To build something exceptional, you must make exceptions. To build something scaleable, you cannot make exceptions.

The truth is, most of the extraordinary, incredible things are built by extraordinary, unique, and frequently difficult individuals. They thrive in an entrepreneurial environment because they are not bound by rules. Only an organization that can embrace that uncertainty can truly leverage that brilliance. Yet most organizations are built to scale. To scale means creating rules and standards. Rules and standards usually means least common denominator. “We can’t pay this Mark Zuckerberg kid $120k! He doesn’t even have a degree!” “Salesman X you didn’t book this plane ticket 2 weeks in advance and therefore this expense report is rejected. Nevermind that it was for a client meeting that closed a $1mm deal.” These rules are made so that nobody really screws things up. But they also ensure that the truly great people never really shine. But the challenge is to build a scalable, repeatable organization. Yet at the same time, people are unique by nature, and the brilliant ones are one in a billion.

TechCrunch works despite Arrington’s eight thousand conflicts of interest because Arrington is Arrington, and the writers are who they are, and the culture is what it is. The journalist’s standards absolutely make 100% sense, but they are also standards which means they are the least common denominator, and if you took someone like Arrington and held him to those standards, he would not be who he is, and TC would not be the powerhouse that it is. Would our country be a much better place if it were run by a truly benevolent, clean, intelligent dictator that could not be corrupted and could reign for 40 years and had full authority to make all decisions? Of course. But such a person does not exist. So a system is designed with checks and balances that makes it much harder for any given president to do the right thing, but also guarantees that we never go astray. It is scalable, but very hard for that person to be exceptional.

So then, what? I don’t know that there are answers. Larry Brown recognized Allen Iverson’s brilliance and made exceptions for him and made an NBA Finals run with a bunch of has-been role players. But even that could not last for more than a year. These two things are at odds. Are you making Michelangelo’s David, or a manufacturable toy? An organization has to be one or the other, recognize it, and be transparent about it. When an organization transforms from one to another, casualties are necessary by-product.

It’s easy to sit over here on this side of the world and look down upon the spotty human rights track record of China and turn one’s nose down in disgust. However, whether it’s in marriage, business, politics or friendships, I have never seen a lasting resolution to differences of philosophy come without first having empathy for the other person’s viewpoint. Shouting louder or pushing harder may give way to temporary change, but it lacks the conviction to make that change lasting.

So, how do we better understand why China does the things it does? Well, the easiest way for me to think about it is China = Apple/iPhone, and US = Android (or Windows). With Apple, Steve Jobs decides what apps are good for us. It sucks, people get frustrated, but in the end Jobs does this because he believes he’s delivering what’s best. With an iPhone, you don’t have to worry about porn, about malware and trojans. You don’t have to worry about accidentally installing some major resource hog. But you can’t run background tasks, you can’t run Google Voice (until now). Likewise, China makes decisions based on what it thinks are best for the country at large. China looks to the west and sees porn, gun proliferation, Columbine, Lindsay Lohan, and it says thanks, but no thanks, much like Jobs looks at Android and says thanks, but no thanks.

I’m not excusing China, but most of the people shaking their fists at the East think that China’s citizens are as a whole suffering under an oppressive regime, and that’s simply not true. There are things that are definitely very wrong, but there are also things that are working. Very well, in fact. So when the government moves millions of people out of their homes to build a dam, or run a major crime sweep that may net some innocent people, many Chinese would look at the progress and feel that it is an acceptable tradeoff. Calvin Chin eloquently summarizes this general sentiment in his recent post on TechCrunch.

Ok, so *besides* him

p.s. For the record, I use an iPhone but am pissed about the whole Google Voice debacle and believe that in the long run I will be using an Android device.

p.p.s. The irony that I’m writing about this on a WordPress blog, which is blocked by the Great Firewall, is not lost on me.

Let’s see now, I count at least 5 problems here:

1. They don’t mention his twitter name
2. They don’t link to his twitter name
3. In the video, they go through the trouble of reformatting his tweet, yet they don’t use his actual twitter photo, but instead substitute it for another one
4. In the video, instead of mentioning his twitter name, they mention @sportscenter
5. I go to the @sportscenter page, and there’s no mention of the Iverson story, much less a link to his tweet

Now, it’s not like the tweet is a side story in this article.  The TWEET IS THE FRICKIN’ SOURCE and ENTIRE BASIS OF THE STORY! For this, Mr. Mark Stein at ESPN.com, you earn a coveted monkey bitch slap:

betta recognize!

