating his disbelief, he offered his services. After showing the site to anyone I could find, I went over to Michael’s room to swindle some information from him for the “About Bent” section.
“So Mike,” I said as I entered his room. “How’s it going?”
Michael looked up from his computer. “Fine. I went to Advent Home today. It was cool, man. You should come next week.”
“Sure… sure…. So Mike,” I said tentatively. “When’s your birthday?”
“Why?”
“Uhm…” Why? I asked myself. Luckily, just then a conversation I had had with my sister about how many of my friends I was older than popped into my head. “My sister and I were talking about which one of us was older.”
“Oh,” he said. He gave me his birthday and I scribbled it down surreptitiously.
“Cool. So Mike….”
After a few questions, Michael got suspicious and eventually figured out my ploy. I had no choice but to show him the website.
“You guys were serious about this?!” Michael laughed when he saw his face plastered on the computer screen.
I shook my head and smiled. “You should know by now – you really can’t make jokes around me.”
Though he was reluctant, I eventually got enough information out of Mike to write a quick synopsis of his life. His roommate, Benson, and I then spent the rest of the night brainstorming and putting small plans into action. Benson made fan pages for Michael on Facebook and Twitter and got some of his friends on Skype to talk to Michael about the “issues” (apparently, many of the girls on campus would like the president to somehow provide better men). While Benson and I busied ourselves with the campaign, Michael paced back and forth, contemplating whether or not he should take us seriously and run for president. All this continued until we finally decided to call it a night at six o’clock in the morning.
The next morning, I couldn’t help myself – I checked the website.
“Okay Mike,” I said, ready to click the button to view site traffic. “If you have more than ten views, then we’re in business.”
“Alright, bro,” chuckled Michael, who still hadn’t come to terms with his presidential destiny.
I clicked the button, expecting to see a number between eight and fifteen, but what I saw totally blew my mind. Without thinking, I jumped up and raced down to Aaron’s room, where he and Benson were working. I shoved open the door and shouted, “Fifty views!”
My friends’ eyes widened and I ran back to my computer grinning like a maniac. After gaining the knowledge that the website was actually being looked at, the campaign went into full swing.
“It had started off as a joke – but it was no longer a laughing matter.”
With that statement I started off the Presidential Blog, and in all truth, the matter had actually become very serious.
We had a whole production team. I worked on bettering the site and the outgoing messages, Aaron helped with the website and promoted it the through the Facebook and Twitter fan pages, Benson designed eye-catching graphics, a guy named DJ gave us a crash course in online programming, and Joel, who we met through the site, worked on stationary promotion. Pretty soon, a group of essential and nonessential personnel had gathered in Aaron’s room to work on what we were calling “Operation: Bent on Change” (copyright pending). While tapping away on separate computers, we yelled out ideas to further the campaign.
“We should let people tell us what they think on the website! We can call it ‘Open Mike!’”
“We should add music so that people stay on longer and remember the site!”
“Let’s make a presidential video that ends with Mike saying: ‘I approve this message!’”
“We could add a pre-page that compares Mike to Bush and Obama!”
For the entire day, we complained about the amount of homework we had to do, but continued to work, comparing the experience to the creation of Facebook. All illusions were ripped away, however, when a pessimistic Abraham said, “You guys know that Michael isn’t really running for president, right?”
For a moment, all production stopped. Silence filled the air of the crowded dorm room – a repressed truth had finally been brought to light.
“Well then, I guess there’s only one thing we can do,” I said, closing my laptop. “Let’s get Mike in the running.”
Joel and I spent the next hour or so stealthily posting tiny flyers all over Talge. We tacked them on bathroom doors, kitchen doors, and main hallway doors from the first floor to the fourth. We then went to the cafeteria and attempted to hand out the left over flyers.
By the end of the day, the site had gotten 141 views. The number may not have seemed large for a school of almost 3,000 students, but it made us feel pretty good. Word also got around pretty fast. Students’ responses to our campaigning soon went from “Who’s Michael?” to “You mean that guy who is ‘supposedly’ running for president?”
Though we were told that Michael was too late to become a candidate only a day after the campaign’s inception, and though we were forced to remove the tiny flyers from the doors of Talge two days later, we all felt like we had done something significant – especially since almost everyone Michael bumps into still thinks that he’s actually running for president.