Stop taking credit for my work!Originally Posted by Jessweeee♪
Anyway, let me give you some insight into this; It was a particularly cold day sometime near the beginning of February. I had just been in conversation with a friend of mine about his birthday, which coincidentally fell on Valentines day. That of course just reminded me about my current single situation and put me in a decidedly more-depressed-than-normal mood. To try and blow off steam I decided to browse the internet, with EoFF being one of my major haunts between YouTube and Wikipedia.
It was while I was looking over the forums that the idea dawned on me; I wasn't going to get jack on Valentines, but maybe I could at the very least say I did something positive. So I came up with the idea of encouraging people to send Valentines to each other. It then became quickly apparent that due to my reputation I was liable to be seen as "taking the piss" as it's colloquially known in my country. Thus I devise another plan; get people to send Valentines anonymously through a neutral medium.
I approached Psy with the initial idea (incidentally he got WAY more Valentines that any other person on this forum; the guy truly is loved). He explained he had done the same thing last year, but was more than happy to allow me to do it. The idea was put through, I made the EOFF Cupid account and posted the topic you see here. I decided from the outset that I was purposefully going to be as sickly sweet as possible for two reasons; one I wanted to get people in the mood for it, and two I figured that absolutely no one would figure out it was me, and they didn't. The only people who knew were the staff members.
Organizing it was a nightmare. It soon became apparent that keeping all my PM's together just wasn't going to fly, so I set up about five separate folders to deal with different messages. Any Valentine requests I got were stored in their own folder. Come the big day itself, and I have a mountain of PM's to send out. I couldn't just forward them because most had specific instructions as to who to send it to. The worst were the ones where a person had requested all ten people in the same message. This meant on several occasions I had to edit the same message over and over, making sure each time to add the custom Cupid message around it. I was compounded further by the fact that due to the temporary nature of the account I was limited to sending out only one PM at a time, which meant I couldn't even bulk-send the same Valentine. All in all it took me about three hours of solid work to get them all sent out. The replies were easier, just a quick forward to whoever had sent it. But that caused more problems because I had to manually go back over the Valentines to check who had sent want because the replied message only ever said it had been sent by "Your Valentine".
In the end I guess it was worth it. People seemed to get a kick out of the Valentines they got, and it's interesting to see what people actually send each other (the number of times I was sat raising an eyebrow at what had been typed was uncountable). It's worth noting that, on a ratio basis, about 40% of the PM's I sent were from males-females, the other 60% were from either males to males or females to females, with some explicitly gay. All I can say is we've got a lot of fruity people.
As for myself? Well I got two Valentines sent to me, and I sent out two myself. Thanks to those who sent me them, they know who they are.
O, and by the way; I am never, EVER doing this again.
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