Apple sucks, right? By delaying his patch, they are effectively letting their users deal with a crappy piece of software when the better piece of software is just sitting on some verification dude’s desk collecting spiderwebs.

Joe sucks, right? I mean, with no real insight beyond the blog post, it sounds like he left out a pretty major use-case (unless he assumed he’d have massive scale immediately…just like I assume Megan Fox would totally be into me). He messed that up, and then likely in a rush to get a patched version to fix that issue, either broke something else or didn’t fully test it, once again. So on his third try, he thinks he’s finally got it right, and is super pissed at Apple for sitting on it.

Leaving aside those two discussions, it was really this comment on TechCrunch that got me thinking. Kyle basically said, “anyone who blames Joe hasn’t developed software cause you can never have bugfree software and anyone who tells you so is a liar or is a pompous freak who doesn’t know anything about coding” (I’m paraphrasing, but since Kyle left his twitter URL, but has a private account, I can’t find any info about him).

I don't like to call this a date, I prefer to call this customer development

Anyway, to me, this is what it boils down to: we got a web developer writing a client application. Developing for the web is like dating a chick. In the web world, you release stuff at midnight Monday, realize there are 805 use cases uncovered in the first 30 minutes that you had never anticipated, rollback the changes by 1am, code until 10am the next day, and then deploy again. By Wednesday, you get some feedback and some meaningful stats, and then you can change it a couple more times and re-release by Friday. This is awesome on so many levels because of the ability to iterate fast, and make changes based on real user feedback. Sweet right? At a web company, your developer-to-QA ratio is probably something like 5:1 or 10:1 or 10:0 where the guys who wrote the code are the same guys who test the code. If on Monday the chick you meet is ugly, by Tuesday you could line up another date and start over with little or no consequence, save for a few angry text messages.

I will love you forever, or at least until the next release

That’s all fine and dandy because of the nature of the web. BUT, the reality of the iPhone/iPod Touch is that you’re writing client side software. And when you’re writing client side software, you’re getting married. If you mess up, you just can’t patch and deploy as frequently or seamlessly as you can on the web. You can’t just line up another date. You have to fill out divorce papers. And split assets, and figure out child support, and pay lawyers, and stalk ex-wives on Facebook and…eh hem, where was I? If you’ve ever worked at a desktop software company, the developer-to-QA ratio is often 1:1, and for a 6 month development project, QA will easily take 4-6 months on top of that. Why? Cause at the end of the day, you’re printing that bad boy onto a DVD, and putting that DVD in a box, and then putting that box on a shelf at BestBuy. When you do that, you’d better damn well be sure that that version is the right one, that you’ve tested it, and dated it, and found all its flaws and fixed them or worked around them. Point is, when you’re developing for the iPhone, you have to change your mentality. I’m not saying that you need to QA the crap out of that thing and never release it, but I am saying that I bet TechCrunch commenter Kyle never built client software, and I bet Joe Stump just learned that he might want to date his app a little longer before wedding it to the App Store.

As I mentioned in one of my quarantine posts, I was taken away during a Startup 2 Startup dinner, shortly after Dave McClure gave his Startup Viagra: How to Pitch a VC (which is excellent, btw, both entertaining and informative). So with apologies to Dave, I’ve aped his title and turned it around to give VCs some advice about how to appeal to entrepreneurs (and in the process guaranteeing that I will never ever get funded).

We know you’re busy, but so are we

I ain't got all day buddy

I hear it over and over again from VCs in their blogs and on panels, “we’re busy people, so when we grace you with 15 minutes of our time, make the best of it and don’t screw it up.” But here’s another news flash – starting and running a company is pretty time consuming as well. And while I appreciate the fact that my pitch is taking time out of your busy schedule, THAT’S YOUR JOB! You’re job, and the reason your LPs put money in your fund, is so that you would sit through 1000 of our boring, discombobulated pitch meetings and find the next Google.

