05.02.12
Saint Mark and his ‘life-saving tool’
The life-saving tool, with everyone lined up to coo in delight, because that’s what we do in this country, for the wealthiest of swells. With Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, everything is an example of author Paul Fussell’s BAD — the witless or trivial applauded as profound and wonderful, held up as examples of the best the country has to offer.
So yesterday Mark Zuckerberg played to the national lickspittle crowd, as usual, with his new “organ donation tool.”
Is Mark thinking it will get him the Nobel, or perhaps a great inventor/discoverer and humanitarian award alongside the doctors, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who came up with the vaccines for polio?
Only Zuckerberg is more efficient and tight, needing a few lines of code to mark on your Facebook profile that you wish to donate your organs.
Of course, if you don’t have work or an insurance plan and you need an organ transplant, it won’t help. But you can still let Facebook know that you’ll donate your organs to the people who have medical insurance and need your liver or heart.
Remember to keep your wall info current so they know where to pick up your body.
Big ups, Saint Mark Zuckerberg! Ten million likes!
Instead of noting at the mortuary, or in the car wreck, or in the hospital room, that the license pulled from the wallet on your corpse shows you to be an organ donor upon departing the earthly existence, they can just fire up Facebook and tell. (Note that so extensive was all the bootlicking, the link for driver licenses/organ donors’ search term has to be crafted with “-Zuckerberg” to get his contaminating mug out of the picture gallery.)
If they know your login and password. Damn! It’s not in the sticky note pasted on the morgue monitor!
Well, anyway, as soon as you’re dead, through the power of magic, perhaps the life-giving Facebook tool will notify the nearest organ reclamation center near you with an automatic e-mail.
And hopefully it won’t get sent to the junk folder and they’ll arrive within that short window of time before you become too rotten to use. And that they’ll believe it’s really you that’s dead, not someone else who is either pretending to be you in cyberspace, or with a similar name the Facebook search engine returned.
Mark’s life-giving Facebook tool, much like the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone, a life-giving tool, has saved millions and millions of lives during its existence, so who can say what the future holds for Mark’s few lines of code!
And the computer keyboard! Let’s not forget the inventor of the software driver that sends the tapping of text to the lowly computer!
Or the app in your iPhone that speed dials 911 because it can connect you one or two entire seconds faster than you can manually. That must certainly be a life-giving tool, too!
Well, anyway, Mark’s tool — thought up in minutes just chatting over dinner about children who need organ transplants! Maybe after a few glasses of really good wine. God knows what the this man will come up with next when he really sets his mind to it!
But wait … I’m feeling a pain … in my arm … getting hard … to … breathe! Tell the people to come. And … that … I … wish to … be … an organ donor … in payment … for all the mean and thoughtless things … I have said!!
Tell ’em not to take my heart because that’s what’s failing. But the spleen, that’s in really good condition.
Chuck said,
May 3, 2012 at 10:17 am
So, let me get this straight–you post on Facebook that you want to donate your innards if the worst should happen when you’re riding your donorcycle without a helmet?
Is it even a legal document? How do you sign it? What if someone hacks your account (note that time is of the essence in these cases, so the organ-gleaners don’t usually have the luxury of running down your relatives to determine if that was *really* your final wish)?
I don’t think FB postings will pass muster as legally-binding documents.
George Smith said,
May 3, 2012 at 1:42 pm
You can’t do it anyway, yet. There’s nothing on my profile/wall pertaining to it. It’s all bullshit so far, like most Facebook stuff. Oversold, under-delivered, maximized for publicity and personal benefit of the owner or the company.
Facebook freed Egypt! Not. Facebook delivered from death’s door all those waiting for heart. liver and lung transplants! Oh, wait .. Getting your reality achievements through publicity is so much easier than having to make stuff happen in the real world, like emptying the Egyptian prisons..
George Smith said,
May 3, 2012 at 1:45 pm
What was unexpectedly fun was that Stephen King kind of shit on Mark, among others, yesterday at the Daily Beast. Although it was in an indirect argument and for different stuff.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/30/stephen-king-tax-me-for-f-s-sake.html