"TAKE ME TO THE VD CLINIC" More Valentine's misery from the GR Compound... Thank you for calling JustFlowers, this is Michael. How can I help you? "You can shove your balls up your ass, how about that?" I was stunned with silence at being so quickly and sharply cut down so early in the morning, so unjustly attacked by my first caller who shook with anger and cowered in fear under the mask of complete anonymity. For the first five minutes I struggled to find a suitably caustic comeback, but an hour-and-a-half passed and I'd gotten only so far as "Oh yeah? Well, why donıt youŠ" before trailing off; a repeated mental blue ball into a galvanized Kevlar condom. It was Thursday, the day after the do-or-die Valentine's Day stampede into the gelatinous and formless world of the Internet, and my fourth and final day at JustFlowers, another dotcom venture dove into headfirst and unwisely. JustFlowers, the e-florist, hubbed its nationwide operations in a tiny office space above Westwood's California Pizza Kitchen, a fact that maybe a quarter of the thousands of lovers and creepy stalkers who ordered roses by dozens, teddy bears by the clan, and embarrassingly tried their hand at romantic poetry only to have their intentions rejected by miscarried delivery, never realized.

But how could they know that JustFlowers took their precious and (sometimes) highly personal order and then brokered them out to florists in their area, whom they should've just called in the first place? So when the orders never arrived, the heat came down on the lowly temps at JustFlowers. And while the regulars scrambled night and day to right the wrongs, the heat came down hard on the four or five heads who were hand-selected to answer the customer queries with spineless defensive whimperings of "I don't know," and "I'm sorry." In fact, I'm quite sure the higher-ups predicted this type of chaotic mismanagement of orders, the equivalent of very localized tornado sweeping through the room, and hired us temps; luring us at first with the prospect of actual work, before revealing our true purpose on the final two days and turning the customers' wrath on those of us who really didn't know any answers. All I could do was take down on yellow slips of paper by the hundreds customer names, order numbers, where the order was supposed to go, to whom the order was supposed to go, any changes requested, and contact information and throw the slip into a jar to be added among the already mounting stack of messages for the problem solvers. If the slips were money we would have been successful players in a commando-invasion, HEAT style armed robbery, and we'd all be millionaires. And as neutral-to-I'm-on-your-side as I tried to be, the confluence never slowed, it only grew and minutes were like acres of Indian Summer dried wood chips begging to be devoured. Some of the more interesting comments to which I was the recipient: (1) I will personally make sure Bill Gates crushes your web site. (2) I am going to make a newsgroup that's going to make web site after web site telling everyone how terrible you are. (3) Yeah, I want to know why the shit you guys charged my credit card and didn't deliver my flow- ers. (4) I've called 17 times today and this is absolutely the worst customer service I've ever experi- enced. You can be sure I'll report you to the Better Business Bureau. One man from Minnesota actually threatened me as a journalist, that he would wield his unedited power and destroy us using the power of the pen. As a sorta-journalist I can relate to such temptation of power, but I also know that if said journalist does his homework he will come to the sad conclusion that he was taken for the "proverbial" ride: that it was not this presumed (wrongly) Internet giant JustFlowers that's fucking people left and right, but the little Mom-and-Pop shop down the street­the same one he probably called last year, and that the circle will complete itself squarely upon his own shoulders.

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