On the other hand, an entrepreneur’s job is to build a freaking product and company, of which funding is a necessary evil. So as much as it sucks that we’re taking up your time in these meetings, believe us when we say we’re busy as well, and it’s not just so that we can get to the next pitch meeting. Here’s a tip – TAKE FEWER MEETINGS! If you find that your schedule is overrun, maybe you should scale back. If you have to be 20 minutes late to a half hour pitch meeting, and you’re gonna be pounding on your blackberry throughout the meeting like it owed you money, and then have your assistant pop in 5 minutes early with “an emergency call” so you can skip out on the rest of the meeting, then maybe, just maybe you’re taking too many meetings, and the quantity of your meetings are getting in the way of your ability to do your job right and find the next Amazon.

When I attend these VC panels and read a lot of these blogs, all these guys talk down like the VC is doing us such a huge damn favor to even grant us an audience. Well, is there a Google if John Doerr did not exist? What about if Larry and Sergey did not exist? Not to discount what I’m sure are enormous contributions Doerr made to Google, but when I hear some of these guys talk (not Doerr), you’d think that they alone make or break the company and we should just pray that we’re lucky enough that they’d pick us to be along for the ride. I’m not saying you have to worship the ground that we walk on, and I’m sure you guys come across a high percentage of idiot entrepreneurs that truly waste your time, BUT, I’m saying you’d have a better chance of an entrepreneur signing that term sheet if you showed more mutual respect.

Hope you guys make it!

The way I see it, VCs are in the business of shoving people off the plank into an ocean full of sharks, and in between martinis on deck and poker games, they check in with all the folks who are trying to tread water and point out where a few sharks may be coming from, and see who’s still afloat, who’s been eaten, and who’s drowned. Wait 7-10 years, and hopefully out of the dozen or so people they’ve thrown overboard, one or two of them have survived, and they fish them out of the water and then take credit for keeping them afloat. But guess what, at the end of the day, as long as one or two of those guys gets fished out, the VC is a hero. If not, well, at least they collected 10 years of “management fees”. Meanwhile, for the guys getting thrown overboard, if they die, they’re dead. It’s their one shot, their one life, so they have to either sink or swim. If they swim and make it through, it’s a great life, but most likely they’re gonna die. So again, just feel like a little more respect for the fact that all the entrepreneur’s eggs are in one basket, while yours are spread across your portfolio, would make us feel a lot better.

TAMs, SAMs, and other crap that McKinsey folk do well

While I completely recognize the value of understanding TAMs, SAMs, SOMs, SPAMs and whatever other market sizing charts are important to put in a presentation, we’re usually not that great at this. But you know who’s usually really good at this? Investment bankers, guys that work at McKinsey and Bain. But you know what those guys are also really good at? Working at McKinsey and Bain, or taking mid-to-senior level jobs at large companies. Don’t really know a ton of guys from McKinsey that have built great software companies. So while you may fall in love with a great presentation that has a great analysis of the market (because, afterall, that’s the language you speak), we tend to fall in love with the VCs who can see the potential in the product and can piece that bit of the puzzle together without relying 100% on our analysis (which we performed by reading some post on Venture Hacks and threw together the night before).

This is my market size

Besides, how do you even size the total addressable market for Facebook or Twitter? If Zuckerberg or Ev walked into a presentation when trying to raise a seed fund and said, “My total addressable market = The World”, wouldn’t they get laughed out of the room by most VCs? Maybe they did get laughed out of a lot of rooms (and shouldn’t THAT say something)? Not saying it’s not important, just saying that we’re not pros at this, and that we’d be turned on by VCs who understand the product and can do this type of math and see the potential regardless of how bad we botch this part up.

