Most Unappealing Conversations in History, Part 7: The Grand Inquisitor & Kelly in Customer Service

Kelly: Thank you for calling Quiz Giant, the Internet's premier FREE quiz generator: guaranteed to go viral or we give you your free back! My name is Kelly, how can I help you create your custom quiz?

The Grand Inquisitor: Hi Kelly! I'm sorry you have to deliver such a long greeting. Anyway, I am looking to make a "Which color are you?" quiz.

K: An excellent choice! You are tapping people's natural desire to have the visible spectrum be about them. Could you please maybe give me a sample answer? Describe, for example, a "blue" person?

TGI: "Blue is very intuitive and creative. They are more concerned with the ethereal and that is OK! They are most likely an artist, or if not they definitely find subtle ways to use their intuition and creativity to do their job. Romantically, blues are most compatible with green or yellow, and should stay away from maroon because maroon's need for stability and accountability will be a frequent point of contention."

K: That is very nice! The answers will be perfect tie-ins for ads for online schools and dating websites. Now could you please give me an example of a question?

TGI: "What do you think most reflects the current living situation in Haiti?

A) Probably on the road to recovery, since like, Beck held that benefit concert?
B) Everybody has their own journey, but I'm sure all the people there are doing their best.
C) Rubble and cholera, but nobody is paying any attention, they should try the paleo diet.
D) I don't know! I'm awful! Does feeling awful and apologizing for my awfulness then continuing to do exactly what I was doing before help?"

K: Hey now, I see what you're trying to do here…

TGI: Well good! I'm not exactly being subtle about it. I was wondering, if I could come up with a rate at which people are dying due to starvation, diseases, armed conflict, etc, could the answer page list how many people died while they were taking the quiz?

K: We do not want to make a quiz that insults the person taking it.

TGI: I'm going to allow silence to communicate the obvious irony of that statement, starting: now.

K: Fair enough. Hey, how many people do you think died under despotic regimes during this conversation?

TGI: Don't try to pull a reversal on me, I'm using satire draw attention to-

K: No you're not, you're just another writer trying to look cool and above something. Plenty of sexy activists and others in existentially favored positions take our quizzes. You just resent people having fun in ways you don't agree with, and you would rather feel superior to them instead of trying to relate. How many hours have you spent on our website trying to design this quiz?

TGI: I don't-

K: That was actually a filler question to kill time while tabbing over to a report that would tell me. It says here that you've been on our site for 4 hours. Do you know how many reasons you could have found to like people in that time?

TGI: I just think everyone spends too much time crafting fake personalities on the Internet.

K: That's probably because they think the outside world is full of judgy assholes like you! Writers like you shape the world with your perspective, and your cannibalistic usage of meta is ruining everything! Meta is the most obvious shortcut to acting like you're better than something, which is probably why most people become writers anyway

TGI: Don't do that!

K: Don't do what?

TGI: Writer ego baiting. It's possibly the worst part of being a writer, really. Writer culture is fraught with self-deprecation, which is basically your bridge toll to talk about yourself and have people pretend to still like you afterwards.

K: What has that to do with ego baiting?

TGI: As writers analyze one another and themselves, as they are wont to do, these bridge tolls become too obvious, and thus the toll goes up until all that's left is picking on the egos of writers. So we bludgeon ourselves and each other with quotes like "kill your darlings" or pretty much everything Ernest Hemingway ever said, misappropriating every wise saying we can find to apply to every sentence we enjoy.

K: I hate to break it to you, but it looks like you just proved my point.

TGI: No I didn't!

K: Yep. You're saying writers use more meta to discreetly seem better than each other. You even make out of context wise sayings about yourselves, how egotistical is that? All justified through meta.

TGI: Oh no! Where can we hide from the meta?

K: I don't think there is any way to hide from it. How can we recover when we're the disease?

TGI: My God you're right!

K: I didn't know you were Christian.

TGI: I didn't say I was Christian. Actually I-

K: Well yeah, but you used a capital 'G' in- OH NO!

TGI: It's getting worse!

K: I think we deserve to die. It is the only way to atone.

TGI: You're right, it doesn't matter, because we are just Ian talking to himself.