Checklists suck

I always hear VCs talk about various forms of checklists they keep in the back of their head when they’re evaluating companies. “Do they have patents?” “Are they repeat entrepreneurs?” “What is the competitive advantage besides we’re smarter?”, and the more of these you can check off, the more hot and bothered a VC will get. VCs love to quantify certain categories of risk, and whatever risks you can “take off the table”, you have a better chance of getting funded. It’s as if this magic formula of conditions would guarantee success. While these check marks can help a company, for every 10 examples of a pattern of success, one will come along that will completely blow all of those out of the water. The “V” in VC means venture. You’re going to have to take risks! Don’t come across as a guy who’s managing my grandma’s 401k account. We’re all swimming against the grain and doing crazy things. It’s a homerun business, and you’re not going to bunt your way into a homerun! You have a responsibility to manage risk, but most of that stuff is to cover your ass when the deal goes south. But instead of spending all your time building up ammunition to cover your ass for when it all goes to hell, find that fastball down the middle and just crush it.

yup

On a related note, I remember hearing a VC on a panel about the crappy economy. They are a seed fund, but he started talking about not doing seed deals anymore cause the economy went south and they were able to get into Series A and B deals for seed money, and it’s hard for them to justify doing seed deals anymore. I thought that was one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard. Hey, I got an idea! Maybe instead of using the money in Series A deals, let’s put it in a CD at Bank of America! Yeah! That’ll for sure make us some money back. Well, if your LPs wanted to be in a fund that invests in Series A deals, they would have invested in a freaking firm that does Series A deals. If you’re a seed fund, it kinda seems like you should still be doing deals at the seed stage, unless you’re telling me that there aren’t any more seed stage companies? You’re telling me that if you were able to go back in time and fund Bill Gates right out of Harvard, that you’d pass on that because of a crappy economy and instead invested in crappysoft because it had a more favorable valuation?

Series FF Stock

I'm rich biiiiooootcccchhh!!!

I’ve heard arguments for and against letting a founder take some money off the table before the ultimate exit. But I haven’t really heard a good argument against this. Most of the arguments are VCs are afraid that the founder would lose motivation or get comfortable or distracted if they had too much money. Well, you know what’s kind of distracting? Bills, mortgages, and other crap like that that would blow up if you don’t hit an IPO jackpot. And you know what? You the VC seem kinda rich, and you seem to still be working, so I don’t see why taking some money off the table once the company has demonstrated some track record of making money is that absurd of a request. Remember the whole shark thing? Well, if we get eaten by sharks, at least it’d be nice to have a *little* something so we’re not left with broken credit, bad debt, and nothing to show for our hard work.

Participate in the web

If you’re a VC that’s investing in tech, you don’t have to blog or tweet, but if you do, it gets us a whole lot more comfortable with who you are and what you’re about. If the relationship is supposed to be like a marriage, then it helps a whole heck of a lot of we can follow you or read your blog and know what you’re like before we dive into a marriage. Plus, there’s a much better chance that we think you’ll get what we’re doing if you’re actually on the web and doing the things that we do that made us think of the idea that we’re pitching you.

Who the heck are you to be giving advice?!

Granted, I am not the founder of a company, nor am I in the process of fund raising, nor have I raised any VC money in the past. So what the heck makes me qualified to give advice to a freaking VC? Well, that’s exactly the point. Most entrepreneurs raising seed money are people with backgrounds like me. If I was a serial entrepreneur, hopefully at some point I’ve had a good exit, and I wouldn’t be asking for seed money. So I’m the type of person that would be looking for fund raising, so this is my perspective, and I would imagine one that’s shared by others like me. Aaaaand now I’ve bitten the hand that may have fed me, so maybe I won’t ever be looking for funding afterall

Raise your hand if you’re still reading

Congrats! Glad to have taken your valuable time away from taking pitch meetings to read this novel!!

Instead of posting anymore about my over-documented stint at Hotel Quarantine, I wanted to wrap up my posts about China with some thoughts from Startonomics Beijing (I would post about the other events, but, well, this was the only event I made it to). For some background on that day, Mark Hendrickson has an excellent recap over at Tech Crunch, and you can see all the slide presentations over on SlideShare. Here are some of the topics of discussion that I found most interesting/thought provoking:

What South Park can teach us about localization

什麼是douchebag?

No Legacy Business

Google Music made me how much?

Censorship

One of the most interesting discussions was led by Kaiser Kuo. Kaiser seems like the kind of guy that was probably a royal pain in his teacher’s and parent’s butts growing up. He’s got a brash style, but he tells it like it is, and has thought provoking things to say. In his discussion about censorship, he pointed out that while the mainstream media likes to talk about the Great Firewall of China, and the blocking of access to sites like YouTube, Twitter (during the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen) and wordpress, the real story is in the content censorship that happens on all of the local BBS’ etc. Here in the States, we hear about the GFW, but the reality is it’s pretty trivial to bypass (as evidenced by my constant posts from China about the quarantine on a wordpress blog, which is supposedly censored), but most Chinese people don’t particularly care to access any of the sites that are actually blocked. But the story that goes untold is the monitoring of chat rooms and BBS’ on local sites. The thought police, if you will. In fact, there are even cute cartoon mascots called Jing Jing and Cha Cha (Jing Cha means police) that show up on sites to remind you The Man is watching. All sites are required to invest resources in monitoring their own content, and if they are unable to keep up, are at risk of being shut down. So while Westerners complain on Twitter about being blocked from using Twitter, a far more interesting story remains untold.

iCafes

While most attention goes to Shanghai and Beijing and a small handful of the “tier 1″ cities in China, the majority of the country accesses the internet through Internet Cafes (or iCafes). In some of the rural towns, there are iCafes with over 500 seats! With relatively low incomes, most families can’t afford computers, and therefore get their Internet access via these iCafes. While interesting in and of itself, the implications of this usage pattern are truly fascinating. This means that if you corner the market for iCafe management software (as Jerry Wang from Goyoo.com is seeking to do), you are the gateway to everyone’s Internet experience. Forget SEO, in China, if you want to get attention, get prime placement on the Goyoo desktop and you’ll be sitting pretty. This also has tons of implications for cloud-top applications and storage, since people shift from computer to computer rather than stay on a dedicated desktop/laptop. This also has a ton of implications for potential face to face payment systems instead of your traditional credit card system (imagine, for example, going to the cashier at the iCafe and buying credit to purchase goods). Anyway, as the discussions went on about iCafes, my mind was sent spinning about all the various implications that I haven’t really even thought through yet. Feel free to leave a comment if you have thoughts on this.

Chinese Medicine Balls

That's right, stainless steel

Of course, there were tons of other interesting presentations on the gaming industry, as well as Steve Mushero’s presentation on the tech infrastructure required for sites operating in China, but these were the ones that sparked particular thought and interest in my mind. There were also the usual set of “HOLY CRAP THE CHINESE MARKET IS HUGE AND IS GONNA BE SUPER-DUPER-HUGE ASSUMING X,Y AND Z HAPPEN” type things, which are all impressive and true, but have also been covered in every imaginable way.

Finally, I can’t help but think that this could have all been avoided if they just scanned us before we got on the plane instead of after. If they found someone with a temperature, just send em home. That way they don’t have to be quarantined halfway across the world, and none of us would need to ever be quarantined. Seems like that would save everyone involved a ton of time and money. But nobody’s asked for my advice, and the cab driver on the way over didn’t seem to care too much about what I was saying either.

Well, I will continue to post on this blog, but it will likely go back to what I originally intended it to be about – Web x.0, product management, and other random musings that come into my head. It’s been fun people (no it hasn’t), but time for this geek to get on a plane and get back home!

Back in my day, we used Yahoo for search, there was no Googles!

Why won't you follow me back? Twitter snob!

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Digg (founded in December ’04)
• Yelp (founded Oct ’04)

And these things happend in 2004:

• Google went public
• Facebook was founded
• WordPress turned 1 years old
• LinkedIn has been launched for 1 year
• MySpace turned 1
• Skype was four months old

Think about that for a minute. All of that has happend in the past five years. Back in the day, it took five years to get from New York to LA!

Flash forward to 2009, and it really is hard to imagine how boring quarantine would be without social media. Not that social media replaces or reduces the need for human interaction, but when you’re forced into a situation that specifically prevents human interaction, social media becomes your best alternative.

You should follow me on twitter! I'm @havent_smiled_in_years!

Jump to me in Beijing, and you quickly notice when you get a bunch of geeks on a bus with wifi, everyone is constantly snapping pictures, following each other on twitter and sharing the crap out of everything that’s going on.

Jump to me being in quarantine now, and I still get to stay up to speed on the action. They’re live streaming all the talks, tweeting all the action, twitpic-ing any funny shots. I think someone noted between the twitter group and all the re-tweeting amongst each other it turned into a giant echo chamber, but for someone stuck in quarantine with all the time in the world, you don’t mind so much.

During the TEDxShanghai event, Andrew Lih video conferenced me via Skype, and walked me around the room to socialize with people. While I was watching the livestream on Tudou.com of the event, I was struck by Kris Krug’s talk on being open. The specific line that struck me (and apparently everyone else cause it got retweeted like crazy) was, “If you don’t stick it on the Internet, it didn’t happen”. And it couldn’t have been more appropriate because I had been thinking of blogging for forever, but knew it was a major time commitment. Well, two days before the TEDxShanghai event, I suddenly found myself with nothing but time, and a lot to say. And so it was, I had been furiously blogging my quarantine experiences to make sure it definitely did happen (the most consistent comment I get from friends and family after reading the blog posts is, “wow, you must really have a lot of free time”).

The blog has done a number of things for me. First of all, each of those posts, believe it or not, takes several hours. I scour the internet for funny pictures and write and re-write captions (I have a new found appreciation for our editorial staff back at Break). So it serves as a great time killer. I’ve also gotten several emails from people who either: (a) are traveling to China soon, and are grateful for some information on what to expect, and (b) are actually quarantined as well or have family members that are quarantined.

Hey Dave McClure - look at my blog traffic chart! Wanna fund me?

It *is* a small world afterall!

So as I think back on these past five days, though utterly boring, they were made far more tolerable because of the age we live in (versus the previous age, you know, five years ago). People often poo poo on the notion of twitter, and how retarded 140 characters about “What are you doing?” can be. But I think the power of social media, and twitter specifically, is evidenced in its role in everything happening in Iran, and to a much more trivial extent my past week. Life in quarantine is a little richer and more enjoyable than it would have been five short years ago.

As the saying goes, “When life gives you lemons…you blog and tweet about it.”

**Update** been thinking about all this more throughout the day. It’s hard to imagine five years from now that we’ll look back at this and think how primitive it was and how much things have changed. But in the meantime, how cool is it to live in a time with so much change, and so many things left yet to be discovered? I’m leaving this quarantine more excited than ever that I get to work in web technology, and to think, no matter how mundane something such as “What are you doing?”, or a video of this kid starting a dance party is, we are changing the way we live our lives, and that’s pretty cool.

Want to stay up to date? Add this blog to your iGoogle homepage:

Catching up? Here are the first few posts:
Welcome to The Hotel Quarantine
Life in the Big House
7 People You’ll Meet in Hotel Quarantine
3 down, 2 to go in Quarantine!

So life here is pretty mundane. There are two beds in my room. When I wake up, I roll out of bed, and into the other, which is affectionately known as my “office”. I log in, browse some headlines, catch up on twitter, and all the tweets from my fellow Geeks on a Plane to see the fun that I’m missing out on. I walk three feet over to the bathroom. One day I decided to brush my teeth after I went and picked up breakfast, thinking I’d be wearing a mask and nobody would know the difference. Well, turns out one person that definitely noticed was me. With that mask on, all I breath is my own recycled air. And actually, one thing I have learned is that it’s important to keep up with things. For the first few days, I just rolled out of bed, wandered around, always wore my PJs around the place (who cares anyway? it’s not like I’m trying to impress anybody, I’m only downstairs for a few minutes at a time etc.). Well, the past day or so I decided to actually get changed, and today I put in my contacts, and suddenly there was a little more normalcy to everything. So, for any of you fellow quarantiners out there reading this, don’t let The Man get to you. He WANTS you to mope around like a sloth. He WANTS you to stop shaving. Don’t do it, don’t let him break your spirit!!!!

I won't let you hold me down!

Ah hem. Right. So anyway, the other thing that kinda sucks here is that there is no AC. The idea is that if anyone DOES have swine flu, it’s probably not good to be pumping that air through the entire building. So as far as choices go, yeah, I’d rather be hot than to have swine flu. I’d also rather have toothpicks jabbed in my eye than to have an elephant kick me between the legs (or would I? that’s a tough one). Anyway, so I spend most of the days with my drapes drawn to keep the temperature down, which makes for a pretty depressing vibe in the room:

Now I'm going to watch Schindler's List and then take a warm bath and slit my wrists

I’ve also started to spend a little more time out and about. I watch the fish swimming in the pond:

This reminds me, I need to clean my son's fishtank when I get home

It’s been good though…I guess they always say, in prison you have nothing but time for you and your thoughts. And I’ve been able to spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, which I may or may not blog about in more detail.

This morning we had some thunderstorms, which have done a great job of cooling down the summer heat. There’s also something very soothing about the rain.

Ha! All of you free people who were planning on visiting the Great Wall today can suck it!

Finally, I find it strangely amusing to see new people arrive at Hotel Quarantine. It’s always that same look, that “How could I be *this* unlucky” look.

Welcome to Hotel Quarantine! May I take your bags?

I think I’m gonna order some pizza tonight to switch it up. Last dinner in the big house. Woo!!

Sorry, I would blog about more exciting things if there were more exciting things happening, but, you know, I spend 22 hours a day in a 200 sq ft room, not a lot happens.

Oh, last thing, a few of you have mentioned you have family members here. Tell them to feel free to knock on 1420 and say hello or if they want to borrow some DVDs. If you want me to write a message for them and stick it on the bulletin board, feel free to leave a comment as well. Just can’t deliver any hugs or kisses on your behalf…we’re in quarantine, afterall.

Want to stay up to date? Add this blog to your iGoogle homepage:

Catching up? Here are the first few posts:
Welcome to The Hotel Quarantine
Life in the Big House
7 People You’ll Meet in Hotel Quarantine

The ABC

Yo, T.I., hollatchaboy

Why He’s in China:
ABC’s are American Born Chinese. Most of the ABCs are here in China because they heard a friend of a friend of a friend moved out here to teach English and ended up becoming a VJ on MTV and gets tons of tail on a regular basis. His parents love it because they think their little twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) is finally interested in his cultural heritage, when in fact he’s just interested in going to a club and not being “that asian guy”.

What He’s Like In Quarantine:
After spending his entire adolescent life being the Asian dude that all the girls don’t mind hanging out with but would never date, fighting stereotypes of being a math whiz and battling dumb whities doing the whole Bruce Lee “waaaa taaaaa!!” sounds at him, he is now able take on his long repressed gangsta rapping alter ego. This is a major opportunity for some major street cred, and as he bounces his head to T.I. playing on his iPhone, he thinks to himself, “Yo T.I., I feel ya homeboy. Prison ain’t no joke.” Except, of course, he gets to listen to his iPhone and doesn’t have to be scared of being raped. You can spot him from far across the way by the way he throws that gangsta limp in his walk, and you can hear him using the N word when talking to staff that can barely speak English, much less ebonics.

The family

Couldn't we just go to Six Flags?

Why They’re in China:
Most of the families here are actually Chinese families with their American born kids. For the parents, this is an opportunity to show their kids their roots. For the kids, this just sucks and they wish they could have just gone to Six Flags instead, like the Feldmans did.

What They’re Like in Quarantine:
If people’s thoughts were written on their foreheads, you would see “FML” in bold and all caps on the parent’s foreheads. For the kids, however, this trip turned out to be much more fun than they expected. Instead of doing a ridiculous hike up the Great Wall in 98 degree weather, they get to stay indoors and watch three times as much TV as they normally do at home, the hotel has turned into their giant hide and seek playground, and their parents let them have all the candy they want since they feel bad for having their kids trapped. If the parents’ marriage can survive these 7 days without a divorce, they will enjoy a long and happy life together.

The White Guy with Yellow Fever

Best...place...ever

Why He’s in China:
This guy is in China for the same reason Catholic priests start all boys schools. Instead of spending time on eHarmony or Match.com, this white guy spends all his time on local Chinese BBS sites, and already has three different dates lined up with local girls. Though his dead end job as a sysadmin for a large, crumbling bank back at home gives him little hope in life, he’s created an image of himself on these BBS’ as a shorter, paler version of Brad Pitt. Meanwhile, the local girls who work crappy jobs as tollbooth workers see him as a one way ticket to the American dream. When they tracked him down to bring him into quarantine, he was found at the night market buying up tacky silk robes with lots of dragons on them. This guy would give up both his legs for one date with Zhang Ziyi.

What He’s Like in Quarantine:
He can be seen walking the hallways in his tacky silk robe, listening to the Rosetta Stone Learn Chinese series. He tries to flirt with staff constantly, he loves the giggling reaction he gets from the girls at the front desk, not realizing that the girls are giggling about the furry dead animal that’s growing on his chest that peeks out from behind the robe. He’s in love with everything about the place, he loves the “authentic” sweet and sour pork that they cook here (even though the staff makes it specifically for the Americans). After he gets out of quarantine, he will fly back to the US, pack all his belongings, and move to China.

The Black Guy

Not a lotta brothas here

Why He’s in China:
He’s in China for pretty much the same reason any other tourist is in China.

What He’s Like in Quarantine:
This is not so much about what the black guy is like in quarantine, but what everyone else around him is like. He’s pretty much like every other person in quarantine. Except that the staff really don’t get to see very many black people. He’s like the Jackie Robinson of Hotel Quarantine. There’s a lot of whispering when he’s around, wondering if he’s Obama, Kobe Bryant or Jay-Z. See, Chinese people are the most racist people on earth. Not only are we racist against other Asians (look down on Filipinos, will never forgive Japan for Nanking), but we’re racist against other Chinese people as well (north vs. south, this province vs. that one). On the bright side, the staff is really more stereotyping than discriminating.

The Student Tour

OMG this is sooo fun!

What They’re Like in Quarantine:
Seven ambulances show up at their hotel the next morning to whisk away the entire group. The teachers are freaking out, they think they are going to be detained by the Communist government and forced to recite propaganda for seven days. Mindy, the pastor’s wife who is on the trip as a chaperone is their unofficial spokesperson since she’s the only one that has been to China that one time when her and her husband came to adopt a Chinese baby. They have one cell phone that all 32 people pass around and share. The adults are scared stiff, while the kids spend their time in the courtyard reciting lines from Zach Effron’s 17 Again. The kids are excited because they’re getting some press coverage on ABC 10 back at home, while the folks back at home hold candlelight vigils wondering if the US government will send Bill Richardson or Al Gore to help negotiate their safe return.

The Party Cru

Duuuuuuude

Why They’re in China:
F*@#$%* YEAH! We’re in China baby! We are going to tear the roof off this mofo!!! We’ve been drinking from nip bottles the entire flight, they still haven’t checked our ID’s!! This trip is going to be like one extended episode of Wild On E!

What They’re Like in Quarnatine:
There are three emotional stages for the Party Cru:
Stage 1: Relief.
When the people tracked them down, they were 120% sure the government was after them for either the 3 pounds of weed, tylenol bottle filled with ecstasy, or girl at the night club the first night that may or may not have consented since they couldn’t understand what she was screaming in Chinese. They are just relieved that they were brought in for swine flu.

Stage 2: Detox.
For the next 36 hours, they drift around the hotel with slow and deliberate movements and are extremely sensitive to light. Though they can barely make it to lunch each day, they somehow find the inner strength to gel and spike their hair before leaving the room.

Stage 3: Reform.
Having spent the remaining 4 days in the hotel room left alone with their thoughts, each party boy reflects upon their lifestyle and how far they’ve fallen. A couple start reading up on buddhism online, another starts to read the Tao De Jing. All return to the US as vegans and their old friends find them far less interesting. All they’re sentences start with, “Bro, trust me, when I was in China…”

The Swine Flu victim

Dude, it's just a mild fever, It's toootally not the swine flu!

What They’re Like in Quarantine:
Two days before the trip was probably not a good time to head to East LA and get sneezed on at the Saturday market. But they’ll be damned if they let a small fever get in the way of this kick ass trip they’ve been planning since the dawn of the ages. So it’s off we go onto a sealed 747 that will double as a petri dish for spreading the new virus. Weee! In all seriousness though, you will never see this guy at Hotel Quarantine. When I went to the front desk to find out if my lab results came back, the said, “If you haven’t been carted off to a hospital by now, you can be pretty sure your results were negative.” Makes sense to me.

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